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Music FM Blog

Guides on downloading music legally, picking audio formats and bitrates, and keeping a library that works offline. One new article a day.

  • Is Downloading Music Legal? What Actually Decides It

    · 6 min read

    Downloading music is not one act with one answer. Saving a public domain recording, saving a Creative Commons release, and saving a commercial single are three different things legally, even though…

  • Free Music for YouTube Videos: Where to Find It and Use It Legally

    · 8 min read

    You can legally use free music in a YouTube video whenever the track carries a licence that explicitly allows it — a Creative Commons licence, a public-domain dedication, or direct written permission…

  • How Much Data Does Streaming Music Use, and How to Cut It

    · 6 min read

    Streaming music at a standard quality setting uses roughly 70 MB per hour. Two hours a day is about 4 GB a month — which on many prepaid plans is the entire bundle, spent on audio.

  • MP3 vs WAV: Which One You Should Actually Be Using

    · 5 min read

    WAV stores raw audio samples with no compression at all. MP3 compresses by permanently discarding data your ear is unlikely to notice. WAV is therefore the higher-fidelity format, and it is also…

  • How to Listen to Music Offline Without a Subscription

    · 6 min read

    Streaming subscriptions solve one problem — access to almost everything — and create two others: a monthly cost in a currency that may not be yours, and music that disappears when the payment or the…

  • Converting Video to MP3: What Works and What Is Allowed

    · 5 min read

    Pulling the audio out of a video file is a normal, mundane operation — the audio is already a separate stream inside the container, and extracting it is closer to unzipping than to converting.

  • How to Cut an MP3: Trim, Split and Make a Ringtone

    · 6 min read

    Cutting an MP3 means keeping a section and discarding the rest. The job itself is simple; what separates a clean result from a rough one is where you put the cut points and whether the tool…

  • MP3 Bitrate Guide: 128, 192 or 320 kbps?

    · 5 min read

    Bitrate is how much data an MP3 spends on each second of audio. More data means less was thrown away during encoding, a bigger file, and a longer download.

  • Best Audio Formats for Music: MP3, AAC, Opus, FLAC and WAV

    · 6 min read

    There are only about six audio formats you will meet in normal use, and each one exists because it solved a specific problem better than the others. None of them is best at everything.

  • How to Download Music on Android and Play It Offline

    · 5 min read

    Android is the easy case: Chrome saves audio files to normal storage, and almost every music player on the phone will find them by scanning that storage. Where people get stuck is that the file lands…

  • MP3 vs FLAC: When the Difference Is Worth the Storage

    · 6 min read

    FLAC keeps every bit of the original recording. MP3 throws some away permanently to make the file three to five times smaller. That is the entire technical difference, and everything else follows…

  • How to Download Music on iPhone Without iTunes

    · 5 min read

    iOS will download an MP3 from Safari and store it permanently — the part people get stuck on is that the file lands in the Files app, not in the Music app, and nothing plays it automatically.

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