music-fu

Situation: You just heard an amazing song on the TV, say in the background of a commercial, or on your favorite show, and you manage to catch a few odd words, but not the name of the band or the song. Here’s how you find it and get the song.

1. The first step is to identify the song.

I usually google the name of the show, if you heard it on a show, or the product if it was a commercial, and the words you remember from the song. For example, let’s say you heard that song in the background of the Budweiser select commercial. Something about “don’t hold back”? Sometimes even googling ["budweiser select" song] will be specific enough, as it is in this case: the first two results both mention “Galvanize”, but searching for ["budweiser select" "don't hold back"] yields an affirmation that “Galvanize” is, indeed the name of the song, and clicking through to any of the search results will reveal that the song is Edit: a remix of a Q-Tip song (thanks Dan) by “The Chemical Brothers”. At this point, you can proceed to the next step.

2. Making sure it’s the right song.

In other words, finding any source that has this song – streaming, or w/e. At this point, we’re just verifying, we don’t actually need the mp3 yet. For this, we turn to www.singingfish.com. Since we just want to make sure we have the right song, search for “Audio & Video” of “Any Length” with all the format and category checkboxes filled. The search terms are the song name in quotes, or, if it’s common, the name of the band in quotes. Since “Galvanize” isn’t a very common song name, we don’t need to bother searching for the band name, but if we were looking for a more common song name, we’d need to search for “Chemical Brothers” and look for galvanize among the results (notice I left out “the”, since sometimes “the chemical brothers” are referred to as just “chemical brothers”, and searching for “chemical brothers” will match both “chemical brothers” and “the chemical brothers”). As I said, we’ll just search for Galvanize this time; we don’t need quotes since the name of the song is only one word (quotes around a search term means “find the words between the quotes exactly as they appear” – the difference between “chemical brothers” and chemical brothers can be a large one, but there’s no difference between “galvanize” and galvanize). Once you’re satisfied that you’ve found the correct song, it’s time to . . .

3. Find a downloadable version of the song.

There are several methods I use for this:

www.singingfish.com with “audio only”, “>3 minutes”, and only “mp3″ checked;
www.altavista.com with “> 1 minute” and only “mp3″ and “wav” checked (others may result in streaming files)
—search for the song name in quotes
—search for the band name in quotes and find the song in the results
www.google.com
—search for ["index of" mp3 -html -htm] and the song name in quotes
—search for ["index of" mp3 -html -htm] and the band name in quotes, looking for the right song in the results
—search for the band name in quotes and [torrent], assuming you have a bittorrent client (BitTorrent, Azureus, and uTorrent are popular clients)
—search for the song name in quotes and [torrent], assuming the same
www.mininova.org,
www.isohunt.com,
www.thepiratebay.org,
www.bittorrent.com
—assuming you have a bittorrent client, search for the band name (no quotes necessary)
—assuming same, search for the song name and be prepared to sift through a lot of irrelevant crap to find it

when all else fails, check the following four sources:

the band’s official website (find via google) and the “media” or “downloads” section
any fan sites of the band (again, find via google)
the band’s purevolume website, if they have one, and if any of their songs there are available for download
the band’s myspace, if they have one, and if any of their songs are available for download

If none of these methods bear fruit, ask your friendly neighborhood google guru to find it for you.

Alternatively, if you have a program that can record speaker output, say Audacity, and have a lot of time on your hands, whole new worlds are open to you. You could sign up for the “25 free plays per month” plan with Rhapsody (which offers 25 streaming songs for free each month). You could search in “Winamp Music” under “Online Media” in Winamp, or even “Winamp Videos”, since you’re only recording the audio anyway. You can record any of the streaming music you found via singingfish or altavista. Songs on the band’s website which aren’t available for download can nevertheless be recorded. Granted, the quality won’t be as good, but it’s better than nothing.

Happy hunting.