Amazon.com has had free mp3s for a least a few years. I remember discovering they had a “free downloads” section and I was able to find some stuff that interested me. There was even recognizable stuff (I can’t remember all of them, but I do recall seeing Yo La Tengo, popular Christmas tunes, and some exciting indie). As you can still see, Amazon still has a Free Music Download section, with a search box for it and a link to the same page on the upper right. That’s as far as it goes though. The search function doesn’t yield any results and the page has no content (It used to have featured digital downloads and short write-ups and maybe reviews). What I did find was that at least some of the free mp3s are still hosted and the referring download links still function. The problem is accessing the URLs that can no longer be found because of Amazon’s lack of a working search engine and the empty page content. Using the wayback machine to get an archived version does nothing but redirect to a newer page. With some crafty search skills I found a few pages that mention these old downloads, and most of them are still downloadable for nada.

Secret #1- Old link still available, just hard to find.
Three Sides to Every Story on Tattoos And Alibis by Ricky Warwick

Raymond McLain “Place Of My Own, A” and “On The Road.”

King Without a Crown by Matisyahu

Code Blue by T.S.O.L. = Childish “shock rock” punk.

50 Cent – New York (a-Fam Remix) I do not condone this song or any use of the word “Niggas” unless quoting something, and “Niggas” is bountiful in this song.

Of all the free mp3s amazon.com had, there are some crummy ones that got archived. I couldn’t find the real treasures like Yo La Tengo and other surprising ones.

Here is an old list of someone’s favorite downloads. I couldn’t get all of these to work.

Secret #2 is that the new DRM-free Mp3 store has rolled out with some free mp3s using the new interface. Evidence is found through Amazon Earworm and right now Thrice has something for free. I’m sure they’ll offer something new every week and list it on this blog. Doing some smart browsing, it appears that a $0.00 Track 3 is available by Saves the Day. If gospel is your thing you can get 2 soulful gospel songs (I wish they offered “Oh Happy Day” on this instead though). There are several more that you can find on what customers also bought section, just see if it’s $0.00.

From my previous post I found “Miserlou” played by the Air Force. I managed to find some others that are pretty interesting. Some for the Christmas season, some patriotic songs, and a few hymns and ceremonials. Usually everything produced by the government is public domain, but things become tricky if they borrowed or used copyright or published material. The liner notes mention permissions from Warner Brothers, BMI, ASCAP, and other companies. It also states the CD is approved for use in public service broadcasting and Air Force activities such as recruiting, troop morale, and retention. They are certainly free, but there may be some restrictions I am not aware of (Like selling them would be illegal, not sure about filesharing).

The United States Air Force has kindly offered some mp3s from physical releases they’ve made. The link divides things into Patriotic, Ceremonial, Marches, Popular & Show Songs, Rock / Pop / Country / R&B, Holiday, Choral, Classical, Jazz, and Traditional / Celtic / Folk.

There are a total of 41 browsable selections.
Clicking “Next” will send you to the next album of theirs. Almost all releases have a few downloadable goodies. They all have mandatory preview as they start playing before you get a chance to download them.

Most people know the guitar driven riff of “Misirlou” from Pulp Fiction, and others know it as being a song played by all the hot surf bands with Dick Dale being the first in the wave of ’60s bands. The truth is it goes way back at least to the 1920s. Michalis Patrinos is said to have performed the rebetiko in 1927, and a recording exists from around 1930. Richard Spotwood’s Ethnic Music on Records, Volume 3: Eastern Europe lists a recording by Tetos Demetriades for Victor in 1927. [source]

Across wikipedia and other sites are several versions of the song:

Tetos Dimitriadis unknown date, possibly 1927.
Michalis Patrinos about 1930.
Other later recorded mp3s at the end of this post. (same as above source link)
US Air Force Band The Strolling Strings, 2004. (other unrelated mp3s to check out too)

Instead of wasting time downloading things by hand, page by page, clicking links generated from javascript, right clicking to save or waiting for each save dialog box, you could be using a download manager to automatically grab certain files from links off of a page. DownThemAll is my choice for Firefox.

Let’s say you want to download all mp3 links listed here. After DownThemAll is installed, go to this page and right click in the black area of the layout to avoid clicking a link. Once you right-click, you should select the DownThemAll button. Add the below code to “Additional Filters,” and make sure “Reg. Exp.” (to the right) is checked. Better yet, save the code as a permanent filter in your preferences.

