Free Stuff

[jkpescador]

I was browsing around for free stuff from some artists I enjoy. Hopefully other people will share their finds of their favorite artists.

DJ Z-Trip
http://www.djztrip.com/downloads.html
Some profanity in some of his mixes. If anything listen to the Motown Mix.

Cocteau Twins
http://www.cocteautwins.com/html/media/audio.html

Ursula 1000
http://ursula1000.com/media.htm
The long MegaMix is pretty good. I think there may be some profanity it in. Both Z-Trip and Ursula1000 have played at Next Door in Chinatown.

[Hellbent]

wow, cocteau twins. my ex-gf and her friends used to listen to CT... do i know you?

[mel]

Sub-Pop Records (http://www.subpop.com/) has some free downloads:

The Shins (http://www.subpop.com/artists/the_shins) - on the Sub-Pop label site you can download their singles "Phantom Limb" and "Australia" both on MP3 as well as music video.

There is a giant audio download site at the Internet Archive:

http://www.archive.org/details/audio

Lots of unusual music, some concert performances by some fairly well known artists, old radio shows, podcasts, etc.

[MonkeyMan]

Harvey Danger offers their entire third album, Little By Little, as a free download. Good music, too!

http://www.harveydanger.com/downloads/

[Hellbent]

okay, heres one: http://www.the-underdogs.info/
free public domain games. stuff like syndicate wars, dune, etc that has fallen into public domain.

[Hellbent]

sorry, i forgot it was music-related free stuff =P

[jkpescador]

Did she go to the Hawaii concert in 1995 (?). Elizabeth Fraser's voice is purely angelic in person. I could not believe they actually played in Hawaii. I have my concert shirt packed away somewhere.

I'd say I was a closet fan. I have some albums and a couple of CDs. I was introduced to Cocteau Twins by a tall guy at Jelly's in 1985 or so. His name escapes me. He was in the record section. He would tell me to buy things like Everything but the Girl and Debbie Gibson. :)

Mel, Thanks for the links. Good stuff there!

[MonkeyMan]

Free music and videos from the artists:

http://www.strippedmusic.com/

Some big names here.

[jkpescador]

Cornershop
http://www.cornershop.com/audio.html

Battle of New Orleans
Hot Rocks
Top Knot
+ Clinton - The Hot for May Sound

From Pop Candy the lastest from Stars
http://www.arts-crafts.ca/stars/stars-thenightstartshere.mp3

Free from TMBG
http://www.tmbg.com/textWin.cgi?main=sign&subnav=helloLight

[jkpescador]

Anything Box
http://www.anythingbox.com/anythingbox-media.html

Sorry only some videos no mp3s.

[jkpescador]

Free Mashups
http://simoniddol.freeblog.hu/archives/2007/07/25/Forgotten_Hits/

[zztype]

Bruce Springsteen is giving away his new single on iTunes and off his website. Story here:

http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9767421-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

[mel]

Bruce Springsteen is giving away his new single on iTunes and off his website.

Classic Springsteen. I love it. Downloaded both versions, 1 from iTunes and the other from the web. :)

[jkpescador]

http://mashable.com/2007/10/31/free-and-legal-music/
From Mashable ... Free and Legal Music links.

[Kittrick]

Howard Jones has some free songs of his, including "everlasting love" at http://www.howardjones.com .

[LovinLK]

There's some free Australian country music from this Toyota site:

http://www.toyotacountryclub.com.au/

[jkpescador]

Mick Jones (ex Clash & Big Audio Dynamite) latest band ... Carbon/Silcon posts new music for people to download.

www.carbonsilicon.com

[mel]

The Dallas Wind Symphony site posts a handful of free MP3 music files of John Philip Sousa marches. I've downloaded all of them and can have a parade in my iPod. :)

http://www.dws.org/sousa/march-of-the-month/

[jkpescador]

Ghost World: A Story in Sound
by Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid
http://djspooky.com/articles/venice_2007.html

[jkpescador]

zipped files of Pitchforks best of 2007.
http://stereogum.com/archives/mp3/you-asked-for-it-you-got-it-pitchforks-top-100-of_007526.html?loc=interstitialskip

and here is the list if you want to peruse.
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/47681-staff-list-top-100-tracks-of-2007

[jkpescador]

More free stuff ...
http://sillypipedreams.blogspot.com/2007/12/12-posts-of-christmas-top-20-covers-of.html

Supposedly best cover songs of 2007.

