Yep, go here and then use the web 'onion peeling' approach :-)
  
Version 00.10, november 2005
Searching among Music Blogs
based on an various articles (e.g. The Guardian), edited by Fravia+

first published at www.fravia.com in April 2005

Part of the blog section.


Introduction
How to fetch da beef without wading into the blogs
A list of mp3 bloggers
red Searchlores' own music blog red



Searching the 'Blogosphere' for Music 

"Find a feeling, pass it on" So sang pop dreamers The Coral two summers ago: these days, it's the mantra of a new breed of musical bloggers. MP3 bloggers, as they are known, are people who hunt down and post musical gems — usually hard-to-find or niche MP3s — for others to discuss and, for a limited time, download.

This is the relevant wikipedia entry: "[MP3 blogs] are also known as audio blogs or audioblogs. MP3 blogs have become increasingly popular since the beginning of 2003. The music posted is normally hard-to-find, often has not been issued in many years, and selections are often restricted to a particular musical sub-genre or theme"

This is, of course, a legally "grey" area, and proves once again, that the Web was made for sharing, and not for hoarding and selling crap.

As readers of this site knows, there are many other better ways to search for mp3music, yet most MP3 bloggers post tracks for a week to 10 days, or longer, and take them down when and if eventually companies complain.

But complaining is unlikely: music blogs sport real good music, and only seldom they host that kind of banal "crap for zombies" published --and pushed through advertisement-- by the big music companies: "Peer-to-peer networks are obviously a far greater threat as far as the labels are concerned. And the industry seems to be built on the backs of an ever-decreasing number of artists; music blogs are not the place to go if you're an 18-year-old high school kid looking for the latest Eminem record"

So you may be interested in a small combing exercise: "The great thing about visiting music blogs is finding that half-dozen or so whose taste you share and whose expertise you trust": find out those music blogs that appeal to your music soul and have periodically a look at the "beef" in offer (of course for free) there.

This rises a problem however: in fact humans (and especially searchers) have a limited time, and many things to do. Alas: staying in touch with a given --rarely insignificant-- amount of bloggers is quite time consuming, or even --as pretty often happens to be the case with blogs in general-- time-wasting.

MP3 blogs are intricately cross-referenced via long lists of links, and hopping from site to site can easily consume several hours.
The solution is at hand: wget to the rescue!

How to fetch da beef without wading into the blogs 

As often when you need a speedy free tool for mass downloading, the solution can be a correct use of wget (here version 1531). In order to fetch this vey powerful fetcher, you may also visit the ad hoc section of the GNU site, or Charron's for the windows version.
Wget is a command line program, that allows you -simply put- to do and fetch *anything* you want (not only mp3, duh :-)

Now for blogs, you would use the URL of the bloggers you are interested in and run wget once a day -say- in order to download everything it finds.

Here's Jeffery Veen's command string:

wget -r -l1 -H -t1 -nd -N -np -A.mp3 -erobots=off -i ~/mp3blogs.txt

And here's what this all means:

-r -H -l1 -np These options tell wget to download recursively. That means it goes to a URL, downloads the page there, then follows every link it finds. The -H tells the app to span domains, meaning it should follow links that point away from the blog. And the -l1 (a lowercase L with a numeral one) means to only go one level deep; that is, don't follow links on the linked site. In other words, these commands work together to ensure that you don't send wget off to download the entire Web -- or at least as much as will fit on your hard drive. Rather, it will take each link from your list of blogs, and download it. The -np switch stands for "no parent", which instructs wget to never follow a link up to a parent directory.

We don't, however, want all the links -- just those that point to audio files we haven't yet seen. Including -A.mp3 tells wget to only download files that end with the .mp3 extension. And -N turns on timestamping, which means wget won't download something with the same name unless it's newer.

To keep things clean, we'll add -nd, which makes the app save every thing it finds in one directory, rather than mirroring the directory structure of linked sites. And -erobots=off tells wget to ignore the standard robots.txt files. Normally, this would be a terrible idea, since we'd want to honor the wishes of the site owner. However, since we're only grabbing one file per site, we can safely skip these and keep our directory much cleaner. Also, along the lines of good net citizenship, we'll add the -w5 to wait 5 seconds between each request as to not pound the poor blogs.

Finally, -i ~/mp3blogs.txt is a little shortcut. Typically, I'd just add a URL to the command line with wget and start the downloading. But since I wanted to visit multiple mp3 blogs, I listed their addresses in a text file (one per line) and told wget to use that as the input.

I put this in a cron job, run it every day, and save everything to a local directory. And since it timestamps, the app only downloads new stuff.



A list of mp3 bloggers 

(Courtesy of The Tofu Hut, Wikipedia and the Guardian)

First a useful aggregator (an aggregated feed of mp3 weblogs: updated every hour): http://www.mp3blogs.org/

Then a big list but as any seeker knows, links are wacky things on the quicksand web...