The site clearly has been created by people who love video games. The organization goes so far as to claim that they are “dedicated to the appreciation and promotion of video game music as an art form.” Up in the right hand corner you will notice a mascot. That mascot will change with every page reload and you can click on them for more information. They come from a myriad of games and are undiscriminating of systems, as does the music within the site.

There are several ways to reach the music within the site. The latest songs are listed on the right. Random songs are listed towards the bottom of the page. You can search for games that may have remixes by name. Typically, games for the NES, SNES, and Sega will a few good songs to choose from, but new games have a growing number of remixes as well. You can list songs by game alphabetically or by number of remixes from the Music menu at the top of the page. You can also go to the torrent page.

Torrents are often associated with illegal downloading, but this is an example of legal file sharing. In fact, using the torrents will help the site. How can it do that? Simple: torrents save the site bandwidth costs. The files in the torrents are the same ones that you can download from the site. By using the torrents, the bandwidth comes from fellow users rather than traditional web servers. The torrents have a lot of content. At the time of writing, you can download the first thousand songs, the next nine hundred songs, and twenty nine albums. The albums often come in both MP3 and FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) formats, so the quality of the tracks is high.

Here are some recommendations. I tried to represent a variety of tastes and systems. The one thing these songs have in common, besides being based on video games, is good sound quality. Keep in mind that any assertions made are my opinion and subjective. (I make no claims to be a music expert.)

• Chrono Trigger – The Frog Dance : A fast paced, chipper tune (probably house or club genre). It is suitable for a workout playlist.
• Final Fantasy 11 Online – A Cinematic Heaven : An example of an orchestral song. The sampling may be noticeable to experienced ears, but it still pleasant.
• Final Fantasy 13 – Blue Skies : An example of a song with vocals, but distinctly techno. Trance influences soften its edges.
• Super Metroid – In Your Prime : This composition starts off very dark but steadily increases the tempo to a climax. An interesting work.
• Sonic the Hedgehog – April Rain : A whimsical tune that will evoke nostalgic memories within seconds. The style is a blend of orchestral and techno music.

The web site and community there encourage others to try their hand at creating new remixes. They have a variety of tutorials and avenues for feedback. There is a list of software on the Links page (see “Music-Making Software”), but the tutorials are general enough to accommodate various types software and tools. If you wanted to learn how to make music on a computer, this is not a bad community to learn from.

If you are interested in contributing and not just consuming, I would encourage you to read the Content Policy. While it does not claim ownership to the uploaded music or anything alarming, they outright specify that they typically do not take down content. Once you post something on the site, it is expected to stay there. While this makes sense for fans, it may not for composers. In general, it is good to be aware of rules like this.

With thousands of songs, and several sources to download from, most people should be able to find something to add to their MP3 collection. Enjoy the music. Let us know in the comments if you find a song worth downloading.

Virtually no music player can parse websites for mp3 music links. That’s where Play Them All comes into play. Instead of having to download all mp3 music files manually to play them locally one simply has to press the Play Them All button. The extension adds an entry to the Firefox tools menu. It does come with a button as well which can be added to a Firefox toolbar to simplify usage.

Once pressed or selected it will scan the entire page for links to mp3 music. The Firefox extension will then open a Open / Save download window. The extension is currently in experimental stage meaning that you need to log into the Mozilla website to download it from there.

The developer has only tested the extension on Linux using XMMS. Tests with AIMP2 and iTunes on Windows were not successful.

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.

Electrobel features a nice looking interface that makes it very easy to listen to mp3 music on the site itself using a great player. It is possible to create playlists, look at playlists from other users, export the music to m3u files. You can download music from Electrobel as well, everything can be done without registration. It offers however more than just music downloads; Members share information about upcoming concerts, new releases, music production, music hardware and software.

The community is pretty active and you can find lots of royalty free music in the different music categories on Electrobel. Everything is devoted to electronic music of course which means that the dominating genres are Techno, Trance, Electro and variations of that music. They even got a chiptunes category which I remember from the time that I produced some music with my Commodore Amiga for some demos and intros.

So, let me sum it up: Free Music Downloads + Free Music Streams + Royalty Free Music + Great Community =  excellent website that gets a recommendation.