I have a technique to quicky look for some good music.
Materials required: Bandwidth or time, a website archiver, and a list of sites.
Here are the basic steps
Step 1. Compile a list of online record stores or other sites which have samples that you may be interested in. See this article.
Step 2. Get a program like Freedownload Manager. Freedownload Manager is freeware.. http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/
Step 3. Set your download manager to download all the mp3's on the pages of interest in one scoop.
Step 4. Make a couple folders, 1 for enjoy , 1 for ok and one for discard.
Step 5. Quickly sample all the downloaded files, and catagorize them or delete them if you have issues with harddrive space.
Step 6. You can continue filtering files by sampling them until you get music that is listenable.
I have had marginal success with this method. However it is still quite time consuming to do when you are sampling hundreds of tracks. The key is getting a good source for music, as there are just so many cherry picking the best sites will hopefully give you sources to refine from, rather then perhaps just listening to those sites, you can develop a number of sources and a method to quickly disimiate. Look HERE for an article about finding good music sources.
What can be done to perfect this method. Get something to run automated tasks of inserting sites you like into the download manager. Listening is still your perogative, however by sampling tracks instead of listening to them whole. Using Site updaters, that is programs that can look for updates on sites such as check and get (http://activeurls.com/en/)
Of course these are some directed data mining techniques. The process is integrative meaning that this method can be combined with other methods, such as listening to radio or the notorious p2p.
Author: William Ashley
email: w_ashley@sympatico.ca
Dated: Thursday, May 26, 2005
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