Services like Pandora or Finetune are great ways of finding new songs and artists but pose the problem that it is not possible to download the songs easily. The creators would run into serious troubles if they would allow downloads and they try their best to kill every possible loophole that is found. This happened to programs like Pandoras Jar for instance which could be used to download the songs for a time.

There is however one solution that can’t be cut off. Everyone is able to record every sound that hits the soundcard and this is the little trick that we are going to use. We simply record the sound of the soundcard with Audacity. The method is not as comfortable as using a program that starts and rips everything by itself but it is a solution that always works. If you hear the sound you can use this method.

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I would like to write about a service today that helped me discover new (mainstream) artists. Musicovery is a interactive website that lets you choose a mood and genres and plays a list of songs that fit into your selection. You could for instance select that only music from the 80’s and the genre metal will be played or music from the 50’s to 90’s with a energetic positive mood.

I love listening to musicovery while working at my computer, they surprise me every time I load their website with new music that I did not know about. I found Leonard Cohen for instance using their service and will be eternally grateful for this. I did buy the CD’s later on ebay from second hand for just a few bucks. I ensured that the CD’s were not copy protected to be able to play them on my iPod as well.

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Ripping internet radio is perfectly legal in most countries on this earth and a major way to download the latest music tunes without using illegal methods such as p2p networks to download them. It is one of the safest easiest methods that I know and I would like to introduce a little how to to describe how this can be done. There are actually several programs that can do it, I like the combination of Winamp and Streamripper.

Start by downloading winamp 5 if you have not done so already. Install winamp and download the latest streamripper afterwards (Streamripper winamp 5). Streamripper will automatically detect the location of winamp and will be installed in the right directory. Once that is done you have to activate the plugin by right-clicking Winamp and selecting Options > Preferences. Click on Plugins > General Purpose, select Streamripper from the list and click on configure. Enable Streamripper this way.

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A friend of mine send me the link to the beautiful website of Joanna Newsom, a talented singer which offers songs, lyrics, pictures and other information about her and her art on the website. The website has a very personal touch with information that one normally does not find on such websites.

I especially liked the quotes section with many (long) quotes about everything that matters to her including songs, life and her music in general. I enjoy her music which consists of some cover versions of songs like Little Wing and Angel from Jimi Hendrix and original work like the beautiful Only Skin.

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I will be writing about every kind of media that uses different distribution models than the one that is forced upon us by the media industry. If you are as fed up with copy protection, drm and regional encoding you have come to the right place. Movies enter the realm of public domain after a set number of years or if the copyright holder decides that he does not want to renew the copyright. Every country has its own laws concerning public domain making it quite a task to find out if a movie or music is public domain.

Public Domain Torrents is a website that offers torrents of many movies that are considered public domain. Categories like horror, drama and war contain many movies that can be downloaded in various formats using bittorrent. Most movies can be downloaded in divx format but also in iPod, Zune and PSP formats. Every movie has a page with details about the movie summarizing the plot and showing off some screenshots to give you a first impression.

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