My p2p replacement: Peel
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
Last.fm, Pandora, imeem and all the others are great for discovering and listening to music but I need the files too. The simple reason is that I want to play the tracks on my radio show and I need the sound file in a decent quality for that (192kbps mp3 at least).
Getting the tracks from the labels, iTunes or even from peer-to-peer networks has always been a good solution for me but for a few months I’ve been using Peel, a great mp3 blog reader, player and download tool. All you need to do is give Peel the mp3 blog URL and it will check automaticall which tracks are available on there, lets you listen to them and adds them to your iTunes library if needed.
For my purposes this is perfect:
- I don’t need to go to various mp3 blogs every week to see what’s new on there
- No more right-click and ‘save as’
- Since many of those blogs would write about new tracks/artist I always find music that is relevant for my show (I prefer to play new music but don’t do that exclusively)
Is this ‘legal’? I gave up on figuring that out a while ago. It is common knowledge that many labels make music available for free download on mp3 blogs but also that some blogs don’t care about those labels and therefore post up complete albums. At this point I would normally start to talk about online licensing and how blanket licenses (that make sense) could be the solution for this but I leave that for some other time…
