Russian MP3 Search Engine MP3shki

MP3 search engines seem to appear by the dozen every week and about 11 of them disappear after a while either because no one uses them or because they have been sued by a record company. I have seen defenses against this. The first is to search and play only music from “legit” sources like Youtube or Last.fm, the other is to host the mp3 search engine in a country that is outside of the Western jurisdiction.

MP3shki.ru does both. It crawls for music at websites like Youtube or Last.fm and is hosted in Russia. The interface is one of the best that I have seen yet, graphics and usability is awesome. Begin by clicking on the little EN link on top to switch to the English user interface, makes it easier.

Then search for an artist or song and watch how the search results are populated on the same page. A click on a search result opens a tiny overlay menu with options to play the song, add it to the playlist, to view the source and the link to the song and to mark it bad.

Songs can also be dragged and dropped into the playlist. It is furthermore possible to create more than one playlist, I suppose you can save them if you register an account.