Recently I had installed iTunes on my PC at work, these days iTunes comes bundled with QuickTime. When QuickTime installed, it forced mp3 files in FireFox to be associated with itself rather than be saved to disk (which was my previous default).

To solve this irritating problem load up FireFox click on Tools then Options.

Next click on the content tab, click the manage button in the file types section at the bottom.

You’ll see a big list of file which have been associated with Quicktime, find mp3 files in the list and click on the button that says “remove action” to remove its association with Quicktime. When you click on hyperlinks to mp3s you should now get the prompt to open or save.

I’d like to take this chance to publicly apologise to Tom from mySpace as I know he’s very sensitive about mockery especially when it comes from a prominent member of the blogosphere like myself!

/* Pete Graham */

Say I wanted to download Phil Collins mp3s then if you enter this into the search box ?intitle:index.of? mp3 “phil collins” then have a look through the results. If you’re lucky you’ll see a page a bit like the one below:

Now you could download each of the songs one at a time but this would be laborious, a better technique is to download a program called Wget. Wget will let us download all these files in one go. If you’re using windows you can download Wget from here.

To download all the mp3 files links on your page start up the command line prompt and type:
wget -r -l1 -t1 -nd -N -np -A.mp3 -erobots=off URL

Where URL is the url of your site. For Wget to run from the command line you’ll either have to be in the directory of the wget executable or you’ll need to add the location of the Wget executable to your windows path. For more information on how Wget works simply type Wget –help from the commandline.

Hats off to Jeffrey Been who’s written an excellent article about automatically getting mp3s from music blogs using Wget.

DISCLAIMER: I take no responsibility if you choose to use this technique to download illegal mp3s. Everytime you download a copyrighted mp3 a kitten dies, if it’s a Phil Collins mp3 five kittens die!

# Pete Graham

When I clicked on the download track link the mp3 actually gets streamed in your browser using quicktime. It is not possible to right click the download link and “Save File As” because the mySpace media-player is flash based. What is the point of offering a download
link if your not going to provide a proper download?

The amount of bands using mySpace is quite staggering now days, it seems that every new band that comes out has a mySpace page, some don’t even bother with separate website. mySpace has multi-millions of dollars behind it and must have hundred of developers, the mind boggles why they can’t sort this, especially when one of the sites main appeal is supposed to be the music.

Now I sure the mySpace download feature used to work, interestingly I received a newsletter from mySpace the other day promoting their new Music Store. Conspiracy theorists will probably claim they’ve sabotaged the free downloads on purpose so people pay for music in the store. Well it certainly doesn’t entice me to buy anything from them, if they can’t offer downloads correctly imagine what they might do with your credit card information!

# Pete Graham