Found Sound #5 Finding Sound

Greetings everyone, welcome back for another edition of Found Sound, today we will be discussing the innumerable opportunities for obtaining music online. Certainly many of you know about the more mainstream outlets for music downloads, i Tunes, Walmart, and hundreds of other sites offer quick and easy $.50-.99 downloads. However, for those of you without the financial means to buy all the music you desire I offer you a few alternatives.

Firstly, I will refer you to a few of the many online radio stations popping up all over the internet. Pandora is a pretty impressive site which allows you to enter all the types of music you like. This may take the form of artists, albums or songs, and then you will be presented with many of those songs along with a variety of choices the program thinks you may like. The songs selected for you are hit and miss but if you are patient you may find some great new music. Another option is Lastfm which offers much the same service although it is attempting to build more of an online community. Both sites offer remarkably good sound quality and provide great diversions for long days in the office or on the computer.

Next we will talk about a few of the sites that I use frequently in my search for new music. Archive.org is a site I have mentioned here before but it is worth emphasizing. Here you can find an incredible amount of live recordings from a great diversity of artists. Downloading is free and legal because all of the artists on the site have generously agreed to allow taping at their concerts. If you are in the mood for a quick listen rather than downloading the entire concert, streaming audio is also available. Make sure to check out the 75 live shows from My Morning Jacket, the 28 from Explosions in the Sky, the 2,843 from the Grateful Dead, the 29 from the Mountain Goats or the 129 from Ween.

Another site I frequent is Sugarmegs.org, which allows streaming audio of over 12,000 live shows on their site. Very much allied with the Grateful Dead’s ideals of sharing music this site has compiled a huge archive of primarily jam concerts, although others types of music can be found too. Phish shows, which are oddly missing from Archive.org can be found in abundance here. As you are scanning the shows keep in mind that many of the band names are abbreviated so Phish is ph, the Grateful Dead are gd and Medeski, Martin, Wood are mmw.

Finally, I present you with a new music detection technique I discovered recently. I have found many uses for it in finding legally recorded live shows as well as other forms of media. Keep in mind that while it may be used illegally I do not suggest doing so. First, you need to navigate to a search engine, Google is always a good choice. Secondly, select the artist or album name you wish to find, enter its name along with either; “sendspace”, “megaupload”, or “yousendit”. For example “Grateful Dead Live sendspace”. Google will then give you a listing of all of sites containing these words and, here's the secret, most of the time you will be directed to pages which will provide you links to download the artist or album you are looking for. Most of the time you will be connected to a message board where users are uploading music for other users, all you have to do is click on the links provided and download the files.

These files will be in a condensed form when downloaded and so it will be necessary to download WinRar to access the music. Once you have loaded WinRar and downloaded the file it will just be a matter of running the program and you will have your music! In the interest of saving time while you search for the file on the message boards use the find function (Ctrl +F) to quickly locate it.

In case you were wondering Sendpace, Megaupload and Yousendit are all file transfer and exchange networks, which enable millions of users to distribute large files. There are often limits put on the amount of information you can download in a day but this is not usually a problem. These sites also can make it possible to send large numbers of photos or music to friends without having to worry about clogging up their email.

That does it for me, you have a lot of music to enjoy so I will let you get to it.