Free Music Online...That's Perfectly Legal

I got a "trial by fire" so to speak when I got my Microsoft Zune for Christmas. I like to listen to a few podcasts...the financial gurus Dave Ramsey and Ric Edelman being my favorites. I guess my husband saw me wasting too much time on the computer listening in, so now I can get their latest talk shows and listen to them on my outings around town...very handy. And then when I saw the music...my hubby had uploaded all my favorite hits from the 80s and 90s! What a great feeling to listen to all that old stuff. Now my kids happen to get Zunes too from Santa. They,for the most part, don't like to listen to that "old lady stuff", so we looked at alternatives to get them their favorite songs. They have been diehard XM Radio Top 20 listeners for about 6 months now. It's funny to see the "almost tweenies" get into the latest songs and artists and such, mouthing the wrong words and keeping just a step behind the beat.

After dutifully downloading a few songs from the Zune Marketplace, as well as Amazon and a few other places...we started running out of allowances and chump change. So I put on my thinking cap. Remember in the very old days..at least for us....recording songs off the radio with your cassette player? I figured there had to be something just as nifty now. After a few days online, here are a few alternatives I have found...all are legal, and your conscience won't beat you up about it either.

• Broadclip MediaCatcher. Let me say, I loved the idea. The software searches for you on hundreds of internet radio stations. You check back periodically to see what it found and then download the songs as MP3s to your computer. I say I loved the idea, because I had software issues and couldn't quite get it to work right.

• Freecorder. This is a nifty little browser tool with record, stop, play, etc buttons at the top of your browser. You can go to one of the many sites that plays songs in streaming audio (I like Yahoo Music and CNet Downloads, which also has some free songs), hit "record", then "stop" when it's over. Freecorder will then prompt you for a song name and where you want to store it. You can customize some other options too. I have a folder I named "My Recordings" and made sure the Zune was able to find it.

Of course, when you record songs, you do have to fill in the Album, Artist and other info. The Zune automatically searches for album art and plugs that in. There are also some programs you can use to find album art and fix tags. I tried out Fixtunes . It fixes all your tags automatically, but gives you the chance to check them over first too. I had a few album covers that were just plain wrong. You can do 50 free with the shareware version, to buy, it's $24.95, but if you use coupon code 3eba623620, it drops the price to $9.95. It was a handy program, and it worked well for me. After a few hours, early one morning, I fixed all the old tags from my husband's music. It was funny to see him go to bed last night, scrolling through all the old album art from his heydey on his own little Sansa MP3 player.

I also tried out MP3 Tag, which is more labor intensive, but it allows you to search online databases to fix individual album art as well. I liked how it organized all the artist folders, so you could see what was in each one, without clicking on it. We had some songs stored in the wrong folders, which we would've never noticed otherwise. I guess that's my being uptight by things that aren't quite so orderly. Anyway, it's another program I recommend.

Do you have an MP3 player? When do you use it? Where do you get your music?