Third party programs like Google Music Downloader filled the gap, but many users hoped for a integrated solution as those programs were usually only compatible with a specific browser or device.

Google yesterday made an announcement on Google Plus where they stated that US Android users can now download all songs, including self-uploaded songs and purchased songs, from Google Music to their devices. This improves the service significantly as users can now download music whenever they want. Music can now be downloaded so that you can listen to it on all of your devices, and without the need for an Internet connection. This may be useful if you are on a low-bandwidth plan or want to listen to your music on devices that are not compatible with Google Music.

Google Music web users can simply click on the small menu icon that appears when hovering over a song name or album. A left-click on the icon displays the new download option

Multiple songs can be selected by holding down the Shift key while left-clicking on songs in the listing.

Google’s Music Manager now displays a download tab that leads to two options to download music to the local computer system. Download purchased music downloads only the albums and songs that you have purchased on Google Music, while Export your library exports all songs to the system. Google notes that only users who have uploaded music using the Music Manager will see the download tab in the program.

Songs can only be downloaded two times from the Google Music website. The Music Manager does not have that restriction though.

The addition of a download option makes Google Music more accessible from a user perspective. Still, Google has a long way to go, especially in the supported countries department (via Caschy)

Enter Google Music Downloader for the Firefox web browser. The Firefox add-on at the time of writing is compatible with all versions of Firefox. Some Firefox users may need to force compatibility though. The add-on is restartless, but I had to restart the browser once to get the download song links to display on Google Music.

The extension adds a Download Song link to all songs on Google Music. The download link and notification is not only displayed for songs that you have uploaded, but also for the free songs on Google Music.

All you need to do is to click on the song to play it. The Firefox add-on displays a notification in the lower right corner of the screen. Click on “Click to download song now” to download the song that is currently playing to the local computer system.

There is a difference between downloading songs that you have uploaded and the free songs on Google Music. Songs that you have uploaded are downloaded as stream.mp3 files, while the free songs offered by Google are downloaded as videoplayback files without file extension. You can still add .mp3 to the end of the the file name and play it back in all compatible music players though.

Google Music Downloader can download all songs from Google Music. The download process could be less complicated though by adding a direct option to download a song from Google Music instead of displaying a notification link that needs to be clicked on to download songs.

Firefox users can install Google Music Downloader from the official Mozilla add-on repository.

Mulve, is a free, standalone program to download music from the Internet. It’s biggest feature? Simplicity. A double-click to start, a search phrase, and clicks on the Save button to save the music to the local hard drive. That’s all it takes to download music.

The availability of music is huge. The developers claim the program has access to ten million songs, and it surely feels that way. Search for some hip charts pop trash and you find it, search for other genres or artists and you find them, search for rare stuff and you are likely to get hits as well.

mulve music downloader

A click on Extend Search will display more results on the same page. All downloadable with a single click. All results are shown with the artists name, title, length, bitrate and size of the song. It is even possible to sort the music, for instance to display the largest files on top, or to better handle results with multiple artists.

Download speeds are ok and it is possible to download multiple songs at once.

From a technical standpoint, there is not much that can be more comfortable or better. The program could use a search filter and an option to start downloads of multiple files at once.

Torrentfreak scanned a few of the downloads and found out that their source leads to Russia, more precisely the huge social network Vkontakte. Downloads are direct http downloads, there is no sharing involved in the process and the only way to find out that a user has downloaded music is from the traffic logs of the server they were downloaded from.

It is legal? We are no lawyers here. Legalities depend on the laws in the country of the user. For many countries this will likely be a No. The likelihood of discovery on the other hand is slim as well.

What’s your take on Mulve? Let us know in the comments.

The program supports the four services Trilulilu, YouTube, KOHit and MusicDumper, with the option to add additional services with plugins. The plugin section lists two at the moment, including a MySpace music downloader plugin.

download free music

Some plugins need to be activated before they become active. This is done in the Preferences. Here it is also possible to select the download directory, player for playing media streams directly and the conversion options.

music download

The search form in the main interface supports individual song titles and direct urls that point to songs or videos of one of the supported services. A search leads to a listing of songs that match the search query. Pymaxe displays an icon of the service the song was found on, as well as the artist, song title and length.

