There are so many blogs that offer quadrillions of discography’s from practically every artist you could mention. I have found a way of ripping the whole lot from any given blog in one hit. There are probably other ways of doing this, but this is what I have found works great for me.
OK, here’s what you need:
A decent broadband connection
A rapidshare premium account (this costs like £15 for 3 months and trust me you’ll rinse it!)
A PC running Windows (I’m using Windows XP SP3) with LOADS of hard drive space!
Microsoft Internet Explorer (I’m using the latest version 7)
Flashget, the download manager (get it here: http://flashgot.net/ )
Winrar or alternative software for unarchiving
OK, so go to rapidshare, register your account and then go into the options and configure your username and password so it’s easy for you to remember.
Then, download flashget (it’s free), install it then go into the options. Then go into the monitor section and only include the .rar extension. Then under site manager, click add, then put the URL http://rapidshare.com and put your username and password for your rapidshare premium account, then click OK.
Next,go to a blog with a load of content you want to download, such as http://def-momentum.blogspot.com
When the main page has loaded fully, scroll down to the archive and you’ll see the tag 2008, this includes every post for the entire year, which in the case of this blog, is every post that exists. Click on this, then wait a while for it to load fully, this will take a while as there’s a lot of info. WHen done, right click anywhere on that page THAT IS NOT A LINK and select download all with flashget. The next screen you get will be where you configure the location that your files download to and the type of file. Make sure the list of files only has .rar ticked, in the case of Def-M it’ll be around 650 files.
Next, click OK and that’s it. It’ll queue all the downloads and just rip the whole lot down to your hard drive. One thing I recommend is that you configure flashget so that you only have 2 simultaneous downloads, that way none of them will time out.
In the case of Def-M this should take around 24 hours to rip the entire blog. All files have a password, so when you get them all done, go to the download folder, select them all then right click and extract all to seperate folders. I’m not 100% sure but I think there is a way of automatically inserting the password so you don’t have to do anything. When it’s all done, delete the original rar files, then you’ll have the entire site’s files in one folder which you can add to your media player of choice. I use iTunes, and in fact, don’t use a Mac to download as this really is the best way I’ve found to do this, so get yourself a download slag PC and when it’s all done, I just drag it across the network straight into iTunes on my Mac and enjoy the fruits of your labour.
Once you have the hang of it, you can grab the entire posts from all the blogs around with all the files you want. Hard drives are so cheap, it’s quicker and easier to just rip the whole lot down and sort it out later, I mean you can cop a 500GB bare drive for like £40 now from eBuyer or wherever.
Anyway, I hope this tutorial helps some of you to get a good MP3 collection. You can of course use this to get down files of any type, just configure flashget to get whatever file type you like.
Enjoy!
