The Quest for Free Music

When I discovered that Kazaa had become illegal, I went into a period of time when I couldn't get any music. This was mainly because I didn't know where I could find it free legally, and I was too cheap to buy CDs or the like. This went on until I found allofmp3.com, which is a Russian music website that was (and still is) in the gray area of the law. This site offered music at $0.02 per MB downloaded, so I could get whole CDs for $1 or so. I got a gift card for the site, and started to work.

This went on really well, until the RIAA discovered the site, and went to work pressuring the government to get the site shut down. During this time, the site was unavailable, and I once again needed to find free music. This time, however, I was fortunate to make a number of discoveries.

I discovered a program called StreamRipper, which allows the "ripping" of a stream of audio from a web radio station. This process was (and still is, I think) legal and free, so I gave it a try. It is not targeted yet because of the quality of the audio. Most web radio streams at 64 kbs, so the audio is very low quality. The program that rips the audio is also imperfect in that it sometimes overlaps the songs, and sometimes records radio ads and promos along with the songs. So, it had limitations. But it was still very useful in getting a wide range of music, so I could go for quantity and not quality. This lead to my introduction to the genres of Lounge and various forms of Electronic.

The "feature" that I have utilized this time is putting an mp3 on the page. I am doing this by embedding a flash player that is linked to a file found on the Internet Archive. The file can be played by clicking the little play button.

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