A double-click on a result opens a new window with media clip details. This window displays the download options. Depending on the source, it is possible to download files directly as audio or video. For Youtube it is furthermore possible to select the quality level of the video, which can influence the quality of the audio.

download music

Users who only want to download music from specific resources can filter the results listing by that service. This makes it possible to search and download music only from Youtube for instance.

Only one song or video can be selected for download at once. This means that Pymaxe is best suitable for downloading individual songs from the Internet, and not full albums. It is still possible to do the latter, but it requires quite some time to do so.

Pymaxe is an Open Source program for Windows and Linux. It can be downloaded directly from the project website.

There are several options when it comes to downloading music and videos from the Internet. Some websites use weak or no encryption at all which means it is possible to download the media directly from within the web browser. Other websites and services protect the media by encrypting it which makes it harder to actually download the files to the local computer system.

There are several software programs available that can download from most music and video portals and services. A very versatile one that is automating the process as much as possible is Tubemaster++. Tubemaster++ is a Java application that is using the packet capturing network monitor WinPcap.

The software program will automatically capture music and videos once the application is up and running. All the user needs to do is to visit a media site, service or software and start playing the media from there. Tubemaster recognizes the media and will display it in its interface. The software works with many services including Youtube, Last.fm, Pandora, Imeem and many more. The only restriction is that the service needs to stream the music to the computer system.

The music and videos can be saved in their original format or converted in the software program to common formats like avi or mp3. There are presets for some popular devices like Apple’s iPod, Blackberries, the Playstation 3 and dozens of other devices.

A video and mp3 search is provided in the program itself which makes it very comfortable to find specific music or videos. The search results are displayed in the program but open in the default web browser where they can be played.

Tubemaster++ (via Freeware Genius) is a very comfortable program to download videos and music from the Internet. The program is compatible with Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Windows 7. It requires Java and WinPcap to run (which are provided if they are not installed).

Start by visiting the Myspace website and locate a page with a music player. Those are usually band profile pages at Myspace. The music download can then be initiated by copying and pasting the url of that Myspace profile page into the web form at File2HD.

Check the “I have read and agree to the terms of service” box and click the Get Files button. The web service will analyze the Myspace page and display all links and files that are contained on it including the music files of the music player.

The list that is compiled will be huge. Look for the entries Featured Playlist (Standard Quality) and Original Version (High Quality). Those will usually contain the direct links to the mp3 files on the Myspace page. To download any of them simply right-click a song and select Save As or Save from the menu.

A normal file download will be initiated that will download the selected song to the local computer. Got any other methods of downloading music from Myspace? Let us hear them in the comments.

ESP is a software program that combines both concepts. It makes use of the Shoutcast directory of Internet Radios that the user can listen to online. It provides the means to record the active stream right away. Other applications that handle this well are Streamripper, Musicy and several music players like AIMP2 or XMPlay.

ESP would not be special in this regard if it would not offer a more or less unique feature in addition to being able to record Internet Radio. The software can automatically search for music that has been publicly made available by the artist or the record company. The developers say that ESP looks only for music that has been uploaded by the artist to social networking websites. The software itself will not display the source of the music download which could be reason enough for cautious users to not use the feature. Tests revealed that it pulled songs from websites like MySpace.

ESP is available for most Windows operating systems including Windows 98, Windows XP and Windows Vista.

The proxy setting has to be configured in the web browser so that all http traffic is routed through the localhost proxy at port 8800. Firefox users would click on Tools > Options > Advanced > Network > Settings to open the proxy configuration.

They would then select the manual proxy configuration and enter localhost and port 8800 under HTTP Proxy. They should make sure to revert the settings to No Proxy again when they stop using Freezer.

The program requires the user’s presence because the download dialog will pop up whenever the user clicks on play on any of the supported music portals. This works nicely with the various radio stations at Deezer and playlists in general.

