Thoughts of a coder

Most probably, you are using file sharing apps(Limewire, Bearshare, even Bittorrent) to download music. But do you know there are thousand of free mp3 hosted on internet, and those are directly accessible by normal browsers?

Sometimes, people upload mp3 files to their web servers thinking that no one will find them. But when someone enters the url of the folder which contains the music, the web server uses directly listing to show the files in that folder (Directory listing can be turned off).

Basically, if you can find some web servers with mp3 files, you can download those. The problem is finding those. You can use google advance queries to find them. The title of apache directly listing starts with the phrase “Index of”. So, you can use google to search pages with “Index of” in title. Then, you need “mp3″ files. So, just append mp3 to the query. Lets say you want Beatles. Then, append Beatles. Here is an example : intitle:”Index of” mp3 Beatles

There is a possibility that some of those url might not work. But keep on searching, there are lots of working urls.

When there is a lot of sub directories and files, you might want to get a list of urls. So, i wrote a simple PHP script. You can execute this script in command line. I have put some sample URLs. The sample pages given there will generate more than 1000 direct links for mp3s.

<?
	$stderr = fopen('php://stderr', 'w');
	set_time_limit(0);
	error_reporting(0);

	$urls[] = "http://www.mcgees.org/mp3/pearl_jam/";
	$urls[] = "http://www.xieish.net/Collective%20Soul/";
	$urls[] = "http://www.asilentflute.com/mp3/";
	$urls[] = "http://www.semret.org/music/";
	$urls[] = "http://www.koreangirlssuck.com/emotion/mp3/";
	$urls[] = "http://www.vrees.net/mp3/";
	$urls[] = "http://www.webpiri.net/Mp3/";
	$urls[] = "http://pierre33200.free.fr/Music/";

	$done = array();

	for($i=0;$i<count($urls);$i++) {
		$url = $urls[$i];
		$done[strtolower($url)] = true;
		$temp = parse_url($url);
		$path = pathinfo($temp['path']);
		$domain = $temp['host'];

		if ($path['extension']!="") {
			if (strtolower($path['extension'])=="mp3"
				|| strtolower($path['extension'])=="wma") {
				echo $url."\n";
				continue;
			} else {
				fwrite($stderr,"Escaping $url : Not mp3\n");
				continue;
			}
		}

		fwrite($stderr,"Proccessing $url\n");

		$html = file_get_contents($url);

		$direct = preg_match("/index of/i",$html);
		if ($direct==false) {
			fwrite($stderr,"Error : Not a directy index\n");
			continue;
		}

		$count = preg_match_all("/<a href=\"(.*?)\">.*?<\/a>/i",
				$html,$matches);
		foreach ($matches[1] as $match) {
			// Ignore the pages link to same url
			if ($match[0] == "?")
				continue;
			if (substr($match,0,7)=="http://")
				$cur = $match;
			else if ($match[0] == "/")
				$cur = "http://".$domain.$match;
			else
				$cur = $url.$match;
			if (!isset($done[strtolower($cur)]))
				$urls[]=$cur;
		}
	}
	fclose($stderr);
?>

Save the above script(“mp3.php”), then execute it(“php mp3.php > urls.txt”). Then, it will show you what it’s doing and all the urls will be written to “urls.txt”. If you are in linux, you can use “wget -i urls.txt” to download the songs. If you are in windows, download Free Download Manager and use File -> Import List of Downloads.

You can also download the list of generated links.