The Fast And Free Way To Fill Up Your Mp3 Player

Now that I have plenty of disk space, I wanted a fast and free way to get a whole lot of music on my new Sidekick Slide. Here's how I did it.

Note - this approach is all about quantity over quality. I'm looking for a way to have some tunes with me while on the occasional flight or metro trip - I'm not looking to put together a high quality music library.

1. Download the latest version of Real Player
2. Pick some radio stations to be your music source. Here are some stations to try: Groove Salad, Radio Crazy Opera and Radio Country Club
3. Using the suggestion here, record a couple hours of your preferred radio stations.
4. Download an mp3 splitting program. My preferred is mp3splt. It zipped through my gigantic mp3 files without breaking a sweat.
5. Run a series of commands to split up the big recording you've made into smaller, more manageable, chunks:

    cd /cygdrive/c/Users/ben/Videos/RealPlayer Downloads/
    mkdir slices
    mp3splt.exe -t 7.0 -d slices RadioCountryClub6.mp3
   

   In this case, I'm splitting the above file into 7 minute chunks. This is hardly elegant, as it will cut songs off before they are complete. But for my purposes, this should be fine.

6. Download a program to set mp3 tags. This will allow you to add various bits of information to the files, such as the Genre, or Artists. I used massid3lib to set the genre (Country), artist (Radio Country Club) and album (RCC, Apr 3rd) on 30 files at once.
7. Copy the split up .mp3 files to your mp3 player
8. Listen and enjoy!

Ahh....music on my Sidekick Slide...