Downloads are pretty fast, they never took more than a few seconds during tests. Freezer is probably best for users who like to download a few selected songs from those music portals. Should work nicely with an instant proxy changer or autoscripts that automatically save the files.

The author explicitly states that the software is not intended to download copyrighted music but only music that is freely available.

This radio feature is being used by Last Sharp, an application that can be used to download music from Last.fm. Last Sharp requires the Microsoft .net framework 2.0 and an operating system that is either Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Vista. The application itself can be unpacked and started from any directory on the hard drive without installation. The only other requirement is a Last.fm user account to be able to tune in and download the music.

The default language of the interface is German but it can be set to English in the options. The options are in the lower left corner. The user can set the download directory, add a proxy, enable continuous downloads or select to normalize mp3 files with MP3 Gain.

The heart of the program is the Tune In section which can be used to load a 30 track playlist filtered by tag, similar artists or account specific parameters. All tracks of the playlist are selected by default and can be downloaded by right-clicking in the window and selecting the Download option from the context menu. Tracks that are not wanted can be unchecked. The Remember Downloads setting in the option is handy to prevent that already downloaded tracks are downloaded again.

It should be noted that the downloads have to be in order. Selecting a download from the middle will prevent downloads of tracks that are listed above it in the playlist. It is however still possible to recreate the playlist which will be populated with songs that can be downloaded.

One interesting parameter is continuous download. It will automatically pull the next 30 track playlist from Last.fm once the end of the last has been reached. This effectively means unlimited downloads for as long as the application is running.

Last Sharp is available on a German website. Just scroll down to the section called Aktuelle Version and click on the Download link which leads to Rapidshare where the application can be downloaded.

Each music community offers a large amount of music tracks that can be played online in an embedded player. Some music tracks can be downloaded directly because the user who uploaded the track allowed that option. Other songs on the other hand can only be played in the embedded player.

There are however a few options to download those songs from eSnips as well. The first software that I try out for any kind of streaming service is Orbit Downloader and it’s grab++ link grabber.

Orbit Downloader seems to have problems downloading songs from eSnips currently. I was not able to download the full songs, only 50K of the song which is obviously not enough.

The second option is a web downloader that converts the eSnips page where the music is embedded to the download url of the song. That works surprisingly well. One of the few scripts that can do that is the called eSnips Download.

Just enter the url of the website where the song is currently playing and hit the Get Download Link button to receive the url to the song. Another click downloads that song directly to the computer.

Before you go ahead and make use of the methods described in this article I would like to remind you that those methods are legal in some countries but not all. You still have to check if it’s ok in your country before you download 1000+ songs a day using the methods listed below.

The chance that you get caught ranges from slim (Music Search Engines) to virtually impossible (Internet Radio) though and is way below the chance of getting caught trading music in P2P networks.

The methods are listed alphabetically and I only described a few services and programs to download music. If you do some research you will find many more applications and services.

Free Music:

Free music has a bad reputation on the Internet. That is undeserved and can be mostly attributed to spam and malicious software. If you look around a bit you find massive amounts of free music that can be downloaded to the local hard drive.

Jamendo is surely one of the top locations for free music on the Internet. Jamendo is currently offering more than 11000 albums on their website. Direct download and Bittorrent downloads are available and the whole site concept deserves a larger userbase than they currently have. It pretty much works after an “if you like the artist visit his website and buy some merch or CDs” system.

Jamendo is not the only way to get your free share of music. I have collected a large list of possibilities called the music list some time ago. Most if the websites and services are still in existence these days.

Internet Radio:

That’s probably one of the easiest ways to download music from the Internet. Thousands of Internet Radio stations cater to the music listening taste of almost everyone. From metal over gospel to christian, there is a good chance that you find a station that is playing exactly the music that you like.

One of the best tools for recording Internet Radio is Streamripper in combination with its frontend Stripper in my opinion.

