The times of slow internet connections are over and most webmasters don’t have to worry about long loading times anymore. This means that background music becomes more popular. Sometimes you hear a song you like on a site, but you don’t know how the song is called and/or can’t find it anywhere on the world wide web. If the song is embedded with a Flash file, or if the whole site is Flash, most people think that it’s impossible to download the song because they can’t find a link to it. In this post I’ll prove the opposite. I’ll use the website 3121.com/jam/. It’s Prince’s official website, which features a new Jam of the Week every week. Since I’m a big fan I want the songs on my iPhone, but there isn’t a download link on the site! The following steps allow me to download the song, without a download link.

1. Download the web browser Safari (OSX or Windows) and start it.

2. Browse to the site with the embedded song (in this example: 3121.com/jam/)

3. In Safari’s toolbar, click Window > Activity

4. Scroll to the mp3 file, if there’s more than one, use common sense in combination with the file size and file name to find the right one. Double click it.

5. If the download starts automatically, the song will appear in your downloads folder, if it opens Quicktime, hit the little arrow and select safe as source. If it does something else, copy paste the URL in Firefox and go to file > save as.

That’s it! This little trick works for all embedded things (youtube video’s, background music, vodcasts, podcasts etc.)

If you know a better way, please leave a comment, though I think that this beats all youtube download pages/plugins (since it won’t go down after 2 days nor need to be constantly updated)