jeffery druzba is dreamy

I’m A Dork So You Don’t Have To Be

Someone sent me a text message inquiry about my love of Wget and MP3 Blogs that I mentioned a bit back so here’s the run down if you don’t know. I’ve used Wget for some time to get things quickly off the Innanet but, with more and more mp3 blogs putting audio out there, wget becomes your method for obtaining large amounts of data quickly.

1. Find yourself some music-minded blogs that match your approxinate listening style or match things you’re willing to try to listen to. You might start with mp3blogs.com or webnymph.com and, once you find one you like, use the links off that to look for others you might like because usually people link to other quality blogs. Add the full URLs for these sites to a text file and save it somewhere.

2. You will need to get wget on your system, whether Windows or Mac. On Windows, install cygwin and then make sure you have wget installed. I can’t go into the details but if you’re capable of figuring stuff out, you shouldn’t have a problem. On a Mac, the most brainless way to do things is to use Fink and install wget through that. Wget is able to be installed on OS X on its own but you may have issues you don’t know how to solve if you don’t know what to do.

3. Make a script that runs a wget command to grab only mp3 files from the blogs in your text file. In all honesty, Jeff Veen has a nice run through of that on this post. I find timestamping to be unrequired because I don’t run this every day. I actually run it on sites once a month if that. I also change the contents of my mp3 blog URLs file as I find new sites I like and have it go. I think it’s better to run this as a manually started script whenever you want.

You’ll only want to do this on broadband because once you run your script or command line, your connection is going to go nutty downloading all mp3 files from the sites you specified. When all completes, you’ll have a folder full of several hundred tunes depending on how many sites you specified to crawl.

Some mp3 blogs put a mixture of direct links to mp3s and other links that do weird things. Wget will only get the types of files you tell it to.

That’s it. Dork status: confirmed.

• March 31st, 2005
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