That’s a combo for super-easy recordings of multiple Internet Radio streams at once. The advantage of this method is that it runs automatic after pressing the start recording button. Just sit down and relax while the software programs download song after song to your hard drive.

Another advantage is that you pick the stations which means that you can include factors like bitrate in the selection process. Each station plays usually between 15-20 songs per hours. That’s between 360 to 480 per Internet Radio station and day. Imagine recording multiple stations simultaneously. The only real limit is your Internet connection.

Streamripper tries to save songs correctly if the Internet Radio Station sends those information. You end up with music that uses the song and artist as the name and some proper tags.

A great directory to start looking for interesting Internet Radio Stations is the Shoutcast directory.

Music Communities:

Music communities, like Last.fm and partially also MySpace, offer a vast amount of music that can be listened to online. They also lack direct download features but the usual tools work pretty well to download music from those websites.

The Last Ripper is for example an excellent tool to Save Last.fm music. Grab++ and Download Helper should also work wonders on most sites.

It is usually not a problem to download the songs. If nothing helps a direct audio recording tool like Audacity does the trick. That tool can record all sounds that the user can hear, a last resort so to speak.

Music Search Engines:

Music Search Engines like SeeqPod or MP3zy crawl the Internet for audio related content which gets added to their vast database. The results are presented like any other search on regular search engines like Google with the difference that they can be played directly in the browser window.

They usually do not offer ways to download the music that can be played directly. It is however usually not a problem to download the streams that are offered directly to the computer. A good combination is using the software Grab++ which is part of Orbit Downloader, a free download manager that supports downloading from many media sites directly.

Youtube:

If you search on Youtube for artists, albums or songs you will most likely find a video with music that you are looking for. After that it is only a matter of downloading the Youtube video and ripping the audio from it.

The combination of Download Helper, a Firefox extension that can download videos from Youtube and many other video websites, and Audio Extractor does the trick.

Just load the downloaded Youtube videos into Audio Extractor, select an output format and wait until the audio has been extracted. The only problem of that method is the audio quality which differs tremendously.

Each result occupies two rows displaying the artist name, song name and the options to Play and to Download the song. Songs are downloaded pretty fast, much faster actually than from P2P networks, because those downloads are coming right from websites who tend to deliver faster speeds normally.

The basic version of Songbeat is free and does not seem to have download limitations. The FAQ however did mention that the free version can be used to test the download function which seems to imply some sort of restrictions. If you encounter any let me know. Songbeat Basic is ad based which is not such a big problem, the ads are not that obtrusive.

I have not found a way to change the default saving directory which is the My Music directory in Documents & Settings because there are apparently no options available.

But, there is another way to download songs from Bebo.com this one working perfectly right now. You need Orbit Downloader to be able to download songs from Bebo.com. Download Orbit Downloader and start Grab++ from the Tools menu. Grab++ sits there and waits for multimedia urls.

Once it discovers a song from Bebo.com it displays it in its main window. Checking that song and clicking on download sends the url of the song from Bebo.com to the Orbit Downloader were it will be downloaded to your system. You can filter the results in Grab++ to only display audio files by clicking on the Audio tab.

Most songs on Bebo.com are provided in mp3 format but some are unfortunately in flv format. All songs need to be renamed as well. I suppose those random filenames are generated every time a user requests a song from Bebo.com similar to the random script that Myspace uses.

To download an element you simply check the box and click on the download button at the bottom of the screen. The download will then be send to the Orbit Downloader where the selected file(s) will be downloaded automatically. You do need the Orbit Download Manager and the Grab++ addition to download the elements.

The following websites and services are currently supported amongst others: Pandora, Yahoo, Myspace, IMEEM, Radioblogclub,Youtube, Dailymotion, Myspace and others. I tested it for instance with Gametrailers.com and it worked perfectly.

Grab++ is currently available as a beta but it worked without problems using the latest version of Firefox. The developers plan to integrate Grab++ into their download manager in the long run and support more sites such as Last.fm and the RTMP protocol.

A slighlty more complex alternative to grab++ would be the freeware URL Snooper.

