Monday, October 30, 2000		Entertainment

Chat with film stars

Music is just like religion, which has followers the world over. Earlier, persons used to listen radio for music. Then cassette recorders and hi-fi music systems took over and offered high quality music to the listeners. But now, the definition of music has changed once again. It’s now MP3, which has taken over the reins of music from its predecessors.

The popularity of MP3 can be judged by the fact that a majority of the Internet users use Internet for the purpose of downloading MP3 songs. In fact, it is the second most popular use of the Internet after e-mails. The recent episode of Napster.com and MP3.com bears a clear testimony to this fact. As per a report, Napster.com became one of the most popular sites after the legal action was initiated against this music portal. Though music on the Net and MP3 files are a craze abroad, in India also it is fast becoming a prominent source of entertainment.

Surfers have started using MP3 players in India and they regularly download their favourite numbers free from the Internet. You can also download these free music files from the Net and play them either on your computer using computer-based MP3 players or on your MP3 player, which is hardware.

Though there are a lot of sites for downloading music from the Internet, but only a few of them work well and have a good collection of music. One such site is http://www.bollywoodmusic.com. This site is a very good resource of music and has a number of channels including, regional music, Hindi music, Punjabi MP3z, Hindi MP3z, India FM live, Radio of India, Smash Hits, Countdown, Hindi Remixes, Real Video, Ghazals and Bhangra hits. There are many more channels on this site, which deal with specific interest like regional music, songs and lyrics.

The best feature of this site is that you can listen to the music and can also download it if you wish. Thus if you want to listen to the latest countdown, then go to the countdown channel and click on it in the left pane. In the right pane, a list of latest countdown will come. Now if you just wish to listen any of the songs, you can listen them online by simply clicking on it. However, if you wish to download, then you can simply download by clicking on it while holding down the shift key. This will download the song on your computer. Similarly you can download as many songs you want.

There is another excellent music site http://www.smashits.com, which is one of the most comprehensive sites on Indian music. You can listen to any song of your choice and can even create your own Web CD, which would have assorted titles of your choice and can be played as non-stop music online. This is an exclusive feature of this site, which lets you maintain an account of the songs, so that you do not have to search them every time you visit this site. However, this site is not just all about listening to songs, as it is a complete entertainment site. It has channels on Bollywood, music, video, downloads, chat, games, pictures and astrology contest.

So these are some of the good sites for complete entertainment on the Net. You can listen to music, read film reviews, download music, screensavers and wallpapers. You can even chat with your favourite film star. So, go ahead and enjoy yourself.

— IV