for your * pleasure – beginner’s tutelage

By Kervin | February 23, 2010 | 1 Comment

hello, hello. welcome to another hastily planned and poorly executed recurring feature; this one’s specifically called “FOR YOUR LISTENING PLEASURE.” it exists because i listen to a lot of great music, and so should you. see, indie-scoff avoided. i’m a reasonable man.

keep in mind i will not be linking to any of the albums or songs mentioned, as this would be “illegal,” but i don’t want to keep you from enjoying the many jams to be cranked, so i will start off the feature with a great google query that will get you going in the right direction. use it with discretion, and as always, be prepared to get your pants sued off by gigantic corporations whose only aim is to make example of those unscrupulous people called “pirates.” oh, and please don’t play “pass the blame”– this query has been around much longer than i’ve known about it, and is here for educational purposes only.

so we want to try and find a song IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN, yes? well, i like mozart. he’s been dead long enough that all of his copyright holdings have died too.

i’ll crack open a new browser tab, jump over to the search engine everyone uses, and hammer away a snippet of search.

site:mediafire.com “wolfgang amadeus mozart” mp3

there’s some meta to notice here. the “site:mediafire.com” tells google to search only the file-sharing website mediafire. similar websites, which also work in this algorithm to varying degree, include

• megaupload.com
• rapidshare.com
• zshare.net

following the spec of where to search, “wolfgang amadeus mozart”. the quotations tell google to search for this exact phrase within aforementioned specific website. fill these quotations (always remember the quotes!) with

• artist names
• album titles
• song titles

finally, since (mediafire, rapidshare, et. al.) returns the entire filename as the title of each particular page, appending mp3 to the end of our query returns only those results which are mp3s. if you’re looking for whole collections of songs, e.g., mixes or albums, replace mp3 with rar or zip– both are equally good methods of compressing data into organized packages.

simple stuff, really. browsing through google guide will better familiarize you with the flexibility of the google query.  great places to figure out the name of that album or track which you forgot are last.fm and wikipedia.

windows users, i recommend 7-zip for all of your unrar and unzip needs. mac users, try unrarx and let me know what you think. 7-zip and unrarx are open-source, which means they’re both free like “free beer!” and free like “free speech!”

OK? OK. i’ll be back on thursday to talk about the glory of the disposable music blog. don’t tell me what you find, cause i don’t want to know.

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