The first method is a search that can be used to find exact matches for artists, songs, albums and so on. Youtube has one of the largest collections of music videos and it usually is pretty easy to find the music that you are looking for. Music that has been discovered can be added to playlists which can be saved after a free account registration at the official website. This is a great way of creating lots of playlists that cover all the songs and genres that the user likes.

The second option that is offered by Muziic is pre-generated playlists that can be accessed from the sidebar of the music player. Those playlists are sorted by genre. About 30 or so genres are available which do contain one or multiple playlists that can be selected for playback.

The video going along with the song can be displayed in the music player if that is something that the user wants to view as well while listening to the song. Besides the playlists that are offered users can import so called channels that have been created by other Muziic users into the application. Channels are also categorized in genres making it easy to pick a suitable one.

The music player is quite interesting as it uses a concept similar to cloud computing to provide access to a large collection of music to users. Users benefit from this by being able to search and access that large database and by saving disk space as virtually no local disk space is required. The only possible drawbacks are the quality of the songs which are definitely not high (but acceptable) quality and the chance that songs vanish if the videos get deleted on Youtube.

Listening to music only needs a software program that does the needful. This brings me to my question for all the readers. What program do you use to listen to music on your PC? I know it sounds a little strange but I’m curious about preferences of the folks who visit Ghacks.

There are a lot of audio players out there. For most people, I guess it doesn’t make that big a difference as long as it plays the songs. But I know some people who are vary particular. How did you select your player? Did you like how it looked or how you could customize it? Were you looking for something that could play specific audio formats?

I’ll start the ball rolling. I listen to music on my computer everyday and my player of choice is Winamp 2.8. Yeah, I know it’s old but what can I say. I started using it 8 years ago and I guess it’s grown on me. I want to try the Linux player Amarok though. With all the rave reviews I keep hearing, I can’t wait for it to be developed for Windows.

Some of the other players I know about are Media Monkey, iTunes, Songbird, Foobar2000, etc. Drop me a line and tell me what your favorite player is and why.

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.

There is a good tutorial that explains all the steps to get this Java program to work at the save ourtunes forum. You have to download the newest ourTunes version, start iTunes first then ourTunes afterwards.

A list of shared libraries should become visible. Selecting a library in ourTunes loads that library in the iTunes sidebar and you can start listening to songs. Listening will actually download the songs which you have selected and you can speed up the process by pausing the stream. It takes a while to get the feeling for this but downloads should not take that long at all.

This is probably not a perfect way to trade large amounts of songs but it’s nice for music discovery. Oh and well, it’s Java so it should work on many operating systems.

This is however not the only fee that has to be paid. The opposing council has to be paid as well which adds roughly 850 Euros ($1193) if one song has been offered on the server up to 5850 Euros ($8200) for 50 songs. All of these fees without a single second in court until now of course.

If you happen to go to court you have to add fees for your own attorney and for the court which all depend on the amount in dispute. Last but not least there is the compensation for the Music Industry which the server operator or file sharer has to pay as well.

Am I the only one who thinks that this is out of line ? Even if no one did download a song from a user he has to pay up to 20000 Euro plus all those fees ?

Especially if you take into consideration that recent studies do show that downloaders spend considerably more on digital music purchases.

Read More:

Arstechnica
20000 Euro pro Lied (German)

All you need is to start Free Music Zilla and play a song on MySpace or any of the other mentioned social music websites. The software will automatically recognize that a song is played and grab all the details needed automatically from the stream. All you need to do is to mark the file and click on download.

Let me walk you through an example on Myspace.

Download Songs from Myspace:

Start Free Music Zilla and open your favorite browser and point it to myspace.com. Once there open a bands homepage and play one of the songs in the Myspace music player. Bring Free Music Zilla back to the front and notice that the mp3 that is currently playing on the Myspace website is listed there.

Just check the box in front of that mp3 and click on download. The default download location for mp3 that you download is c:\download, you might want to change that in the options.

You notice several other values in the listing. The filename has to be changed manually unfortunately because Myspace is using that random mp3 name script to avoid direct links to their mp3 songs. The Leech Timeout displays the time that you have to start the mp3 download. You need to play the mp3 again on Myspace if you did not make it in that time.

