I’m looking for some music to download and listen to. I’ve heard you can find lots of this on the Web. Where can I get some from?

The first thing you need to realise that whenever you’re looking for free music, you need to keep in mind issues like copyright and make sure that the you are always using a legal source for your files. It’s too easy to join a torrent network and download a pirated album. But there are also other sources where you can download your music from.

One of these, for example, is MP3 Rocket, an application you can download which gives you access to 12 million songs with no download or per song fee an in a format you can hear on your computer, your iPod or wherever you wish. The files come down from a network called Gnutella which allows people to share music, videos, applications and any other sort of file they wish.

One thing to note is that the free software will keep asking you to upgrade to the paid-for version. The Nag screens aren’t too annoying though. I downloaded the free version and have been using it for around a week downloading classical music and the files it downloads are just fine.

Just one word of caution with this method. MP3Rocket provide you with a mechanism to download files, however the files come from any one of a number of people around the world. Please make sure you’re always running a virus scanner on your machine as there is a real possibility that you could download a file with a virus attached. There’s a particularly nasty Gnutella virus around that mimics one of your free music downloads and entice you to pull it down. Most virus scanners will pick this up though, so as long as you have an updated one you don’t need to worry about it.