Free Streaming Music: Hushie

Hushie.com is the latest site to offer free streaming music in the form of an MP3 search engine. It’s based on the free streaming music search engine Seeqpod, but has a cleaner interface and three extra features: recommendations, discographies, and best of all, the ability to download songs.

If you want to download a song, just hover your mouse over it and right-click on the button that says “Right Click and click save as.” Then… you guessed it! Click “Save as.” The downside to this? For legal and practical reasons, Hushie doesn’t host the MP3s – it just aggregates them from other sites. The result: Sometimes the audio quality is poor, and the ID3 data varies significantly from file to file.

The recommendations feature is kind of tucked away in the top left corner of the page. Click “Suggest” and then type the name of an artist. Then you’ll get a long list of similar artists that you might like. It gets the job done, but hardly compares to the recommendations on free music streaming sites like last.fm or Pandora.

This is one of the few sites for free streaming music I’ve seen with built in discographies. The implementation could be better, but it’s pretty good. When you search for an artist, a list of albums is displayed along the right side of the page. Click on one and you get a track listing with links to listen to and download each song.

In short, Hushie is an excellent place to go when you can’t find an MP3 on iTunes, but if you want a consistent source for MP3s, this isn’t it, and if you just want to stream music free without downloading, you’d be better off with Seeqpod.com or Favtape.com.