Public domain music

1,193,526 public domain songs by 10,253 artists, boasts the website Dewey Music. You can listen to, download, remix, and share anything you see on this site legally and for free.
But if you are into music, the best website in the world for my money is GrooveShark, which plays streaming audio of every conceivable genre. You can tailor the site to send you just exactly what you want to hear, and it is so easy to use. If there is an award for "smooth", GrooveShark gets it.

More on capturing streaming audio/video

Further to yesterday's post about capturing streaming audio and video, I have just discovered an add-on for Internet Explorer similar in function to Firefox's DownloadHelper. It's called the Ask & Record toolbar, a free utility put out by Applian. It makes saving a video no harder than selecting record, then from the dialog that pops up, choosing the video and saving it. Unlike DownloadHelper, however, if you leave the page the video is being played on, A&R stops recording. This means you must watch every video you want to download in its entirety. A word of caution when installing: A&R asks you if you'd like to make Ask your default search engine and home page (it defaults to this), so watch as you click through the install (good advice with any program). Applian also includes its free FLV player (the majority of online files are Flash video these days) for its own playback use.

Recording streaming audio

I posted last week about the difficulties I had in recording streaming audio from an internet feed, such as from Radio Live. But some gremlin has hit my blog, and the post has been lost. Suffice to say that the usual method I used to record such audio (using the record facility in Audacity), did not work in this case, and I resorted to a very clumsy work-around. We won't go there this time. Since then, I have discovered two simple solutions. Firstly, the DownloadHelper add-on to Firefox - which I have used for several years, but did not realise worked equally well with audio as video - can save the stream to your hard drive. And a new utility I have just come across does the same. Called Multimedia Web Recorder, it can record any audio or video stream, and gives you many options for saving. It's a very neat utility.