I’ve always downloaded music. I’d say I’m a veteran. Allow me to brag…

The first time that I ever downloaded music was way back in 1995. I made my first website which was a Nine Inch Nails fan website. It was a pretty cool website, I was part of webring (which don’t really exist anymore) and I hosted my site originally with Angelfire, then Geocities. There was one really good website that operated for a long time called nineinchnails.net where you could download all of Nine Inch Nails music in different formats. .midi, .au, .rm, and the brand new* high quality version called .mp3! This was several years before Napster. The site operated like that for a long time and one day it had been shut down by the Recording Industry Association of America (The RIAA) and that was the first time I realized that what I was doing was illegal. The site went up and down a few times, but in the end, the site was not allowed to give away the NIN music.

Newgroups got huge.

Napster came out. Napster was shut down. Napster came back, but sucky.

Kazaa, Morpheus and Limewire came out.

ITunes came out and you can download music LEGALLY for the first time.

BitTorrents came out.

There’s another dozen or so ways to download music both legally and illegally.

I have about 100 GB of music on my computer. Each album is approximately 2/10th of a GB, so I have somewhere in the vicinity of 500 albums of music in MP3 format on my machine. Many I have legally downloaded and paid for. But for those who want to download music and not pay for it this is what you do:

1. Download the new version of Limewire. You can download it here. It’s free! Get the Latest version. It’s far better than previous versions. GET THE LATEST VERSION!!!
2. Install Limewire.
3. Use Limewire to download individual songs.
4. Go to mininova.org and get your latest music via BitTorrent. Use Limewire as your torrent application. I vouche for it being the best program out there.

That’s it. If you didn’t know how to do that, you do now. I know lots of people who understand the concept but forget how easy it is to grab your own music.

This method is illegal.  Itunes is another great way to download your music. If you want to know anything about downloading, leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.

Enjoy.

*Technically not brand new. History of the MP3.