Nerve Endings Firing Away

Don’t you miss the days of Napster and Kazaa when any music soundtrack was just a click away? But thanks to the bullyish ways of RIAA who haven’t recognized the changing trends in music sales, we were penalized heavily for even trying to download single tracks for our personal use (until iTunes knocked some sense into them). Before I get into describing this process to download music online that I stumbled on recently, I wish to make clear that I am in no way endorsing piracy but am only pointing you to resources that are already available out there.Online music has changed from being resident on servers or personal computers waiting to be downloaded or shared to being available in streaming format on various websites. You can listen all you want but you cannot download them to listen offline; just like radio but without the irritating RJ chatter. But there is a way you can download these streaming songs to your PC and all you need is a freely-available software and a conversion tool.

Download and Convert Online Music Files

1. Download and install Free Music Zilla on your computer. This software will let you download songs from streaming sites like IMEEMâ„¢, Last.fmâ„¢, Pandoraâ„¢, Myspace, eSnipsâ„¢, Mogâ„¢, iJiggâ„¢, Radio.blog.clubâ„¢ and almost all social music services.

2. Open Free Music Zilla and let it run in the background. Now, head over to your favorite social music service site that streams music. Moviewallah has the latest Bollywood hits that uses the IMEEMâ„¢ service.

3. Begin playing the song that you want to download. Free Music Zilla will automatically detect that song and give you the option to start downloading. Remember to select the song and hit the Download button before the Leech Timeout countdowns to zero. Also, remember to keep the song playing in the streaming device until it finishes downloading.

4. After it downloads to your chosen folder (default – C:\downloads), remember to rename the file to recognize it later since the original file name is long and consists of random characters.

4. That’s it! The song is now downloaded to your PC. The song will be in FLV format which plays easily in any FLV player. But if you wish to convert it to MP3 format in order to load it on your iPod or other music devices, then hop over to this site that converts FLV files to MP3. The beauty of this site is that you don’t have to download or install any software but instead just have to upload your FLV file and it converts it and lets you download the MP3 version.

The only limitation with Free Music Zilla is that it lets you download only ten songs per day. Not good when you are on a downloading spree. But if you wish for unlimited downloads then check out their sister product, Orbit Downloader which is similar but slightly different in the way it downloads files.

Legality of Using Free Music Zilla

Now, the tricky part of legality of using this method to download songs. I’m sure RIAA definitely will find it objectionable. But the logic is a little fuzzy in this case. Some argue that the tool we are using to download from streaming sites is simply a recording tool and akin to recording songs off radio that we have done since ages. However, in reality the tool is extracting the songs from the back end of the streaming services so technically it isn’t recording. But can we liken to say, reading an article online and then cut-pasting it into MS Word to read later? I’m sure plenty of people do that either to share content or just to save on Internet online time (photo credit: labanex).

But most people would be concerned if they can be tracked downloading songs when they use this tool. I’m not sure since I am not aware how exactly the technology works but a similar tool for extracting songs from MySpace streaming player received a cease-and-desist notice but none of the people that used it got anything. Anyway, the legal aspect of file-sharing finds you guilty if you upload pirated content which you do when you share files on a P2P network; I’m not so sure about downloading such content. If you think otherwise, please feel free to voice your concern in the comments.

I’m guessing, the music industry or the streaming sites can ban the tool or fix the loopholes that let such tools extract songs from the back end. Until then I guess, you can go crazy downloading songs from your favorite streaming sites. Just don’t talk about where you heard it from. Enjoy!