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I do not in any way endorse piracy. If you like it, buy it!

Most of us music downloaders, have used various means to download those favourite tunes from somewhere on the internet to our little computer. Most of the time, we use Peer to Peer (P2P) software like Limewire or Ares, but P2P works by creating a lot of connections to other computers, really a lot, and this slows down the internet connection to snail-pace, which annoys us (well, at least it annoys me). Other ways is by searching through websites like yourmp3.net or esnips.com, but these websites have only limited collection of downloadable music links. In this tutorial, I’m gonna show you how to make music-hunting much more easier with the help from no other but our good friend Mr. Google.

Now, the first thing to do is go to www.google.com (or .com.my or whichever localised host for the country you reside in). Then, type in the following code:

intitle:"index.of" (mp3|mp4|avi) artist.name.song.name -html -htm -php -asp -cfm

Separate the artist name and song name by a period (.), for example aqua.cartoon.heroes and then click on search.

Now, you’ll get a lot of search results (depending on the song you search for). But not all of the results have downloadable link for that song you search. Some websites will ask you to login or register or bring you around some websites and round and round. These are not the websites we’re looking for. The trick here is to find website that allows us to download the song with just a single click, no redirecting to other website or webpages and stuff. For the example above, try and click the following result:

And you will get something like this:

Now this is the directory listing page for that particular directory on that particular server for that website. Good web administrator usually disallows this listing to be viewed by the public, but many webmasters either through ignorance or intention didn’t change the permission parameters in the server that allow this page to be publicly viewable.

To download the song, simply click on the song we’re looking for, and if all goes well, we begin downloading it!

Now, this process does not go well all the time. Some website brings you to endless loops of pages which ultimately end up asking you to pay for the song, while others offer very slow downloading speed. The good thing with this method is that depending on the popularity of the song, there’ll be a lot of search results that you can try. Figuring out which will give the highest chance of success is a skill you’ll develop as you get used to this trick.

However, be aware though that the availability of the song depends entirely on the probability that some people somewhere upload the song to a web server and leave it public. Having said that, the more popular the song is, the more likely you’ll get a lot of search results, and the same goes for the opposite. In cases where you’re looking for very rare song or very old song, you might not get any result at all.

It is important that you download the right file. You don’t want to be downloading a MIDI file instead of MP3 file. So, when you’re choosing which to download, look for the ones that have .mp3 as the file extension and have a file size of around 2MB – 8MB depending on the length of the song.

Okay, now that you know the trick, you don’t want to be typing the whole code or visit this page (though I would certainly like you to) every time you want to search for a song. By using Firefox (don’t know about Internet Explorer though), you can skip the process and just enter your specified keyword and artist name and song name in the address bar of your browser.

Now, let’s look at the address bar when we’ve performed a search using the above codes previously:

This is the resulting address after we click on Search with the codes we used above. We want to save this page so that everytime we want to search for a song, we can just simply load up this page and skip typing in the whole code, but we also want to be able to change the artist name and the song name.

To do this, in Firefox click on Bookmarks > Bookmark This Page…

Then, in the resulting dialog box, change the name for the bookmark to “music”.

Now, click on Bookmarks again and look for the bookmark you created just now. Then, right-click on it and select Properties.

In the resulting Properties dialog box, in the Location field, scroll to the right and look for aqua.cartoon.heroes and replace it with %s. Then, type “music” in the Keyword field and click OK.

Now that you have saved the bookmark, let’s test it.

Open up a new tab or window and type in the address bar music the.fray.how.to.save.a.life and hit Enter.

If you get the results page like the one we’ve done previously, then you have successfully configured the bookmark. The next time you want to search for a song, you can simply type in the address bar “music artist.name.song.name” and hit Enter!

If you get a results page with normal websites like you did normal search on Google, or if your browser automatically brings you to other website, then you must have done something wrong in the process. Go back and check for typo, etc.

That’s all. Good luck!

p/s: For those who wants to know what the code really means and what does it actually tells Google, post a comment asking for it and I’ll probably write about it in another post