I see a lot of people get into trouble when trying to get free software, music, etc on the internet. They download a torrent or find a site that promises free music, and before they know it they are hit with a fake Antivirus or worse. Over the years I have had fairly good luck using Google to find music, I am not condoning copyright stealing of music. There is a lot of music out there that is indeed free and the artists just want to get it out there and get heard by the people.

I lost a lot of respect for Metallica over the years because they were crying like babies when file sharing first took off. Metallica doesn’t understand how they got big, and that was because a ton of people shared their music in the first place.

Enough about that,  I use googlemusicsearch to help me do this. What we are doing is searching Google using a complex search term that is searching open FTP indexes and looking for audio files. All the while we are trying to be safe and not get infected out in the WWW world. Here are the exact steps.

  1. Update your Antivirus. You do have an Antivirus correct? If not go to Microsoft Security Essentials and get one, or Antivir Free is another good one. Remove your out of date, unused, old, crusty Antivirus first before installing MSE or Antivir. (Mcafee, Norton, are no good, get rid of them)

2. This is not without risk, if you go to a site and something pops up always say no, close the window, unplug your computer, and pressure wash it. (jk)

3. Go to Mozilla and grab the latest Firefox web browser and install it.

4. Once Firefox is installed open Firefox and go to downthemall.net and install the Firefox add-on. Firefox will want to restart, do it and then leave Firefox open just minimize it.

downthemall3

downthemall plugin

5. Install Sandboxie which will allow you to browse the web in a virtual environment. Download Link. The trick for using Sandboxie is to have Sandboxie automatically delete contents  of your browsing session. Otherwise Sandboxie becomes bothersome. Doing this by first installing it and then going to Start –> Programs –> Sandboxie –> Sandboxie Control –> Sandbox (up top)–> Defaultbox –> mouse over to Sandbox settings –> Click the + sign by Delete on the left side –> Delete Invocation –> Check mark “Automatically delete contents of the sandbox” –> Apply –> OK –> OK –> Close.

6. Ok it get’s easier from here on. Open a Sandboxed web browser IE or Firefox. There should be a yellow pizza shaped icon on your desktop. I’ve found Internet Explorer to be better using googlemusicsearch.com but you can try to use Firefox to do all of this.

7. In the sandboxed web browser go to googlemusicsearch.com and type in the name of the artist you want to search for. We’re using sandboxie to try to stay safe and not get infected or atacked by a malicious website.

8. If you encounter a “this page can not be displayed in a frame” message click the “open in a new window”

9. Ok you should see some search results now. I like to use the auto preview feature Google has going on (big arrows next to search results), it shows you a peak at the website to make sure it is legit and not some crazy porn site.

10. Once you find an index that contains music that you like and is safe, copy/paste the address into Firefox and go to it.

11. Right click that page in Firefox and use the Downthemall button. Choose what you want, where you want them to go, and what you want filtered and not downloaded. Be careful of files that end in .exe. Be careful of small file size.  Files should be sized in the 3mb to 15mb in size depending on how long the song is and the quality it was ripped into.

12. Once you’ve downloaded some songs I always right click the folder that the music was put into, and have my Antivirus scan them.