Kieran Goodwin

"Follow This Great Article About Music Downloads To Help You It is very easy to download music nowadays; in the past it was reserved for the tech savvy. Not anymore, however. It is now possible for just about anyone to download the songs they love. Read on to learn how you can join this modern, enjoyable trend. If you are on the Internet looking for free music downloads, you have to be extremely careful. Downloading music without paying is illegal and is punishable by law. Another reason you want to avoid this is because hackers use music downloads as a way to send viruses to your computer. A great tip when downloading music is to preview similar artists on itunes. Most of the time, itunes will show a dozen of similar songs and artists on the right whenever you highlight a song in your library. This can be a great way to discover new music that you like. Amazon and iTunes are popular markets for finding downloaded music. You can set up a free account and browse songs from millions of artists. In many cases, you can even listen to a small sample of a song before you buy it. This is a great way to access a lot of music all in one place. Remember what music you own already when you are looking for new music to download. You would hate to waste money by getting things you already have. Most services have a history page. You can obtain free and cheap music downloads from some band websites. Some popular bands like to give away rare tracks, live tracks, and rough cuts that you won't find on their albums. These are usually free or really cheap on their own websites. This is a great way to not only get music from a band you like, but to get access to cool extras that you won't find at large online music retailers. Watch the file sizes of your music downloads carefully. A normal music download will be somewhere between 2 megabytes and 5 megabytes. If you see something much less or much more, there could be something fishy about the file. It may be spyware and not the song you were hoping it was. Be careful with music download sites that force you to download files prior to getting the music you want. Often times these files are nothing more than spyware that will hijack your computer. It'll mean lots of pop-ups and strange software behaviors. It's best to choose an alternative solution to protect your machine. If money is tight, you may want to buy a CD from Amazon.com instead of buying a digital track for 99 cents. CDs these days, especially used ones on Amazon, are really cheap. You can buy many of your favorites for just a few dollars. Then when you get it, burn the songs from the CD to make them digital downloads. So for the price of 1 or 2 songs, you've just gotten 10 to 15 songs. When you download a song online, check its size. If it is less than 2 megabytes, unless it is a very short song, it is likely to be a virus. Most viruses are just text and they don't take up much hard drive space, so be wary of small files. If you download music from a peer-to-peer service, take the time to clean up the metadata of the files you get. The metadata is the who, what, and where of the file. Things like the artist name, the album name, the track title, and the genre. A little clean up can go a long way to your digital player being able to deliver the best experience for you. If you install peer to peer networking software, don't install any of the add-ons or extra software which it offers you. These programs are often adware which can eat up resources on your computer or internet connection, plus they add no benefit to the software itself, so just uncheck those