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Free legal mp3 downloads site summary free legal downloadable mp3 pages on free reading site site by Hugh Cook, Hugh Walter Gilbert Cook, born Britain, educated New Zealand, author of CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS |
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Free Legal Mp3 Downloads Music and Audio Books free reading site site by Hugh Cook When I went in search of free legal mp3 downloads, my Google searches were initially frustrated by the fact that, in large measure, the sites which have captured terms such as "free mp3s" are fraudulent, and do not have what they purport to offer. Having gotten frustrated by clicking my was through advertising hell in the search for non-existent mp3s, I blogged about the problem, and got help from people who were kind enough to send me links. Some of the links were, of course, broken, that being the nature of the Internet, but with help from the wider world I did make progress on the free mp3 problem. I found and have sampled the large archives of the site WWW.SOUNDCLICK.COM, which hosts the mp3s of many bands and artists. Some of the music is available for free download and some for sale. Every imaginable kind of music is on the site, with the quality ranging from the exceptionally good to the laughably bad. www.soundclick.com Some of the free mp3s can be downloaded without formalities but some require you to go through a free signup procedure, for which you will need to supply a valid email address. My take on SoundClick.com is that it would be the natural site of choice for any band which is still at the "aspirational" level, as it's clearly a band-centered site, with bands able to post (for download or for sale) not just their mp3s but a bunch of other stuff as well, for example information about the band and song lyrics. Another site with a large archive of free downloadable mp3s is mp3-center.org. If you go there, you can enter the archive by clicking on the link, top left, which says FREE MP3 ARCHIVE. I downloaded a sample mp3 just to make sure that this site works, but at present have no idea how to go about finding what is good, bad or indifferent in any of the alphabetically-ordered pages. mp3-center.org The site gives you no guidance. Intelligent guidance is provided by webmaster Brown of www.ecbrown.org/textlinks.html, where there are links to online mp3s. http://www.ecbrown.org/textlinks.htm Following one of these links I downloaded an entire album, WARM COURSING BLOOD by Ian Nagoski, electronic music which is probably not to everyone's taste. Since Brown is enthusiastic about this artist, I thought I'd give the album a couple of whirls to see if it would grow on me, but so far it hasn't. I downloaded Nagoski's album from the spartan page at phobos.server.com/ian_nagoski/ To circumvent frustrating forays into the wild unknown, Brown's page would be better than either SoundClick.com or mp3-center.org. Because I am visually impaired, I was very interested when someone sent me a link to the archive of audio books that Project Gutenberg has available for free download. The link is: www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_Audio_Books_Project Here there is a stash of free audio books. Audio Books Project Gutenberg The Gutenberg page gives thanks to another site, www.audiobooksforfree.com. The link for that is simply: www.audiobooksforfree.com This site has free downloads, and I downloaded ALICE IN WONDERLAND, available as a set of eleven files at 8 kbs/sec. This is very poor wound quality, but the site deems it to be "bearable," and, after I had gotten used to the badly-tuned-radio effect and the background hum, I found "bearable" to be the case. If you want better quality audio, you have to pay for it, either paying by the download (prices seem to range from about US $2 to US $7, depending on what quantity you want), or by paying US $100 for a one-year membership which gives you the right to better-quality audio downloads, or by splashing out and spending US $120 to buy the site's entire audio archive in mp3 form on DVD. If you're strapped for cash, this site will let you have free audio books, books which have been read by human beings who know what they are doing. Even the free downloads do not carry audio ads. And some of the free stuff is at better quality, for example some stuff about Chinese legends, WHITE COW, for which the download was in the form of mp3 files at 16 kb/sec, which sounds a bit like someone speaking in a marble bathroom, which the site bills as "tolerable," and which is certainly much better than the ALICE quality. If you want to provide extra information, such as your true name, email address and telephone number and so forth, then the site gives you that option, but doing so is not compulsory. Having gotten this far, I'm satisfied with progress to date, particularly with the discovery of the online audio books. I wasn't thinking about audio books when I went looking for free mp3s but, now that I've been directed to where they've been hiding out, I'm glad to have found them. My thanks to all those people who generously sent me links, including those whose links, unfortunately, did not pan out. |
Just love this Internet stuff. Everyone can be a "webmaster." Sounds like you're one of the lords of infinite time and space. What it means, in practice, is that you spend an infinite amount of time writing HTML code, if you're hand-coding everything yourself, the way I do it. Okay, so you want to email me to tell me how bad my site design is. Don't bother. Other people have been there before you, and, on this matter, I am completely indifferent to the world's opinion. I am the client, and I am satisfied. This is my ego paradise and I'm happy here. If you don't like this website, go build your own, but don't bother bugging me to tell me how I should build mine. That message has been sent, more than once, and I don't need it again, thank you very much. If you have any other issues you want to take up with me, you're free to email me. at: If you want your message to be read rather than (a) deleted and (b) branded as spam, then you MUST start the message line with the upper-case word "MESSAGE." People who ignore this instruction sometimes get their email messages read anyway, but, over the years, I've probably deleted a heap of them without noticing it. Good options for a message line would include: MESSAGE MP3S MESSAGE SECRET CLEARANCE PASSWORD "SPAMMERSBURNINHELL" Or something similar. The key point is to start the message line with "MESSAGE," and note that "MESSAGE" is all you need. No need to get fancy. If you're too stubborn and bloody minded to follow these clear, simple, logical instructions, well, good luck, and I hope you have fun enjoying the Internet, but don't be too hopeful about getting a reply from me. In general, I am philosophically opposed to capital punishment, but I am gradually working my way round to the position that instituting the death penalty would be a good way to start tackling the problem of spam. I mean, this situation is out of control. It's time to start getting serious. Okay, that's it. Page is pretty much finished. We're done here, so click for the TOP, unless you'd find it fun to head on down to the |
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This site provides links to other sites, each of which will have its own terms of use. If there are no terms of use anywhere in evidence, this does NOT imply that the material found on such a site lies in the public domain. It will, in all probability, be someone's intellectual property, and taking a "finders keepers" attitude to it would NOT be appropriate. If you want to, for example, sample a piece of music that you find online and quote it in your own self-made music track, which you're planning on publishing to the world, then you're going to need permission for that. As far as intellectual property rights are concerned, the onus is on you, the user, to make sure that you are legally in the clear. As the future development of this site and the full blossoming of its global reach cannot yet be known of a certainty, this TERMS OF USE text is, necessarily, phrased in general terms. The key point is, as has been stated already, that the responsibility for using external sites appropriately is yours. To take just one possibility, this site may end up linking to some download site on which some of the mp3s are offered under a public commons license under which some rights are reserved. Although this site links to sites which offer free mp3s, as a rule those mp3s are somebody's intellectual property and do not lie in the public domain. Even if no statement of ownership is posted on the site. In the case of each external site to which this site links, please respect the terms and conditions of use of that particular site. And, if the site gives you no guidance as to how you may use the material, aim to act in a manner which would tend to lead us toward a future in which the Internet is as open as the Internet which we enjoy now. "Be good" is not, I know, a revolutionary slogan. But I have lived for more than half a century on this planet, and I am deep into my middle age and heading for old age, and my days of revolutionary sentiment are past. With respect to this site, free reading site, the site which you are on right now, everything is posted here on a free-to-read-online basis, but, apart from certain poems on the site which are by other hands and which lie in the public domain, all the material on the site is copyright, various dates, by Hugh Cook. This page is copyright © 2006 Hugh Cook all rights reserved. For use of any of the material on this site apart from reading online, contact Hugh Cook |