Songr is a Windows application that will search ten mp3 search engines for music that the user is looking for. Among the mp3 search engines that are supported are playlist.com, Skreemr or Mp3realm. It will also search Youtube indirectly by utilizing the Justhearit service. The developers plan to add nine mp3 search engines (including Groveshark) to the program to increase the quality and quantity of search results.

A search is performed by entering an album, artist or song name in the search form in the main interface. Songr will then search the various mp3 search engines and return the combined results of that search. The name, duration, bitrate, size, search engine and relevancy are shown in the search results. These information are not always displayed which means that they are only supported by some of the search engines.

A right click on a row in the search results opens a context menu with options to play or download the selected song. Another interesting option of Songr is the search by lyrics feature. The program tries to identify a few words that are entered and displays possible artists and songs which can then be searched for with a double-click.

Songr requires the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5 and is compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. It can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

SSMunch [via Go Web 2.0] seems to search the three websites eSnips, iJigg and MP3 Realm. That’s at least the three that can be selected individually before performing a search, the only other option is ALL which apparently searches all three of them. A search for Madonna – yeah that’s my default search term when I test mp3 search engines – revealed 69 result pages with 20 songs each. Not all songs that were listed were actually Madonna songs, covers were also included and one of the first was David Hasslehof with La Isla Bonita. I had to get this one !

Some other tests did bring up lesser results but still enough to make this an impressive music search engine. The website is very responsive and good to navigate, music downloads are rather slow though. The one thing that I do not like that much is the way the Listen link has been implemented. If you click on listen a new page opens with controls to start the playback of the song.

It would be far better if the controls would open on the same page instead. A playlist would be nice as well. Still if you want to download songs SSMunch provides you with a way to do that.

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.

Registered users can save the songs in playlists to play them again at a later time, there is no open way to download the music found directly.

Warner Bros. Records has decided to sue Seeqpod, an unlawful music service that directly engages in, encourages, and facilitates the mass infringement of Plaintiffs’ and other intellectual property owners’ copyrighted works.

Seeqpod on the other hand claims that they do not host files on their own server, merely linking to those files just like any other search engine which would mean that they would be protected under the DMCA’s “safe harbor” provision.

If you perform a search on Seeqpod today you will only get search results from websites like Youtube and Wikipedia. It seems that they filter all other search results at the moment. The Podcrawler is still showing newly found mp3 files directly and those can be played, but the search is not finding them anymore.

What do you think, are they infringing copyright ? If you think they do why ? If you don’t think they do, why ?

All you can do on the clone websites is to enter an artist name or song name and search for it. You get search results that show found songs and you can play or download those songs. If you choose to play a song it is loaded in a new window with a very basic player.

Seeqpod on the other side offers a playlist of songs that you have selected, repeat, shuffle, skip songs, change the volume, share playlists with friends, a video search and a discovery mode. We will most likely see more of these websites pop up in the near future and they surely will get coverage on some websites.

A search for Linkin Park revealed more than 2300 entries. Each search results page contains ten links to mp3′s with information about the absolute link to the mp3, a description, name and details as well as a basic music player that connects and plays the mp3.

The file size is the most important information next to the song name of course because it can be used as an indicator of the quality of the song.

Hovering your mouse over the song url reveals even more information such as the bitrate, the cover art and the last time the url had been crawled.

Skreemr supports some advanced search parameters. They can be used to search for an exact phrase (“My favorite Band”), to emphasize words (“My favorite Band +live +London”) and to exclude words from the search (“My favorite band -live”).

This is a great service that is surely going to face some heat from the Music Industry. Skreemr offers a great way for users to find new mp3 files and download them to their computer

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

To find those files you need an advanced understanding of the Google Search possibilities, I will give you some basic examples on what you can find and explain them. From there its up to you to enhance this searches.

What we are looking for are directories that have been indexed by google and don´t have a file in them that is loaded when loading the directory in your browser.

If you want to look a directory you simply put a basic index.htm(l) file into it and this file will be loaded when you try to open the directory and the content that is also in the directory will not be displayed.

That means we will have to exclude index.htm and index.html files from our search to find only open directories. (As a sidenote, there are of course other means of protecting directories like .htaccess files)

To exclude something from your search you use the “-” operator in the search field. We want to make sure that no webpages are displayed that have “htm” or “html” in their url, remember, we only want the directories.

The operator “inurl:” will be used to exclude both file formats. Our search string would look like this atm.

-inurl:htm -inurl:html

What else do we need to find Mp3 files?

Directories are often displayed with “index of” in their title, that means we will have to include this to our search.

We also have to state that we are looking for mp3 files so “mp3″ has to be in the search. That leads us to the following general search query:

-inurl:htm -inurl:html “index of” mp3

you can add a date to the search to get freshly modified directories using “month-year” in our case “Oct-2005″ as an addition to your search which results in

-inurl:htm -inurl:html “index of” mp3 “Oct-2005″

You can change mp3 to other music file formats as well, so aac, ogg, wma, wav ..

You probably are looking for a specific band or singer, that means you can add this information as well to your search by adding “singer/band name” to it. The search would be:

-inurl:htm -inurl:html “index of” mp3 “Oct-2005″ “Fresh Fantasy Dizzy Singers”

Enjoy your searches :)