Set Up the Double Download

By default, it is an extra step to download files from your Cloud Drive. The settings are easy to find. Naturally, you have to be signed in to get to these settings. You will also need the Amazon MP3 Downloader. This is free software that you can configure to sync with iTunes, Windows Media Player, or to not sync at all.

Step 1: Click on “Your Digital Items” on the top right of Amazon’s home page above the cart and wish list buttons (it may appear on other pages too).

Step 2: Under “Amazon MP3 Store” click on “You Amazon MP3 Settings,” found towards the middle of the page.

Step 3: Finally, you will see two settings, each with two options. Feel free to read through it, but you just have to make sure the first option in each of the two settings is selected. See the screenshot for all the detail.

Now when you aquire a song it will be loaded to your Cloud Drive and the MP3 Downloader will put the files on your computer. A small file that ends in .amz may download to your computer at first. Open it to launch the MP3 Downloader. Please note there is no “Apply Settings” or “Save Settings” to click on the website. You just click the circles next to the options you want and you are done.

Mooch Off Amazon a Full Album at a Time

Grabbing a heap of music from Amazon for free is easy. Oddly enough, I do not know anyone who takes advantage of it (locally at least).

You do not have to follow the steps above to download free music, but I would advise it. It gives you a backup, and free songs are perfect to try-out “double downloading” with. Why backup free music in the first place? Because it will not always be free; these are often limited time offers. You may have to pay to download something again if you lose a song. In case of accidental deletion or a hard drive crash, everything would be saved in a completely separate location, in this case Amazon Cloud Drive. Amazon lets you to download songs from there, for free, as many times as you like.

That said, let’s get to the free music!

Step 1: To get the the general MP3 section start from the main page, hover your mouse over “MP3s & Cloud Player” and then click on “MP3 Music Store” to the right. (Note: “Hover” means to move your mouse to something, but do not click the mouse button yet.)

Step 2: Scroll way down to about halfway down the page. You will see a lot of stuff: albums, information, icons, etc. You are looking for the image below. Click on “Free MP3 Albums” when you find it. You can alternatively use this link to go directly to that page: Free Music

Step 3: While you land at a page with the most popular music, you should consider narrowing it down to a genre you prefer. I recommend the Classical section. I found a number of full albums I liked there.

Wrapping Things Up

Note that you will need the Amazon MP3 Downloader to download full albums. This is regardless of your settings. The downloader has the benefit of enabling you to download multiple songs from the Cloud Player too (but not the Cloud Drive, which can only download files one at a time). That means you can restore all your Amazon music fairly easily, provided a backup was in the Cloud Drive, in the event of a computer problem. That is a nice free feature.

You also need to know that you can only download music from an Amazon store if the shipping address of your account is in the same country as the store.

The Amazon US store is currently offering 197 mp3 albums for free download. The German Amazon store only six albums.

I hope these little tips will save you some time and expose you to some new music. Enjoy!

We are concentrating the discovery in this report on music, more specifically music from artists that the majority of users has never heard about.

Muzic scans the Internet and in particular blogs for free music that is then listed on their website. The majority of music that is found this way has been produced by new bands but the occasional promo of established bands (Black Sabbath or Queens of the Stone age for instance) appears in the results as well.

This alone would be useful to discover music blogs that post information about artists and mp3 samples of their work.

The artists and songs that are listed on the homepage of the service do reveal little information. The blog posts usually state the artist name, name of the free song and the genre.

Most of the links lead to the blog the music was posted on. It is there that you find a download link pointing to one or multiple mp3s of the artist(s) that have been reviewed there. These blog posts usually contain a review of the song or artist.

But Muzic does not only display what is posted at other blogs on their own page. More important than that is probably the search and categorization of music and artists.

It is for instance possible to display popular tags, songs by genre or data. The advanced search on the other hand can be used to search for specific songs, artists, blogs or in all information at once.

The results on the other hand look like the homepage listings. But that is more than sufficient and adds to the excitement of discovery. It is probably a good idea to look at specific genres to find music that you are interested in.

All mp3 songs can be downloaded to the local computer system, this can accumulate to more than one hundred Megabytes of music per day if the blog links are followed as well.

Muzic offers a great and comfortable way of discovering new music that is being uploaded and reviewed on the Internet. An RSS feed is available to subscribe to the site and be informed about new discoveries more easily.

You find a good mixture of established artists in the list including songs by Bif Naked, Underoath or Warren G but the majority of songs comes from artists that most visitors probably never heard of. This does not necessarily mean that this is bad music. It is actually a good way of discovering new artists that are not that in the focus of mass media.

The downloaded songs have been encoded with 192 Kbit and it is likely that all songs are encoded in this bitrate. Music can be sorted by letter or genre which helps to find the right music genre or artist.

There is no word yet on the duration of this promotion. Thanks goes to jagslive for sending us the tip.

It surprised me that they decided to offer 20 Metallica live albums from 1982-2003 for free on their website Live Metallica which is selling live albums from their recent concerts as mp3 and flac on the site as well. Well the 20 albums are free to download after registering at the website which just takes an email and password.

Don’t expect the downloads to be that easy. They are offering a Java download manager or single downloads of the files. Single downloads mean that a user would have to right-click files about two hundreds times to download all of them. Most live albums have a playing time between 1:30 and 2 hours and mostly contain classic Metallica songs. All test downloads used a bitrate of 192 Kbit.

A nice surprise for Metallica fans, past and present.

If you click on the title you will be taken to a detailed page which displays information about the source website that offered the mp3 and the option to download or email the mp3 file. Downloads begin immediately and require no registration at all. The same page lists other mp3 files by the same artist or group which can also be downloaded from Sideload. Sideload partnered up with mp3tunes to offer its users a so called music locker.

This is basically a way to transfer the mp3 files that you like to the mp3tunes online locker. This is great if you can’t download the mp3 files right from Sideload. Just transfer them to your locker and download them later when you are able to download the mp3 files.

found: DRM Alternatives