Searching for free music – I’ve done it before, but things change and I get smarter (hopefully).

Trying to get a digital copy of a song or album? Look no further. I’ve found the latest and best online tools to get you right to your goal. Instead of previewing 30 second samples or scrounging through the lost and found known as the internet, you can pretty easily obtain or dip your ears in future music purchases. Do you want to discover that band, but your local music store doesn’t have it and you don’t know anyone or any website that offers sampling capabilities? With the right help you can just search for the latest release or the undiscovered gem you’ve been craving or retrieve downloads that you have legal access to. In most cases, downloading albums for permanent archiving is illegal, so be aware of copyright laws. These searches are powerful and can scrape legal and illegal mp3s and archives. Be respectful of songs and albums and know when they are rightfully free and available. Now choose your route depending on whether you want a song or an entire album:

SONG-ORIENTED

Dilandau
Convenient and thorough search with easy listening and download access.

hypemachine
Covers a lot of ground from mp3blogs and collects in into one giant site. Snippets of posts under the easy-to-read artist/song titles. Friendly play button to the right of the title and link to the original post for the download.

skreemr
easy interface. good in-view listening and quick download option.
Like hypemachine, but not as pretty and a bit more instantaneous. Clicking the search result automatically opens the mp3 and the referring website/blog.

mp3realm
A bit more clicking than necessary, but decent catalog with convenient download after choosing the song.

SeeqPod
A little heavy on flash, but a feature-rich internet player/music search engine that can suggest songs in a manageable playlist fashion and allows for new searches while your playlist continues playing. No straight download button, but it reveals the url. There are a couple ways to download it, but it’s not cake.

sideload
Chock full of the latest in music. There’s a nice little player that can preview songs too. Not a whole lot of rare stuff, but plenty of up-and-coming bands that are definitely recognizable. Right now, the front page features Corinne Bailey Rae and Sigur Ros among many others. Everything is downloadable once you click on the track title, but it’s a bit discreet (download this track)

eSpew
eSpew is a search engine for mp3s. Plain and simple (maybe a little too much) with occasional non-working links. A last-chance effort if all the above fail.

ALBUM-ORIENTED

albumhunt
A community of people that show albums that have been put up on file hosts. Requires registration and quite ad-heavy with a couple clicks too many, but a decent collection all in one place.

mp3locker
There are many music blogs that randomly link to album downloads, but it isn’t organized. It’s usually tailored to a specific taste or it’s half-hazard. In this version, all artists are displayed on the sidebar as tags, and if you are digging then head for the search button.

Straight up Google to span multiple file hosts for Albums.zip
This is by far the strongest way to find an album. If the album is a generic title, try the artist first or do a combination. Remove the quotes within the search if it could have different spelling or wordings. An even better idea is….

Googling albums from file hosts [Firefox Search]
The firefox search plugin I made for your searchbar so you don’t have to type out the advanced google search parameters and the file hosts like mediafire, rapidshare, megaupload, zshare, and badongo. Just slip in your artist or album of choice and you should have results if they exist on the internet.