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| A screenshot of the home page of Jango |
All of us love to listen to music, but most of us would rather get it free than go to a shop and buy an album. You may want just two or three songs and not the complete album. In the pre-Internet days we would borrow cassettes and make copies. But today all you have to do is find the song on the Internet. We are making the music companies very angry, but we persist.
On the Internet you will find sites that stream music, all genres of music. Many are free, but not necessarily legal. You will be surprised at the collection of Bengali music at the Apple’s iTunes store, but it is still not available in India.
Here’s a look at the Indian options.
Saregama.com
www.saregama.com
With over 4.76 million songs in its site, Saregama holds the rights to over half the music ever recorded in India. It has tie ups with Universal, EMI and Venus, making its site unique, with even music from English and Hindi movies. The songs here are encrypted. This means you can’t share the song you buy with anybody. This is called Digital Rights Management or DRM. There are DRM free songs too, but they cost a lot more.
According to Gautam Sarkar, who heads New Media at Saregama, the company plans to introduce giant plasma screens at shopping malls, from where you can download songs into your laptop, iPod or mobile at the touch of a button. Even the Music World outlets could be equipped with this feature.
Sarkar admits that hackers break the encryption and share, but these people are generally in the age group of 14 to 20. Usually those over 35 years do not want hassles and would rather pay for the music. Saregama is in the process of tracking down sites that stream their music illegally, but Sarkar admits it is a very difficult process.
Hamaracd.com
www.hamaracd.com
Here you can select your favourite songs and the site will write them to a CD and mail it to you. The prices are different for those in India and those outside India. Hamaracd is part of the Saregama network.
Raaga.com
www.raaga.com
Till recently Raaga.com, with 3.5 million unique visitors, used to distribute music illegally. Now it has settled with Saregama for a huge sum of money. It still is one of the biggest distributors of Indian music.
There are other sites that distribute free music. Web radio stations stream free music and can find you songs that match your taste. You can even select the song you want played.
Let me start with a very good Indian music site that streams music.
Musicindiaonline
www.musicindiaonline.com
Type an artiste’s name or a song’s name and the site will return results. All I remembered of a song that I loved as a child was that it went like “bushy ball, bushy ball tumi je amar” and “kuch kuche kalo shey jate spaniel”. I entered these in the search box and ticked the “Sound like” option. Out came the result! The song’s name: Kuch Kuchay Kalo Shey; Artist: Ranu Mukherji and Album: Satabarshero Sur.
You can make custom “virtual” albums with any of your favourite songs; mail these albums to your friends; share the albums with everyone on the web; and, of course, save the albums to your hard drive.
Jango
www.jango.com
Just type in an artist’s name, and Jango will find a streaming “station” based on that artist. Fine tune the station by adding more bands. With Jango you can send messages to other users, find other stations you might like, and add or make friends. Jango will also help you find Web radio stations that you might like.
Music World of India
www.musicworldofindia.com
Those who like Indian music and video are likely to find it here. It is categorised by music directors, singers, actors, actresses, the year, and even lyricists. You have things like AmitabhZeenat songs and the like. But be prepared for some snags here at times.
Beat of India
www.beatofindia.com
If you love folk music, you will love this site. The music reflects the vibrancy, richness and variety of folk tunes all across the country.
LimeWire
www.limewire.com
If I want to keep music I always use LimeWire. Just download this small program from the site and search for songs. It is as simple as that. It is a peer-to-peer file sharing site. What it basically does is look at shared folders of other LimeWire users and distribute it to a person searching for a song or movie. The makers of the LimeWire software have installed a security device that can track most viruses in the files. So this site is absolutely safe, unlike Morpheus which is always caught and quarantined by any anti-spyware or anti-malware programs.
Google and Yahoo Tips and Tricks
Have you been trying unsuccessfully all day to find a song? Here is a trick. Enter this search term in Google: “parent directory” mp3 OR wma OR ogg OR wav [[song or artist name]] html htm download –links.
For Yahoo, enter the following search terms: “parent directory” AND (Ei path jodi na sesh hoi) AND (mp3 OR wma OR ogg) AND NOT(“download”) AND NOT(“links”).
You could also use some of the torrents where small bits of files are downloaded to your computer from other computer users. I will give you some good tips on this in a future column.
Send in your computer-related problems to askdoss@abpmail.com. The solutions will appear soon.
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