While Spotify is the successor to well-known names like Napster and Kazaa (though not P2P and well… legal), those of us that are still stubborn and prefer a solution to download music or stream without interruptions desperately search for a respectable alternative. Service-specific applications, like Groovedown, don’t do the trick for me. Relying on a single service to harbor your obscure musical interests doesn’t always pan out.
Recently, I stumbled across Songr and I can’t say enough about it. I’ve used it every day since downloading it and any music freak running Windows needs to have this application in their arsenal. Finding music won’t be quite the same once you’ve tried it out. Let’s give it a look.
Songr
Songr is completely free. You need to be running XP SP3, Vista, 7, or 8. There’s no peer-to-peer transfers, no ads, no spyware, adware, viruses, none of that garbage. Nothing is forced upon you. The only dependency is .NET Framework 3.5.
Songr comes available in its newest version, a Classic version, and a portable Classic version. During the installation process, you may encounter a toolbar opt-in screen. Be very sure that you’re not just clicking through the installation screens because you need to opt out of this. I’ll never support any toolbar or homepage hijack. I can’t blame the application author though, as this is an amazing program and I’m sure it’s a nice source of income.
I feel it’s important to immediately make MUO readers aware of any cautions like that. With that out of the way, let’s get into the application’s array of features.
Songr pulls results from 16 MP3 search engines:
- Audiodump.com
- BeeMp3.com
- DilanDau.com
- 4shared.com
- Goear.com
- Hypster.com
- Iask.com
- JustHearIt.com (YouTube videos)
- Kohit.net
- Mp3000.net
- Mp3Realm.org
- Mpeg-Search.com
- Skreemr.com
- Socbay.com
- Soso.com
- Wrzuta.pl
Many of those search engines are packed with ads and other annoyances. It’s great to have Songr because you can avoid all that and get only what you came for – the music.
Songr supports many different languages. You’re able to search for full albums and search by lyric. You’re able to download HD YouTube videos and even extract the audio from the video as MP3. Intelligent sorting allows the best results to be displayed first. You can even buy music directly from Amazon or Rhapsody after searching. There are many more features that you can read into at the website.
If you’re convinced, download Songr and let’s run through the application.
In the top-right corner, you’ll see the search field. Clicking the field allows you to search for tracks, albums, or artists. Give it a test run.
Here, you can see that I’ve searched for a song and relevant results are shown. They are automatically sorted using an algorithm to predict the quality. Right-clicking on a result offers multiple options. You can play, download, or preview a song. You can also copy the direct URL.
Double-clicking a result will cause it to automatically open in your default application set to play MP3s. In my case, it’s Winamp.
The Download option will immediately open a save prompt. No captchas or anything like that.
This is the core functionality of Songr. It is simple, immediate, and effective. There’s not many other free applications out there like it. Options like Download from YouTube are an added bonus.
What do you guys think of Songr? Is it the best way to stream and download music? If not, I challenge you to offer an alternative below! Let me know in the comments.
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I’ve been using Songr for like a year and a half and is perfect for what it does. Thumbs up
Why you no share!? Songr is so great at what it does.
Thumbs down because it is direct PIRACY.
Actually Spotify uses P2P technology.
It used to. In the early days, Spotify would use your bandwidth to stream songs to other Spotify users. They did this so save server costs. After some people found out that Spotify was doing this without their permission, they made a big stink and got Spotify to stop. I do not mind uploading to keep such a great service running. I hope Spotify’s business model works!
Great app! Thanks for sharing! Now it’s gonna be so easy to download music… :)
well… looks interesting… but i recently found grooveshark, so gonna stick to that
That’s the tool I was looking for ! I was using an ant.com video downloader add-on for Firefox for a few weeks which extracts basicly any media you can play on any site, but you have to download everything one by one and you get it usually in some video format, so converting is also necessary. I hope this application will save me lots of time and let me just enjoy the music!
How is this legal?
It is not, but well we are pirates
i use: http://code.google.com/p/thepirateapp/
it’s pretty damn awesome actually but i will try this songr thing :D
I find this to be very useful and awesome. Thanks! :)
Excellent program – thanks for sharing in a well written article!
This will be useful. MakeUseOf does it again, making me more knowledgable about the web.
excellent
I prefer to pay for and download my music. We need to support artists. I like getting things for free but somebody has to end up paying. Besides buying just the songs you like is still so much cheaper than buying a full CD.
Allen, I think such action could be justified by using it just for preview. If you think the music is good, buy it legally. You’re right, though, nowadays it’s so easy to buy only song you like than having to pay for the entire CD (which maybe only contains 2-3 songs you like)
I’ll second that.
Just heard of this today
Wow, nice find! Thanks for sharing as I just heard this today. This reminds me of Limewire (RIP), though.
I tried Songr and found the download was slow (26kbs). I use HotMP3downloader.
It is fast and offers a good database of songs.
looks pretty cool..thanks for sharing :)
ill bite… ive been using emule and a VPN for individual songs. hasnt failed me yet. but im always willing to try new things.
ill give it a shot, see if its better, faster, etc. if not then ill stick with emule since i can do ebooks and hard to find files.
i see the old winamp again it is old history
Wow, I did not know anything about this until I read this post.
Definitely not legal and something I won’t be using! It’s basically Napster or Limewire without the p2p component.
Definitely going to give it a shot, especially the Download from YouTube option
Cool! :D
I am going to try it right away!
Turns out it also has a portable version, which is helpful to keep memory usage minimum. So, definitely will give this a try! Thanks
I like to use MP3 Rocket, but I am willing to give Songr a try!! :)
Thanks you saved my time of searching high quality mps’s from web :)
It would be cool if there is a ios and a android version of this
Will try it but sont think it will do much for me
Nice app, but Windows only? I hate having to virtualise/WINE programs because it’s not cross-platform compatible.
Nice!
Is this Legal? I’m a bit more concerned now that Six Strikes is brought upon the States
Using Songr for a year & i could rate it as 5/5 for all it’s great function ,, Also i recommend to give this cool site (MP3, Lyrics & Video Downloads) a try :)
http://mp3lemon.org
I use Songr for several months and it is really good that you can listen to a song ,entirely,before buying it.
This program is more than ok.