Filter Code: /\/[^\\]+\.(aac|m4a|ogg|wma|mp3)$/ or if you are having troubles “.mp3” (without quotes) should be accurate enough as a filter. A last solution would be to alter/copy an existing filter replaced with an “mp3″ filetype.

Now for the good part. Instead of navigating threw hundreds of pages, how about going straight to the mp3s? Some Last.fm folks made an epitonic m3u of all songs (no longer working), then another commentor crafted an .m3u list of Artists beginning with A–M from betterPropaganda.com. I went ahead and converted the m3u list into a clickable link fest with a bit of elbow grease plus my new-found regexp skills to do a little cleanup. I take no liability for how you use this. I intend this to be an educational example and only derived this from someone else’s compiling of such “fair use” links. The mp3s are totally free and legal, and in no way is it my goal to compete with them or scrape copyrighted content. I enjoy and support bP’s site so please be nice to them. Most likely you don’t want every mp3 here, so browsing the list and saving by hand is a good practice (and gentler on betterPropaganda).

The monster list of mp3 (A-M):
Keep Reading the Rest…

I never would have thought of such a link, but it exists! The Greedies, as they were called, had a Merry Christmas in 1979 and it featured drums and guitar from Sex Pistols members and all of Thin Lizzy. It’s a rocking little number anticipating the New Year nice and early.

Now we all know what English punk added to rough and tough Irish rock sounds like… “HEY!”

There are times when I persist in the most random things. Sometimes it’s productive; other times it betters my life in no significant way. What I’m about to show you is very handy, but the amount I spent tinkering on it didn’t save me too much effort. Well, it actually did shape up 20,000 of my mp3s in an automated fashion so it was not futile. The geek in you will enjoy some of the techniques, and laymen will have some upper-level tools to clean up and fix tags.

Quick Links

If you are impatient, jump to what you need:
- Trim Trailing/Preceding/Extra Space
- Spacing…(Proper, Amount)
- Title Case (It’s a Smart Conversion)
- Namings (O’Brian, McCarthy, MacDonald)
- DJ, vs., MC, EP, CD, XVI. (Upper Case)
- Contraction- Add Apostrophe’s (Can’t, let’s)

* Download All (zip) or Right Click>Save individual .mta file.
Instructions:
1. To locate the mp3tag actions directory, click “OpenActionsFolder.bat” from the zip file or find %appdata%\Mp3tag\data\actions in your user’s “Documents and Settings” folder.
2. Copy the “.mta” files you downloaded into that folder
3. To use them, open Mp3tag and choose the Action Groups in the toolbar- “[Aa] button,” Alt+5, or Menu>Convert>Actions.

Before we start

First off, you should know that Mp3tag is a must for a music tagging aficionado. Hands down best freeware for id3/tag manipulation. One of the best features is Web Sources, which’ll lookup album info (after it’s been encoded to your preferred music format) from a variety of databases (freeDB, amazon, and many others you can add).

Secondly, you can automate tagging from the filename. Let’s say your mp3 is called “06 You Make Me Feel Like Dancing (1976).mp3” and your album needs tagging. Below the programs menu bar is a button that transforms filename->tag. This can format your results by entering “%track% %title% (%year%)” and all you need to do is add the artist and album afterward. Flexibility is a blessing here. Also the same procedure can be done with an external file. If you have a text file with a list of song titles or a log of taggable info separate by lines, you can add them to several mp3s (in the order they appear in mp3tag). Keep Reading the Rest…

Al Perry is an older musician with an alt. country sound, and some mp3s are available at last.fm. Out of the 4 available for download, “Abnormall” seems like a nice one. If you are adventurous or like your music loaded with electronic psychedelia, you might like the other free mp3s.

I don’t know why I’m posting this other than the potential this could have. DRAM looks like an awesome resource for any fan of American music. Listen to unlimited CD quality recordings, view complete liner notes, and educate yourself on lesser known music that is largely ignored by the commercial recording companies from Earl Hines to interpretations of Miles Davis songs. The drawback is you need to be enrolled in a subscribed college to get access to all of this. Chances are there are no students willing to share their passwords either. I guess the thousands of songs will stay locked from the public…