Rip Tutorial: Last.FM

A friend of mine requested that I take a look at www.last.fm, another free internet radio service, so went on over and played around for a bit.  Last.FM requires an account, so you have to do that before you can start listening. Once you've picked a few artists and started listening, go ahead and do the following (remember to use Chrome!):

1. Press [Ctrl]+[Shift]+i to launch the Developer Console
2. Go to the "Network" tab and click "Size" twice to put the largest files at top
3. A file named "128.mp3" should float to the top after a bit; this is the file you want.
4. Double-click the file and Chrome will open it in a new tab
• note: If the new tab appears to "hang" while opening, it is because last.fm is still accessing this file on their player. Close the tab with last.fm in it and the new tab with your mp3 file should load.
5. Hit [Ctrl]+S to save the file, name it something good (like the song title, for example), and you are on your way...
• ...really, really slowly.  It looks like Last.FM throttles your streaming rate so that you can only download songs at about the same speed they play.  This is a really smart move on their part, at it saves them the bandwidth of pre-loading songs.  Also, it makes it very awkward to download music manually, as a 4-minute song generally shouldn't take 4 minutes to download.

In conclusion, Last.FM is probably the least convenient method of downloading music, as the downloads themselves are very slow, and on top of that, you may need to close and re-open the last.fm window every time you want to save a song.

Anyway, let me know if you find any shortcuts or time savers with this one (or any problems), and I'll move on to the next site.

-The Rip Tutor