How to Download from musicindiaonline.com

Almost everyone who has anything to do with music, both 'hindustani classical' and 'popular' must surely have visited www.musicindiaonline.com more than a few times. This site claims itself to be the largest Indian music resource on the internet. True of course, be it hindustani classical, indipop, bollywood, fusion or regional folk, you name it and it's all there on this site.

The difference between this site and other file hosting sites is very basic. Whereas musicindiaonline.com has it's own files on it's servers and has full control over the streaming quality of the music and also what files to put or remove, other sites like mediafire.com, eSnips.com, 4shared.com and the rest have no such control.

Many of us must have encountered a much wanted song on musicindiaonline.com and wished fervently that there had been a download button on this site. Alas, there is none and no trick such as changing the URL (a'la eSnips) work here.

But for few of us who desperately want a particular music file and are ready to spend a little time, there's a way out : a simple method by which you can download a file or even multiple files in one go.

Just follow a few simple steps. Remember this trick will work with Internet Explorer only.

Go to the Start Menu > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup. Clean all the mess that has been accumulating in the browser's cache. Once the cache is empty you may go to the musicindiaonline.com site and search for your favourite song or album just as shown in the figure below.



Select the songs to be downloaded by ticking them or if you want them all, tick 'Select All'.



Click the 'Play Selected Songs' button. If you have not been to this site recently it will ask you to choose between Real Player and Windows Media Player. Select Windows Media Player as in the pic below :



The player will open up and your playlist will begin to play.



As the file is playing repeat Step 1 (i.e Disk Cleanup). But this time don't clear the cache but click on the 'View Files' option :



This will open a directory of Internet Cache folders as seen below :



Explore each folder (if you have cleaned your Internet Explorer Cache thoroughly, there should be four of them). You will find your playing file in one of the folders, growing by size as it plays on. Wait for the 'Duration' and 'Bit Rate' details to appear and click on the 'Play Next' button of the player to start playing the next song in the playlist.



You may now Copy or Cut & Paste the previous file to a folder of your choice. The files are in .wma format. Keep on exploring all the folders as the second file plays on and you will find it in one of the folders. Repeat the process.

You need not play each song to it's full length. On a fast internet connection a 15 minute song may buffer fully in a couple of minutes. But it's important that you wait for the 'Duration' and 'Bit Rate' details to appear before copying (or cut & paste) the file.

Keeping in mind that musicindiaonline.com has music streaming at a very low bitrate (20-24 kbps) an album consisting of 6-7 songs may be downloaded in 4 to 5 minutes.