Using Fingertips
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Fingertips is designed to be easy to use. This means relatively clean-looking pages--just text and links, perhaps a picture here and there, but not a lot of fancy bells and whistles. The primary goal here is to give you a good head start into the world of free and legal MP3s. There are many more of them than you may realize, but the good ones can be challenging to find. Fingertips exists to point you directly to some very good free and legal MP3s, as well as tell you precisely where you can look to find them on your own. |
The best places to go on Fingertips to give you the fastest sense of what the site has to offer are: THIS WEEK'S FINDS The ongoing heart of the site, featuring the three songs selected each week as the best free and legal MP3s found in my ongoing search for great free and legal MP3s. THE MASTER ARTIST LIST An alphabetical directory of all bands and musicians with free and legal MP3s featured on Fingertips. This mostly involves artists who have had songs reviewed in "This Week's Finds," but also includes those featured in other content areas on the site. |
But, of course, these are hardly the only features on Fingertips. The home page has a constellation of phrases distributed through the colored boxes; each phrase is a link to one of the site's main features. The more prominently displayed the phrase, the larger and more important the feature. Some of these other notable content pages within the site, accessible from the home page, are: THE SELECT ARTIST GUIDE A directory of notable artists with collections of free and legal MP3s available online. THE MUSIC SITE GUIDE A directory of other web sites of various kinds that offer free and legal MP3s. THE FINGERTIPS TOP 10 Some of the best songs featured on Fingertips; there's a current top 10 and an all-time top 10 chart. LATEST SITE ADDITIONS Where to go if you want to see what's being added to Fingertips day to day and week to week. THE ALBUM BIN CD reviews, but a reasonably select few. THE RECORD SHOP Buy CDs from Fingertips artists, via Amazon. |
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There are yet a few other home page links worth knowing about here. There's an email list you can sign up for, which will deliver each week's three featured songs straight to your inbox. There are Fingertips Podcasts, which tend to go online once a month or so. And there are a bunch of secondary features of the site, which are listed in the last, purple-ish colored box on the home page. These include a page listing some resources for full-length album streams I've come across online, a list of notable musicians who keep interesting blogs, a list of blogs that link to Fingertips, and a few other odds and ends. Oh, and don't miss the search box at the bottom of the home page, if you prefer browsing via search. And if it doesn't make life too complicated, there are actually some good features on the site that are not linked from the home page. You kind of have to stumble across them. I'll let you do that, except for one important "hidden" feature, which is the This Week's Finds Archive Page. This is the mother lode: every "This Week's Finds" entry ever written still exists on the site, in chronological order, on this page. Not all the MP3s are still active, of course, but lots of them are, and they're kind of fun to read either way. |
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