[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

I'm with Jen here - and use iTunes. Even if you don't have a Mac or an iPhone, iTunes on your PC is a very good tool to find music with. Once you've searched for it and come up with relevant hits, you can sample 30 or so seconds of each track to see if it is what you were looking for. If you like it it's only a buck or two to download legally.

I have trouble understanding why people won't pay for music and begrudge the artists their measly asking price. You're not being asked to pay for an entire CD these days, at over $30 - you can buy just the song you like. Two bucks - big deal! The artists are worth supporting properly - how else do they make a living and stay recording if their audience blatantly rips them off by downloading their blood sweat and tears for free over LimeWire? I don't believe for a second that anyone here can't afford two bucks and pay for a song legally. "Can't" and "won't" are two different things. Music recordings that that are either old enough or that have been bequeathed to the public domain may be downloaded for free, which is wonderful.

Another BRILLIANT development of late is music recognition software like "Shazam" on the iPhone (and maybe others by now). You fire up the application, hit the button and point your phone at a source of music - the radio, TV, over the loudspeakers in a shopping mall, etc and the phone samples the music passage it hears for a few seconds and digitises it. It then connects to the database and uploads the passage, where it's analysed and comes back (pretty reliably I might add) with a result. You can then hear it to make sure it's what you sampled along with its details. You can then pay your buck ninety nine and download it on iTunes - all automagically. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.