18
MAR
2008
TOPICS Music, Internet, Technology
When I say Napster, I mean the old school one. The one where we ran free and downloaded at a gluttonous level.
If you visit Songza, you will see you can just type in an artist or song name and you can play any song that comes up in the results. What Songza does is scrape the web for any mp3 or even video and it will play you the sound track.
If you use Firebug (an add-on for Mozilla Firefox), you can use the Net tab to download the file that it loads into your browser to play.
Get it while it’s hot!
Buy me a beer if you liked this post or found it helpful
March 18th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
I’ve never used Firebug, but I just downloaded it and can’t figure out how to use it. Can you explain a little bit?
March 18th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
@dan: Sure!
Once you have Firebug installed, you will notice a checkmark within a green circle at the bottom right of your browser.
Click it.
Firebug has just popped up. There are lots of great things here for web developers, but if you’re just looking to download the MP3s, click “Net” under the “All” tab.
Here, you will see every single file that the browser has loaded for the webpage you are on.
It’s a big mess and there are no sorting options, but, luckily, when you click to play an mp3 it will show up at the bottom of the list.
If it’s a youtube video, you will see ‘get_video’. Just middle click that to open it in a new tab and the download the file, make sure to give it a .flv extension. Youtube only allows you to download the same file once at a time, so if it doesn’t start downloading right away, that’s because you’re still downloading it on Songza’s page.
If it’s an mp3, just download it to wherever your heart desires.
Hope that clears it up, feel free to ask any other questions.
March 18th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
I’m having difficulty finding any songs that are mp3 files, and I don’t really want to download and play videos… anything I can do?
March 18th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
I found a couple programs that I can’t vouch for, but it came from Google answers:
http://www.geovid.com/Video_mp3_Extractor_PRO/
http://www.effectmatrix.com/total-video-converter/
http://etudiant.epita.fr/~founad_m/flv2mp3/
Good luck!
March 18th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
I am having trouble getting this to work as well. I can download the video files without problem (I recommend playing them with VLC media player if anybody else is having trouble with the file format).
But with the MP3s, I only see a URL of where that MP3 file is hosted on somebody else’s website. How exactly do I download that? If I right click on the MP3 in firebug, I get a few options, the only two which are useful are “Copy Location” and “Open In New Tab.” I don’t know how to download the file using either of these. Thanks for your help.
March 20th, 2008 at 11:51 am
@jt: Just open the mp3 in a new tab and you should be prompted to download it.
March 25th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
Cool trick, it works, but need to look through all the links though.
Anyway nice work.
April 21st, 2008 at 9:55 am
Is it really napster? No, in addition it’s illegal. Please stop
posting those articles otherwise I have to delete you from my feed
list. I don’t want to use illegal stuff.