[jkpescador]

Free Mexican Institute of Sound song via KCRW:
http://media.kcrw.com/podcast/mp3_raw/tu/tu080205Mexican_Institute_of.mp3

[jkpescador]

Free Mashups from dj BC
http://www.djbc.net/mashes/discog.htm

[mel]

Over on iTunes there are a ton of Music Podcasts that you can download. I also found that people can listen to each podcast directly on iTunes without downloading them. Just go to the iTunes Store, click on Podcast and the one you are interested in. The familiar description banner and a list of podcasts appear. When you click on the podcast to preview it (like how you do with music and video), instead of only 30 seconds playing, you can play the entire podcast. Cool. Great way to reduce clutter in your iTunes folder and sample podcasts without subscribing or downloading them.

Of course you can do this at other places too such as Blubrry (http://www.blubrry.com/) and from most of the podcast pages.

[jkpescador]

http://woxy.lala.com/music/loungeacts/archive.php

Free sets of appearances on WOXY. Many bands to choose from.

[mel]

An artist named Santogold has a hit track climbing up some charts called "L.E.S. Artistes". The song was given away on iTunes for free a few weeks ago in protected AAC.

Their record label Lizardking Records is giving the same track away as an MP3 file along with another Santogold track called "Creator" at this link:

http://www.lizardkingrecords.net/#/santogold/

To get the tracks go to the multimedia tab.

[mel]

I also found this site called "Free Music Now" which is loaded with single tracks put out by mostly indie artists of various genres.

http://www.muzic.com/

[jkpescador]

Hat Makes the Man ... Searching for the Fertile Fields
http://comrademotopu.com/MP3%20albums%20for%20site/Hat%20fertile%20fields%20mp3s.html

I miss hearing Marti Kerton ...

[jkpescador]

Mashup ... http://www.whastudios.com/2008/07/summer-of-love.html
The Caravan of Love Collection is the bonus gift of the Summer of Love 2008 compilation. Each artist from the album has designed a VW bus and you can find them in a handy print ready booklet feature in the zip file.
Print them all and set up your very own Caravan of Love!

and more mashups ...
http://mashup.startingiseasy.com/

[Ron Whitfield]

...the aforementioned www.archive.org (http://www.archive.org) which has tons of great stuff, buku Dead, and lot's of mermen, my favorite current band.

And, www.wolfgangsvault.com (http://www.wolfgangsvault.com) which has buku concerts recorded by legendary promoter Bill Graham, from '65 to '85, and now has joined forces with other collectives that have more modern and current groups available to listen to - live. New shows are added every week, and can be streamed or puchased on CD without the breaks between tunes. Muddy, Zep, Jimi, Yogi Phlegm, you name 'em, they got 'em.

www.pathe.co.uk is another awesome site for historic films and incredible music. I like Felix Mendelsshon and His Hawaiian Serenaders/Roland Peachy.

[miltk]

youtube has replaced the old napster for me.

Everyone but EVERYONE is uploading. Just get an app that grabs or downloads youtube stuff.

Here's one http://www.tubeg.com/ that's free but it only downloads the youtube .flv file. There is also a yt grabber that let's you download in any file format, and in any quality(bitrate) you desire.

[tutusue]

Mac users can install the free TubeSock (http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/ipod_itunes/tubesock.html) to download YouTube videos to an iPod, iPhone, Treo, etc., or even just extract the audio.

[mel]

My favorite audio extractor program for Mac OSX is Audio Hijack Pro (http://www.rogueamoeba.com/audiohijackpro/).

[miltk]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRv953XZX6Y

[jkpescador]

Free stuff from Paste Magazine ... http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2008/08/this-week-on-pastemagazinecom-84-8808.html

Paste Station ... look through the menu. Some items are available for download.

[mel]

I read about this one from Todd Cochran at Geek News Central (http://www.geeknewscentral.com/archives/008179.html).

There is this guy named Cliff Bolling who converted 3,000 of his more than 5,000 78 rpm record collection to MP3. The tracks are available for listening and downloading on his website:

http://78records.cdbpdx.com/

There are all kinds of genres of music from the 1920s to early 1950s here.. Country & Western, Big Band, Jazz, Popular standards, early recorded Hawaiian music, even some very early rock n roll or rockabilly.

It's easier to sort out his library by artist. The main page is sorted by song title.

http://78records.cdbpdx.com/artist/

Supposedly most of this stuff is long out of print and many if not all are in the public domain... or at least that is what I am led to believe.

Remember these are very old, historical recordings made from 78 rpm records, which means you are not going to get the pristine fidelity that you are used to listening to today's music.

I am enjoying listening to these very old songs and downloading a few of them.

