Headphones

Downloads can happen through Usenet using SABnzbd or via BitTorrent—it’s up to you. All you need to do is fill in the settings so things are handled the way you prefer. And wow, you can really fine-tune your preferences. Headphones can help you pull lossless files, the highest quality available in lossy, a combination of both, or lossy files that meet certain bit rate requirements. It’ll also embed album art and lyrics after it finishes download, among other really awesome features. While I don’t really see any good reason to download “free” music these days—as digital music is perfectly affordable and easy to obtain from several different sources—Headphones is useful even if you already own the tracks. For example, you could buy the music on Amazon, keep the songs in Cloud Player, and use Headphones to download the local copy with all the data embedded in the files for you already. If you prefer lossless it also provides that option as well, and can re-encode it into lossy formats for you, too. In fact, if you don’t want to download music with it at all it’s still useful because it recommends new tracks you might like and can keep you updated about new albums from your favorite artist. Headphones is remarkably comprehensive.