I’m a happy subscriber to your splendid Blogsmart News newsletter and was glad to get a link to the amazing results with adwords lecture you did with Joy in the latest news. But I can’t save it? How the heck do I save an mp3 file when the link is in an email message?
I know exactly what you mean and have seen this message again and again after sending out email with mp3 file URLs included. The problem is that within your mail program, all you see is:
Nice, but how do you save it so you can, for example, drop it onto your iPod?
Here’s how I do that: click on the link and/or type it into your Web browser. Now you’ll see a rudimentary set of player controls, like I do in Apple’s Safari browser:
Safari makes it easy at this point, just choose File –> Save As… and you’ll be able to save the mp3 file onto your hard disk:
Sometimes that won’t work, however, so I want to also show you a simple alternative that I’ve found is pretty darn reliable regardless of what browser you use. It involves creating a rudimentary Web page, so are you ready?
If you’re running a Mac, launch “TextEdit” and if you’re on a PC start up “Text Edit” and type in the following skeleton:
Between the two quotes, copy and paste in the URL from the email message you received, so for my message it’d look like this:
That’s all the code you need to write. Save this as a text only or ASCII file with the filename “download.html” (note the ‘html’: don’t use the default of ‘.txt’ here!)
Open that file in your Web browser and you’ll see the words “audio link” in blue, underlined, and if you click it ’em you’ll get to the mp3 player in your browser, but you don’t want to do that. Instead, right click (Mac folk, use Control-click here) and you’ll get a contextual menu like this:
That’s Firefox and you can see I’ve highlighted “Save Link As…”. Choose that and you will have the mp3 file neatly saved on your hard disk, even if the previous methods didn’t work for you!
Hope that helps you out, and, if you too are interested in hearing this hour-long discussion of Google AdWords, here’s the link: amazing results with google adwords: call 1. Interested in the course itself? Here’s that link too: amazing results with Google AdWords.
Your instuctions for PC users requires them to startup Text Edit. I do not have a program called Text Edit. In case you intended the user to open a text document, I did so in Open Office and saved it both as a .txt (Text) and .txt (Text Encoded) seeing that I had no specific Text Only option. The blue Audio File link appeared in my browser (IE), but it would not download. Does my problem lie in the Text Edit step?
woo 😀 Thanks so much; really helpful xD
SWEET! This has bugged me often and I knew it just had to be simple!
Just the information I needed and very clearly explained. Thank you!
Thanks so much for this clear explanation — worked like a charm!
oh man, i feel like a genius! i am overwhelmed by the possibilities…!
wow, i love you.
thanks so much!
Very helpful thanks man
how do I download a song to my computer that was sent to me by email?
thanks for this post! I was looking for this specifically – works perfect.
Thanks – so simple -worked perfectly
Hi thank you very much. Your article was a real help to me and my transcription. God bless.
Hi, thanks for the info. I tried it tonight. Don’t know if it work. Still 60% download with mp3. Thank you again.
Know this may sound silly, but I’ve tried everything I know of and cannot get it. Your book also does not help. I received various through E-mail, however, they are not highlighted to gain direct access. I’ve tried copy/patse tehnique, but have been unsuccesful. Am using windows Internet Explorer, and am a “Computer Dummy.” If U can help, will be grateful. Thanks….. E.
This is a bit geekier, but it’s quicker, and my preferred way of downloading things like this. I don’t have my Mac handy, but it may come with either ‘fetch’ or ‘wget’. Both are command line utilities that, in their simplist usage, take one parameter, the URL.
So you would run, from a Terminal window:
wget http://www.blogsmart.com/audio/adwords-call1.mp3
or
fetch http://www.blogsmart.com/audio/adwords-call1.mp3
And the file will be downloaded to your current working directory (your home directory by default on OS X).
For BSD users, fetch comes preinstalled. For Linux users, virtually every distro comes with wget preinstalled.
For Windows users, there is a wget for Windows.
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/wget.htm