[scrivener]

I just grabbed a bunch of songs from there. Some of them are titles I know by musicians I don't; some are titles I don't know by musicians I do. There are hundreds of songs here I've never heard of by musicians I've never heard of, too, but I thought I'd start with the semi-familiar. Quite a few old Hawaiian songs on there, too. Very, very cool.

I'm grooving right now to the few Bill Haley songs on there. :)

[tutusue]

[...]I am enjoying listening to these very old songs and downloading a few of them.
I just grabbed a bunch of songs from there.[...]
<sigh!> Sometimes I marvel over just being able to boot up my computer! This is a great site but when you say "downloading" or "grabbed" are you referring to importing those tunes into iTunes? If so...how? :o Or, is that illegal?

[mel]

Go to the page listed by artist. I know for sure you'd like to get the 2 Mel Blanc tracks on the site:


http://78records.cdbpdx.com/artist/

1. Scroll until you reach Mel Blanc.
2. One track is about Tweety and Sylvester and other Yosemite Sam.
3. Click on the Blue track title/link.
4. The song will open in a new blank window and start playing if you got the Quicktime plugin for either Firefox (I tested with Firefox) or Safari.
5. If you like song, go to FILE MENU and SAVE PAGE AS.
6. Since it is only the song, it saves as an MP3. (Save to your desktop because it will be easy to deal with when you import to iTunes)


Importing into iTunes.

1. Open your iTunes
2. Go to File menu in iTunes and select ADD TO LIBRARY.
3. In the dialog box, locate where you have your downloaded song and select the title or titles and press CHOOSE.
4. The song should import into iTunes. If you have plenty give iTunes time to load all of the songs into your music library.
5. The data is ugly when imported and only shows up in the song title window like this:

ITAUTITAWAPUDDYTAT_MelBlank_CAPITOL_1360

Yeah, they got Mel Blanc spelled wrong. So you can fix this ugly mess so that the song appears in the TITLE column and the artist appears in the artist column.

To do that you have to:

1. Click once on the song title so that it is highlighted but not played.
2. Then press COMMAND + I. (or go to FILE menu and choose GET INFO)
3. A box will pop up and the whole goofy title data will be in the title line.
4. What I am doing is cutting and pasting that data from the TITLE section to the COMMENTS section.
5. Type in the title in the title line / box.
6. Type in the artist to the artist line / box.
7. Fill in the other info if you know or want to. I try to complete the boxes as much as I can if I have info.
8. Press the blue OK button at the bottom when done.

After that the song will display correctly in iTunes and also in your iPod when you sync it up again.

Whew! :)


P.S. as for the copyright issue, I am running on the assumption that most of the songs on the 78s are long out of print and their copyrights expired. Some though like Fats Domino and Bill Haley, I know for sure are still copyrighted, so you are on your own for those. Ditto probably for the Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Glenn Miller, etc. Since I am not too familiar with the music and what is in and out of print I am not sure on the copyright issue.

You might want to go back to the original post I made about this site and read the post at the Geek News Central site.

[tutusue]

[...]
Whew! :)
[...]
Whew, indeed! Thank you sooooooooo much. It worked! The only adjustment I had to make was Firefox over Safari. The "save as" feature in Safari was dimmed, unlike Firefox.

[mel]

Whew, indeed! Thank you sooooooooo much. It worked! The only adjustment I had to make was Firefox over Safari. The "save as" feature in Safari was dimmed, unlike Firefox.

I like Firefox better than Safari. But in both Safari and Firefox if you know the song already and don't want to listen to it, just OPTION + CLICK on the blue title link. The song will just download directly.

[mel]

Looks like the 78 rpm server is offline. :(

Hopefully it is not permanent. Apparently has happened before. There was a lot of coverage on this site last week.

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/08/12/old-time-record-enth.html

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080815.WBmingram20080815154824/WBStory/WBmingram

http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/08/one-mans-quest.html

Fortunately his is not the only 78 site. Here is a blog style one that I occasionally visit. Has a mix of old and new stuff... not all 78s, but also 45s and 33 1/3s digitized too. The interface is clunky because it is all linear like a blog and there are a lot of commentary per number of files.

Last year I got a bunch of old Porter Wagoner tracks from the site.

http://boogiewoogieflu.blogspot.com/

There is also the audio archive that is referred to in earlier posts in this thread.

[mel]

Amazon.com one of the largest music retailers on the planet, also features a lot of free music for users to download. If you like classic or country rock, I'd recommend downloading this freebie album called "P is For Panda Mix Tape Vol. 1". It contains 16 songs by artists I never heard of.

Here's the link to the free album: http://tinyurl.com/ppanda