Free Music: The Quest for the MP3
by DMUX
I don't know why I haven't heard of anyone else doing it the way I did. It was a simple idea and it was the same way I did it when I was eight. Maybe it is too much work for most people and they don't care.
Since the boom of the Internet, there was a time that music had somewhat of a Holy Grail status. Everyone was trying to find it. In the past 14 years, I have read various articles and tactics of how to find free MP3s. As I read these articles, some explain how to get free music by logging in to [insert "one free MP3 when you sign up" website here]. Seems like a lot of work to me. I think back to my early childhood of "obtaining free music."
(Just to set the record straight, stealing is wrong. Now back to the story.)
I was never a huge music aficionado, but I did like the top tens on the radio. I wanted to play all the new "top of the charts" songs at my leisure. When I was eight (circa 1989), I had a small red POS radio with a tape deck that had the capability to record. While riding in the car, if I heard a song I liked, I would have to quickly write down the name of the song or artist before my ADD kicked in and I would be back to "Hey, I like this song" when it played again.
Usually on Saturday in between beating Super Contra and struggling with Battletoads on NES, I would have a blank cassette in the radio and was ready to push the record button for any song that I heard earlier in the week. With the red POS radio I had, I couldn't make a sound while it was recording because the microphone would pick up everything external to the radio. Quite a tedious operation but hey, I didn't have to go buy the single. A full album on Compact Cassette (CC) cost $15.00 back in the day. I always found it strange that after CDs were popular, they ended up being the same price for an album as what the tapes used to be when they were popular. I wonder if gramophone records and 8-tracks started this trend.
Fast-forward eight years or so - still before Napster. MP3s were starting to be all the rage. You could always hear kids in the hall at school comparing meager MP3 collections. You wouldn't even care what music they had; it was all about the MP3 count. "I got over 7,000 MP3s, do you want to touch me?"
After Napster was released, everything changed. Granted, I am somewhat nostalgic, so I wanted all the songs that I still had on cassette so I could listen to them on my PC. I still had several cassettes and quite a few CDs, but I knew that MP3s were where it was all going. I didn't want to have to re-buy the same music that was on my tapes for a CD, and then rip them to my computer.
Now fast-forward to around 2002. I invested (wasted) many hours into Quake 3. So much time that I would make somewhat elaborate frag videos and upload them to PlanetQuake/Own-Age and other gaming sites pre-YouTube days. I am proud that one of my demos made it in the "Get Quaked 3" video, but that's another story. When I would make Quake movies, I used all kinds of software way above my level at the time: Sony Vegas, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere, and Sound Forge. The overall goal when making an elaborate Quake video is to sync up the music track with the frags. Somewhere around that time, I came across the greatest program every music enthusiast should know: Audacity. I created the audio track in Audacity, then laid it in the video editing program, and compiled the video.
What does this have to do with getting free music? Well, I don't know why I didn't hear about this approach years before I started doing it. With Audacity you can easily record any noise that your computer outputs and re-encode it in whatever format you want. Best of all, it is free. You can actually do this with many other programs. Audacity is pretty easy to use and has a few editing options that make it quick.
I don't know why, but in 2005 I was in search of vintage music videos I used to watch when music videos were actually shown on the music television channel. I didn't begin by searching the P2P realm; I Googled it first just to see what would come up. Sure enough, I came across the newly created YouTube.com. I found lots of remixes to songs that I never heard. I thought, why not just record the audio off YouTube and convert them into MP3s instead of trying to find the MP3? Why waste time and risk getting a billion dollar fine for downloading a few MP3s of songs I still have on tape? Before I knew it, YouTube became my personal music box.
I am so glad that the RIAA finds it O.K. for all of the music to be uploaded to YouTube. I can quickly find rare remixes of songs on YouTube that would have taken hours of searching Kazaa, BearShare, torrents, eMule, and Napster combined. I can record them from YouTube and put them on my iPod or just burn them to DVD. Lots of people ask me where I find some of my remixes because they have never heard them on iTunes. When I tell them I got it off of YouTube, they get the most puzzled look on their face. "YouTube?" "Yea, YouTube." I am sure others have done it, but I have never heard or read of anyone else doing it this way. With all of the online radio stations and music videos that are always embedded on every website, why not?
Why should we have to pay for music that we paid for 20 years ago? I don't want to pay $0.99 for a song; I have the single on tape! The RIAA never emailed my official licensed MP3s for all of the songs that I bought years ago. What gives them the right to put it in a different wrapper and resell it?
So, I guess my process of finding "free music" really hasn't changed from when I was eight-years-old. The only thing that has changed is my age and the format of the music.
Go Build Your Playlist
and many more out there.
Happy listening!