The Myspace mp3 downloads were incredibly fast. I hit the download button and it said completed almost immediately. Not sure how fast it is on slower connections though. The music needs to be playing during the download, make sure it is because the download will fail otherwise.

Conclusion:

Free Music Zilla offers the easiest way to download mp3 from Myspace and other social music sites. If I could correct one thing I would uncheck all mp3 files that I already downloaded automatically but this is only a minor issue.

It has a major limitation though. This version allows the user to download ten mp3 per day which is simply not enough. The Orbit Downloader team which is also developing Free Music Zilla will soon implement a way to download mp3 from within their free client supposedly without limitations.

Read More:

Free Music Zilla

In that moment, you’d give “anything” for an advice that could lead you to the song you have in your head and want to hear it again and again. Tunatic identifies songs automatically by comparing them with other audio patterns. However, there’s a limited number of patterns and it often happens that it just doesn’t find the song you’re looking for.

This is when human being come on the scene. Each one of us listens to different kinds of music but there will always be someone on the other side who knows the name of that song you’re searching for.

That’s why a music recognition community at WatZatSong has been set up. You can join either by listening to existing samples and identifying them or by posting a request for identification.

The samples you upload for identification can be recorded by yourself (don’t worry, your requests will be anonymous ;) or a mp3 or wav file can be used as well. Uploads are automatically limited to 30 sec and queued for recognition by someone else. You need to sign up to monitor your pending requests.

The best feature of Harddisk Ogg is that it sits in the tray once configured and you can start the recording with a single mouse click and end it with another one. The quality of the recorded audio can be configured in detail including bitrate, mono or stereo recording and encoding quality.

Harddisk Ogg offers several normalization modes that amplify the input signal to a constant volume. You need to download and move the lame encoder into the folder of Harddisk Ogg to be able to record mp3 files directly.

I would like to explain why a tool like Harddisk Ogg might be useful now or in the near future. Several countries have already laws in place that make it illegal to copy music from Cd’s if the CD is copy protected. They still allow however to record the songs using audio devices and compare this to the recording of radio with audio tapes.

This is also great if you want to rip audio from music videos that you found on the internet or from youtube videos.

Clicking that songs link leads to some songs that can be listened to on the web. The clever guys at tech-recipes have found a way to download those mp3 files directly to your hard drive. Once you are in the songs menu do the following: Right-click and view the source of the page. Search for mp3 and continue the search until you find a reference that looks like a complete url starting with http:// and ending with .mp3.

This is the complete filename for the first song that was displayed on the songs page. Copy that link and paste it into your web browser or automatic downloader. The song will download just fine and the only step left to do would be to change the name to the name of the band and song.

Continue the search to find additional links to all the other songs that might be in that list. Tech-Recipes suggested to create an account but I was not able to verify that this is indeed necessary. You can download the songs just fine without creating an account.

It could however be that you may listen to additional songs if you have an account at their website.

Update: The described method is not working anymore. I discovered another method which I described in the follow up article Download songs from Bebo.com

I always thought that there had to be a better way to share songs. (note to RIAA: my own created music, nothing you have to worry about) When you connect the iPod to the computer it will not show the songs, it will only show notes, calendar and contacts. (could differ from iPod to iPod). Sharepod is the tool I was looking for. Instead of installing the freeware to a computer you copy it to the iPod and run it from there.

All you need to do is copy the contents of Sharepod to your iPod when it is connected to your computer. When you connect the iPod to another computer you simply execute the Sharepod executable and it should load just fine. Some common files are needed on the windows computer which should normally be there. The author links to them from his site if they are missing.

Once open you can copy music from and to the iPod. Please note that you should turn of auto-sync in iTunes if you want to run that software on your own computer and add files from your friends to the iPod. If you do not turn it off it will delete all files that have not been added using iTunes.

The original song is played and the misheard lyrics are displayed. There is lots of great artwork to explore and you surely will find this funny. Most songs are metal related though, so if you like other genres this might not be the right video for you. Unless you want to prove the point that metal lyrics have no meaning at all.. If you want more search for misheard on youtube.
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