Downloading is one thing. As soon as you visit most (but not all) artist pages on myspace music, you’re progressively downloading tracks when they play, usually automatically since they have it set that way and there’s no stop button. And the stream is usually saved as a temporary file on your computer. When you refresh the page or leave it and revisit, the dl starts all over again in most cases. Saving the tracks to your hard drive in a portable format and being able to keep them in your collection, burn them, share, or whatever is a totally different beast.

So here’s what happened with me. I was peeping my torrent sites to see what’s new. I noticed that Cam’ron’s new joint is out. In the tracklist, most of the tracks said ‘produced by Skitzo.’ I had no clue who he was, what he’s done, what he looks like. So I peeped wikipedia to see what’s new with Cam first of all since he ain’t did shit in a while. Then I researched Skitzo. Found his myspace page along the way. He has some tracks in his myspace music player. I noticed one of them has tons more plays than the rest so I listened to that one to find out what was so good about it. That track would be ‘Puter Luv’ produced by Skitzo, sung by Rob Rhaspy. Lemme tell ya, that song is slammin’! Definitely should be a single at some point. I went ahead n listened to the other tracks but that one really stood out. I did a search to see if the song was available for dl anywhere, as a single or on an album. Nowhere to be found. So that player is the one and only place to get it if I didn’t wanna wait for an official release (and I didn’t).

So I went to a site that I’ve used primarily to dl Imeem flv streams and then convert them to mp3. That site is file2hd.com. It lets you put in a web addy n show you all the diff types of media on the page. Like images, audio, video, etc. It’s not a perfect site as it doesn’t catch everything but that’s probably mainly due to site encryption and file security. Usually I use p2p for singles, http and bittorrent for albums. The song was simply not available so I put in Skitzo’s myspace page and did an audio search. From here I’ll do a step-by-step sorta tutorial so you can follow along and see for yourself that the method works (on a pc since that’s what I use).

Okay, let’s use Skitzo’s myspace page as the example. http://www.myspace.com/skitzofrenyc. You see the music player immediately. At the top right of the player, there’s an option for a pop out/pop up player. You can click that and the player will pop up in a separate window. If the address bar is showing, you’ll see http://music.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=music.popupplayer&sindex=-1.3&shuffle=false&amix=false&pmix=false&plid=35213&artid=2125929&profid=70614985&friendid=70614985&sseed=0&ptype=3&stime=15.647&ap=1. You can also use this addy if you like. It’ll yield the same results.

Now, copy either address (I’ll be using his myspace page in this example) and go to file2hd.com. Paste either addy in the url box, put a check in the box next to ‘I have read…,’ and click the audio button in the filter selections. Currently there’s an ad for amateur emo girls (that’s what shows up on my computer anyway). Probably a dating, porn, or cam site. You wanna click that link for some wank material or potential hookup with a ghost, that’s up to you. Doesn’t have a damn thing to do with what I’m trying to tell you now. Also, there’s a link to a web proxy next to the ad. Again, up to you if you wanna waste your time cuz all it’s gonna do is try to get you to buy something you don’t need and that you can get for free someplace else as I’ll show you. If that site’s admin wants some financial support, they gotta come up with something else cuz that shit they got now ain’t gonna cut it.

Getting back to the biz at hand, go ahead and click ‘get files’ and your results should currently look like this. I say currently cuz the music he has uploaded will no doubt change over time. But for those of you checking this out within a reasonable amount of time from the post date, that’s what you should see. In the search results you’ll see ‘featured playlist (standard quality)’ and ‘original version (high quality).’ It also says ‘older player songs’ at the bottom but we ain’t gonna focus on that right now. You can experiment with this shit on your own time. Don’t know ‘bout you, but if I can get my music in a higher quality format then that’s what I’ll get. Go ahead and right click the higher quality ‘puter luv’ mp3 and select ‘copy link location.’

Here’s where things get problematic. I didn’t try the ‘multiple album/playlist support’ feature cuz Skitzo’s page don’t have a full album.  I just wanted a single, and a high quality one, so that’s the focus right now. You see where it says ‘notes’ next to ‘high quality?’ That explains that US based ip addresses have some kind of restrictions on our ability to save the files from myspace music via file2hd. We have to take an extra step. So go ahead and click ‘notes’ to do some reading for more info. If you try to dl high quality, it’ll appear that it dl’d just fine but in reality the file is only a few kilobytes in size. Standard quality dl’s just fine but hey, it’s standard quality at 96kbps versus high quality at 160kbps. Which one do you want? Thought so.

So you have the link location saved and are ready to dl the high quality file. According to the blog contained in the ‘notes’ link, US surfers need to use a non-US based web proxy. I tested 2 different ones from the blog’s article comments but let’s just use proxificate.net which I found there. Go ahead and click the link, paste the address into the search box and click ‘browse.’ You’ll get prompted to open or save the file which is a stream. Save it somewhere that you can find it. Where it says ‘save as type,’ don’t mess with that. Leave it alone. But you can change the file name to whatever you like. And here’s the most important step: type ‘.mp3’ at the end of the file name so that it saves to the computer in that format since that’s the original format of the file. If the original file said ’.wma,’ then you’d save it as such. Always save in the original format. And that’s it. You can play the file or do whatever you want with it.

But let’s say you’re the impatient type and forgot to add the file extension while saving. Now you got some file with a .part extension that nothing on your computer will open. Here’s the fix to that. Just go to the saved file, right click it and select rename. Go to the end of the file name and delete ‘.part’ and change it to ‘.mp3.’ Click anywhere outside of the rename area and that’s it. You’re good to go. Simple, quick, easy, effective, and you don’t have to buy some garbage program or install anything on your computer to get the job done.

So why doesn’t myspace have a purchase option for tracks appearing on official artist pages? You can see where it says ‘buy’ but as far as what I’ve seen, there’s hardly ever any button there to do anything in most cases. I see Amazon mp3 links occasionally. But other than that, there’s usually no option to buy. So what’s a person to do if they like a song and can’t get it anywhere? And they wonder why people go the so-called illegal or piracy route. Don’t feel bad for using this method to get your music. This ain’t the only method but it’s the easiest win it comes to myspace music. If artists want support, if labels want people to buy shit, give us an option to do so and let us determine the value of what we’re paying for. I’m not paying a buck for one track. It just ain’t gonna happen. For ‘puter luv,’ I’d honestly pay between .35 and 50 cents cuz the song is good, I know I’d be listening to it in the future, and the file quality is high. There’s no donation link, no purchase link, no nothing for me to slide the artist a little piece of cheddar. Add up the chump change over time from different donors and you’ll see the significance. Rather that than nothing at all, right?

Yeah, I download and share files. Call me a pirate, call me whatever. I got money that I wanna give to support what I like but I wanna name my own price when it comes to digital downloads. The file is finished and in a complete form. People are mainly paying for storage and bandwidth in the price of a track I’ll bet. Give us the name-your-own-price option and you’ll get the money that you think you’re losing. Lost sales, or non-existent sales opportunities, are nobody’s fault but your own.