Monday, February 15, 2010

Find music fast on the iPod Touch

I just bought my 3G iPod Touch 32GB two weeks ago and I am extremely impressed.
This tiny machine can do nearly everything (although it has no camera and only connects to wifi -- no 3G or Edge).
Right now I just can't imagine being without it.
Here's a nice trick I picked up from Lifehacker which allows you to set up a bookmark in Safari which you can use to find songs in Mediafire.
This is the article which involves no more than adding a new bookmark to Safari. Then edit it.
Call it any name you want (I called mine MusicFinder) and copy/paste this script to the url box:

javascript:var searchterms = escape(prompt('Enter Artist and Album'));var query = searchterms + ' site:mediafire.com';window.location='http://www.google.com/search?q=' + query;


Actually, up to this point I hadn't appreciated exactly how powerful the copy/paste function is in the 3G firmware.
To use it to copy the above script, just tap on the first word (javascript) and a blue box with two blue circles on each side of the word should appear.
Now drag the right-most circle to the end of the last word in the script (query;) and tap on the word "copy" in the bubble above the phrase you're copying.
Next go to where you want to paste the copied stuff, tap on the approximate location, move the loupe (the magnifying glass-type thing) to precisely where you want to paste and just click on "paste" in the bubble.
I've used this MusicFinder a lot and it's never really let me down. However, one problem is that this same command can actually find complete downloadable albums which generally are available as zip files which the iPod can't handle (AFAIK).
However, this isn't too much of a problem for me as I use iTunes on my MacBook to store all of my media stuff. So, I can easily use the MusicFinder to get an album on the MacBook if I wanted.
Nevertheless, as the legality of this is, at the least, questionable, I have not used this utility for downloading albums.
A problem may arise if an album by any artist has the same name as the song you're looking for. The search may bring up the album but not the song.
One other problem is that the mediafire page that opens after you tap on the search item you want to open, contains more than one downloadable item. The yellow one is the one you want. The other, to the left, is generally just crap. Try not to click on it by mistake which could be a problem because of the small screen size.

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