Optimize Your Web

Most of you have heard of Pandora and Last.fm I hope.  I am here to tell you how to get the most out of them as you can.  What’s better than hearing the music that they play?  Hearing whatever song you want, when you want.  Now make sure you read the legal notice of this program (it’s made in Denmark), but The Last Ripper can rip the mp3 streams from Last.FM.  Now it currently stores each song in a folder organized by Artist then Album and then all songs in that album are renamed in there.

Sounds great right?  Well it is, but of course there can be improvements.  I for one, would like to be able to change how it stores the song (I would want one big directory with just the artistname-songname.mp3) but that may be something implemented down the road.  Basically, once you input your username and password for TheLastRipper, it connects and you’re off to search for an artist/song/album that you like and it records anything that comes up (unless you have it recorded before, and then it skips it).

Regardless, Last.FM (and hence TheLastRipper) and Pandora can be a great source of music, even if you don’t want to rip the songs.  For me, I like how Pandora groups together music when you search for something.  The only thing for those that want to record the streams is that there is not an easy to use Pandora stream ripper available.  If anyone has heard of anything, please let us know, as I am sure we are all interested.

Everyone has tried using limewire, bearshare, etc. and have been one of the many with loads of spyware and other malicious code.  Well time to up your game!  I am talking about Ares!  No, not the Greek God of War, but Ares Galaxy.  It is a project under the SourceForge group (I highly recommend looking for programs/tools you need from sf.net) which is normally one of their top 10 downloads.  Ares is very easy to configure and most importantly, comes with ABSOLUTELY NO SPYWARE!  With that being said, if you enjoy Ares, give them a little donation seeing as how they work so hard on this excellent program and didn’t stuff it with malicious code so they could make money without your knowledge.

Enjoy!

Let’s first discuss how to obtain music, movies, applications, books, and more from the web.  The way most people go about this is p2p (peer-to-peer) programs such as Limewire, etc.  Well there are alternatives, and one of the ones you may wish to explore is using Usenet.  Usenet has a lot of unmonitor groups which post movies, music, applications, and more on usenet servers.  You must get a newsreader program in order to grab these files.

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