Janisum asked the Music & Video Software forum about acquiring songs for an iPod without spending money.

You can download a lot of free music online, but you probably won't find the particular song or album you want--at least not legally. You're basically limited to either recordings that have fallen into the public domain, or ones that have been made available for free by their owners.

That's understandable. Songwriters, singers, musicians, and recording engineers all expect to be paid for their work.

I'm sticking with legal options, here. After all, I'm financially dependent on copyright law. I'm also married to a musician.

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Today I'm revisiting a topic I haven't covered in nearly three years: iTunes folder monitoring.

In an ideal world, Apple's music manager would be able to keep an eye on any folders you want, automatically adding to your library any new music it detects in those locations.

Alas, even well into version 10, iTunes can monitor only one folder: the aptly named "Automatically Add to iTunes," which gets added as an iTunes subfolder when you first install the program.

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For a while now I've been using Google Music as a kind of cloud-based backup for my music library. Except that it wasn't really a backup, because I couldn't easily retrieve all the songs I'd uploaded. In the event of a system failure, I'd have to download tunes in batches of 100. Bleh.

Thankfully, Google just made it possible to download all the songs in your library--or just those you've purchased. (The latter is a handy option if you want to quickly add purchased songs to, say, your local iTunes library.)

This requires Google's Music Manager, the Windows utility that automatically uploads your song collection from iTunes, Windows Media Player, or select folders to your Google Music account.

If you're running it for the first time, keep in mind that the initial upload can take a long time--perhaps several days, depending on the size of your library and speed of your Internet connection.

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Rommel asked the Music & Video Software where to buy MP3s without a monthly subscription fee.

The obvious place to look is Amazon.com's MP3 Store. There you'll find a very wide selection of new, old, famous, and obscure tunes. You have to have an Amazon account, of course, but you only have to pay for what you buy. The songs are all DRM-free, high quality 256kbps .mp3s. And with downloads, there's no shipping fee. No Beatles, though. (To be fair, no legitimate sites have Beatles downloads.)

But I've got a couple of obscure sites I'd like to recommend:

If you prefer concerts to studio albums, check out Wolfgang's Vault. The "Wolfgang" here is the late rock impresario Bill Graham, and the site plugs you into his organization's vast collection of concert recordings. You can listen to any of the available concerts for free as low-grade, 96kbps streams. But some of them (not enough, in my opinion), are also available as 256kbps .mp3 downloads, and, for a little more, lossless FLAC files.

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Reader Ken writes in with this dilly of a pickle:

"On my XP machine if I hear something I want to record, I bring up Accessories, Recorder. Then I hit the Record button and [it] starts recording all of the sound going to the speakers.

On Vista, I can't get this to work. None of the inputs for Recorder allow it, and in Audacity and other apps that should do it, same thing. Help!"

Blame Microsoft, Ken (I always do). For whatever reason, Vista lacks some of XP's audio-recording capabilities. Fortunately, there are several third-party solutions.

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