Skip the next two paragraphs if you can hardly wait on how to download mp3s for FREE.

Multiply.com, which has been the ultramega source for me of audio files than images, had already hidden the download links for all user uploaded mp3′s and wma’s (yikes!) on their profiles. So what’s the music life now for audio scavengers like me? Torrent and file-sharing applications are most likely prohibited in school and in office. I don’t want my name to be announced through a reminder mail across all employees as one of the violators who use these kinds of pirating softwares. (Side story: One time in my previous company, there were folks that forgot that the IT are smarter than them to track peer-to-peer applications. The next day, their names are posted as violators of this certain business conduct for using… tadah… LimeWare, really… the IT called it LimeWare instead of LimeWire. Hahaha. I bet they hate spywires, too. Wahaha.)

Anyways, Aimini.net provides free download links after you had searched your favorite songs in their database. However, it returns a short list. The download time is not also acceptable for their server might not be tough enough to handle several requests. An alternate way to download songs, especially recent international tracks on the air, is to Google the song plus the keyword ‘plunder’. Plundered.org has no internal finder of user uploaded music files. The download speed is also relatively slow.

Most of us like Imeem. It’s like the old Multiply however instead of download links, she provides you streams. For OPM lovers out there, Pinoy.fm is a noisy music library! Here’s how to grab the music:

1. Use Firefox browser. Lucky you if you’re already using it. Install the following plugin – Video DownloadHelper from this link here. It grabs .flv and .mpeg files embedded on the web pages of Imeem and Pinoy.fm respectively. You can also use this on grabbing YouTube videos.

2. Go to the page of your song and wait as the stream is completely cached on your PC. You will see that the logo of the addon is rotating. Click it to download the .flv or .mpeg. The filename is weird but don’t worry because you can rename it.

3. Convert .flv and .mpeg files with Flash-to-Video/Audio Converter on higher bit rate. I recommend 192kbps. I’m using free converters from DVDVideoSoft.com

Presto! You have successfully downloaded your favorite song. What’s good about these scheme is that you are actually fishing for audio files from a vast sea of streams from Imeem.

If you wish to transfer it to a Nokia phone but as a mobile-optimized m4a. The Nokia Music Manager cannot packed it to smaller size m4a file because it complains that the said file is already optimized. Fear no more because what you need is ImToo Audio Converter or any music-file converter that encodes different formats (mp3, wma, ogg, etc).

4. Encode the mp3 which you got from step3 to the same format, mp3 on ImToo Audio Converter.

Having problems on following these steps? Google is your friend!