Easy Downloading of CDBaby Sample MP3's

A couple of days ago, Garrick asked a good question that I've wondered about myself: where can you find downloadable music from the upper midwest? I like finding new music and always get an extra bit of warm fuzzy when the artist is from Minnesota or nearby.

While the question raised some ideas about future projects, I did suggest CD Baby's state-specific listings: Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, South Dakota, etc. While the interface that they provide isn't great, it does underscore just how much great music is out there from EVERY area of the world.

CD Baby is a great idea. Make a place for artists to sell their CD's without having to go through labels. Many of the discs are way cheaper than the $15-18 in most stores and I've bought a couple for well under the $10 that iTunes charges as well. Of course, since pretty much anyone can sell a CD there, pretty much anyone *does*, which makes the preview tracks a good idea (and just plain a good source of MP3's).

The tracks are all individual or by M3U playlist for streaming. The problem is that my searching for music is pretty much completely separated from my evaluation of it. I tend to find a list of artists/albums/tracks I might like, download them and listen to them later. I pretty much NEVER listen to the potentially interesting music when I find it.

All of that meant that to get the most out of the CD Baby sample tracks, I wanted a quick way to queue up the downloading of the tracks on a playlist. First, note that the playlist URL for an album changes (daily it looks like), so this is pretty much about downloading in the background while you're browsing the catalog, not trying to spider their entire site. What I am doing works today, but could always change.

At any rate, with a command prompt open (Linux, Windows or Mac doesn't matter) and a copy of wget on your system path, you can make quick work of grabbing the contents of a playlist.

See, an M3U playlist is pretty simple, coming down to pretty much a text file of URL's to MP3 files. That just happens to be the exact thing wget is made to handle. So, the general "workflow" works like this:

1. Find an album you like.
2. Right click on the "Play All Songs" link above the track list and copy the link address.
3. Go to the command prompt and type "wget" followed by a space and then the URL. On Linux, it can be pasted by CTRL+SHIFT+V. Hit ENTER.
4. Note the filename of the M3U that it downloads.
5. Run "wget -i playlistname.m3u" and let it run.

It will then download them all one at a time. It all works fairly well. I've got them all downloading to a specific directory called, simply enough "cdbaby". I'm keeping them all under there so that I know where to go to buy the albums I like. However, I do want them organized by artist and album. It's just how I roll.

Fortunately, I wrote code to move and rename MP3's by ID3 tag a while back. Add the folder to iTunes and make another smart playlist and I can evaluate more music easily. And, with as much as I've been working the last couple of weeks, more music is a really good thing.