There are tons of new bands and solo artists on MySpace. Many of these musicians are “too new” to have their songs on iTunes or even a P2P network, so your only option is to listen to their music using the MySpace player. And sadly, although the MySpace player has the built-in option to let users download songs to their hard drives, 99% of the bands out there disable the feature… which means that you can only listen to the band’s music while sitting at your computer with a MySpace page open.
Fortunately, there’s MySpaceGrab, a free website that lets you download songs from almost any MySpace page. It’s amazingly simple to use: just to to MySpaceGrab’s site, enter the external URL of the band’s MySpace profile (which is usually myspace.com/bandname) into the box on the main page and click the “MySpace Grab” button. When the next page loads, you’ll see a list of songs from the profile page on the right-hand side of the MySpaceGrab page. Just right-click any song title and choose “Save Link As…” and choose a destination. Once the download’s done… you have music!
Sadly, it isn’t always this simple. Many bands put their music on MySpace in FLV (Flash movie format) instead of MP3, so you’ll need to find a conversion tool if you want to burn the music to CD or use it or your portable player. Also, most of the mp3 files you’ll find using this tool are encoded at a sampling rate of 22,050 Hz and 96kbps mp3 format. You’ll need a tool like Audacity (it’s free!) to upsample the file to 44,100 Hz, which is the “Red Book” (CD) standard, otherwise your burning software or mp3 player might choke on the file. Upsampling won’t make the files sound any better, it’ll just make it compatible with your listening devices.