This means that you create a large library of songs over time. Hundreds of songs are added daily to the list of recorded songs which are kept for an infinite amount of time. The music that you download from Online Music Recorder is encrypted and you need a special software that decrypts the music using your username and password that you use when logging into the website.

You do find a wide variety of songs and genres and may filter songs by genre to view only the songs of a music genre that you like. Downloads from the server are fine. I was able to download songs with a speed of about 300K.

Once the songs are on your hard drive you have to start the decoder and either decrypt one song at a time or a folder with a lot of songs at once. I suggest to use the latter method because it means that you save a lot of time. Encrypting songs takes only a few seconds.

The Online Music Recorder is a great way to download music legally. It has some limitations though. First, you can only download what they record which might not really be what you are looking for. Then it is inferior to recording internet music streams by yourself using tools such as streamripper or xmplay to save them at once to your hard drive.

I personally like the idea and it is a great way to download music especially for novice users.

I’m not saying that the Music Industry will become obsolete, songs still have to be produced somehow but for this concept to work they are not necessary at all. You probably were thinking that this would surely mean an ad-driven service if users were able to download songs for free. This is apparently not the case and leads to a social experiment. Users pay a monthly subscription which is not a fixed price but a sum that the users can select themselves.

You pay the artists as much as you want. It remains to be seen if this idealistic system will be able to compete with the established music portals. It will be rather difficulty to find enough established musicians and bands who will support this project. I’m not an expert when it comes to contracts between artists and the Music Industry but I suppose the Music Industry will not allow their artists to upload songs to Playble.

So, it will have the usual selection of unknown and independent bands instead of major artists such as Madonna, Take That and Robby Williams. It would still be great to see some of the more influential artists support the new model.

What I really like about Playble ? They believe in their users and the artists, that everyone will get a fair share. The Music Industry does not trust their customers at all..

found: zeropaid

The only problem that I see is that you can’t search for music genres which would have been a great addition. Most users will not know the name of the artist or the title of the song and could have problems finding exactly what they would like to listen to. I would suggest to search for specific genres nevertheless, this ensures that you receive lots of links. It can be used to search for artists if you do know their name or an album / song title.

I have been using the DRM Free Music Search mainly to visit the music sites that are in its index. The about page lists them all and provides links to their websites directly. Some do require registration before you can listen to songs, some offer only samples of each tune and cut the music after some seconds.

I think that this is the coming way of music distribution. Musicians do not need record labels anymore to spread their music. All they need is to record the music and upload it to a DRM free portal to make it available to a worldwide audience. Concerts and promotions in (small) clubs is their promotion, not tv advertisement.

Unfortunately for them, but good for us, is the fact that the code contains the direct link to the mp3 file. It is therefor very easy to extract the link to the mp3 file from the code and download it afterwards. This requires some manual work but is really easy, here is one example how this is done.

1. Search for an artist or song and click on the blue icon on the left side of every song
2. Copy and paste the appearing the code in the right sidebar into your address bar
3. Remove all the content except the content starting with http and ending with either .mp3 or .rbs
4. It might be necessary to change some html code back to their corresponding chars, those are:
   1. %2f = “/”
   2. %3a = “:”
   3. %20 =” “

The last step has to be applied sometimes. Rename the file extension .rbs into .mp3. Please check the legality of this method in your country before you proceed and download songs from that website.
source: drmalt

This hack works if you can at least download one tune. Do the following to download every other tune that is on this page:

1. Right click the download link and select “copy link”
2. You receive a large url like the following (one line of course):

http://mp3download.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction= bandprofile.downloadSong&bsid=OldSongNumberHere&song_name= Title of the Old Song Here &fid=bandid

3. Copy this line into your browser or into notepad for further reference
4. Right click the “Add” link and select “copy link”
5. It should look like this:

asfunction:addSong,NewSongNumber^Title of the New Song Here

6. Replace

OldSongNumberHere with NewSongNumber
Title of the Old Song Here with Title of the New Song Here

7. Paste in your browser if you have not done so and wait for the download window to appear.