Today, I decided to add to my music collection. Drastically. I looked around and found quite a few sites that offer free, legal downloads of unrestricted music, mostly from indie labels. Some of the sites are traditional labels, some are net labels, some are blogs and some are fansites.

I got a ton of leads from [1] E.C. Brown’s link archive. It’s about as comprehensive as you can get. Here are some of the sites I found with the largest number of free MP3s:

• [2] 3Hive: Indie blog, lots of genres.
• [3] Oddio Overplay: Several themed compilations.
• [4] Comfort Stand Records: Lots of electronica and samplecore.
• [5] Big Neck Records: Tons of rock.
• [6] I Wanna Be Your Dog: A few dozen covers of Iggy Pop’s “[7] I Wanna Be Your Dog.”
• [8] The Crutch: Big indie-rock archive.
• [9] You Ain’t No Picasso: A very-frequently updated review blog.

Here’s the cool part. I discovered a feature in [10] Download Accelerator Plus that lets you mass-queue downloads. The download manager is integrated with Firefox, so when you come across a page with a bunch of links (a discography, for example), you right-click anywhere on the page and select “Download all with DAP.”

This brings up a dialog box listing every link in that HTML document. The list is sortable by type. So you sort, pick all the MP3s, and add them to the download queue. DAP uses a proximity test to pick the fastest server, and away it goes. When I started this post, I had 1,617 files in the queue. The vast majority are single songs, though there are quite a few albums and compilations in there.

Now the queue stands at 1,811. I figure there are probably about 2,000-2,100 songs in there. Add that to the 270 I downloaded today and the 3,100 already in my iTunes library, and that’s a pretty good-sized catalog.