Update - Myspace is trying to block these types of sites. Watch this thread and specifically our comments for updates on working techniques.
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As of the last update to this article, File2HD.com still works.
To use this site, simply copy the URL from a Myspace artist's page, and paste it into the form on the site.
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original article
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If there's one thing anyone can appreciate about Myspace.com, it's that nearly any artist of any popularity has music to sample. In fact, when you browse by genre, you'll find over 2,000,000 playable tracks at the time of writing. Most of these tracks are complete songs (some longer than 5:00) and many are exclusive; meaning you won't find them anywhere except on the artist's Myspace page. This article will teach you how to download songs from Myspace pages to your hard drive in order to play on your iPod or a CD. The real benefit here is that you'll have those exclusive tracks and live performances geared up on a custom-mixed CD or playlist that goes anywhere instead of only being available on your PC.
Please note for the purposes of this article that this is only information. We are simply showing you the door: it's up to you to walk through it or not. Many artists would not appreciate you ripping every song from their Myspace page. We only recommend you download music for personal use and obey copyright laws. These steps may seem complex at first, but I've outlined them as simply as possible and once you try a few songs, you'll have no problems with the rest. With that said, let's get started.
Tools Required
The tool we use at this time is
Myspace Mp3 Gopher. This tool is very quick to download and we'll explain its usage later in this article. For now,
download the program to a location where you can easily find it.
As an alternative, you may want to visit this site after you've found music (see below). This site attempts to streamline the process mentioned in this article. I personally had problems with the site (especially on longer songs (10 minutes or more), so I'll explain my process in detail now. Finding Music
This is a really easy step. Click "Music" on the top of the Myspace navigation bar (it's near the far right). From here you can search for specific artists or browse by genre at the bottom of the page. You may find several pages for a single artist. This is usually because fans will setup fake pages. Many of these pages will offer music that the primary site did not offer so be sure to check them too.
Once you've located a Myspace artist page with some music you'd like, copy the friend ID from the address bar. This should be a 5-9 digit number at the end of the address (URL) following "friendID=", such as the highlighted section pictured below:
This is Audioslave's friend ID.
Using the Gopher
Run the program you downloaded earlier. It should look something like this:
See the box where it says "FriendID="? That's where you paste in that number from above, 7332316. Doing this should give you the following when you click "Get Song List":
Now we're getting somewhere! Downloading the music is now an easy process. Double click the song you'd like to download. This will prompt you to save the file somewhere like any other file. Point it to a folder you created or will remember later, and click "Save".
Once you complete this, the Gopher will load the Myspace player into a window like that pictured below:
The "Download" button will not be clickable until the player has loaded completely. On broadband this should only take a few seconds. Now click the Download button. Once you've clicked this, you can now click the Play button on the player. The song should now play as it downloads.
While the song plays, it will be downloaded as an MP3 to your hard drive in the location specified earlier. Before the song is done playing, it will likely inform you that the download has completed. It seems that you do not need to listen to the whole file to download it, so you can stop it as soon as you receive this message. The song should be fully downloaded. Some songs appear to have excess silence (10+ seconds) at the end of the track. For now I'd recommend dealing with this as-is, but you could use an audio editing program to cut the track.
Note - You can run the Myspace MP3 Gopher application several times (opening many windows) in order to download several songs simultaneously rather than one at a time. You should probably mute your sound if you try this.
Adding to an iPod
If you want to listen to the music you've downloaded on your iPod, open up iTunes. At the top choose File, Add Folder to Library. Locate the folder that you stored the downloaded music into above and click OK. The songs should be added to your iTunes library at this point. Try using the Search feature for the artist and you should see the downloaded tracks listed.
Now it's just a matter of plugging in your iPod and dragging the songs to your iPod like any other music.
Burning to an Audio CD
Since the files are now stored as MP3s locally on your hard drive, it's as easy as burning any other audio file at this point. If you're burning an audio CD for your car and the CD player can play Mp3 CDs,
read this tutorial on burning a data CD using the MP3 files. If you're unsure or know your CD player cannot play MP3s,
read this article on burning the music to an audio CD. These tutorials apply to Windows XP.
Conclusion
We highly recommend that you spend some browsing different music genres on Myspace. Try different countries and keywords to really expand your taste. There are millions of artists out there dying to have you listen to their music and many are damn good! Myspace is a good portal to find out about some of these lesser known performers.
That's all for now. We hope this information serves you well. As always, please don't shoot the messenger.
If you liked this article, you may also enjoy our guide on Myspace trackers to verify who's spying on your page.
(None of the other sites worked either...)
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