Anyone who has ever tried finding Chinese music on English language file-sharing networks knows that it is a pointless exercise which will fail 98% of the time. Therefore, I will cover only on the Chinese language alternatives and we will be searching using Chinese. This means that if you can’t read any Chinese you’re going to have a hard time following this guide.

As an example in this article we’ll be looking for music by Jay Chou, the unchallenged king of mandopop. If you only know the artist’s “English” name then Wikipedia will usually be of help; from the Jay Chou article we learn that his name is 周杰倫 in traditional Chinese and 周杰伦 in simplified. The distinction between traditional and simplified Chinese is sometimes important, as I will point out below.

Baidu MP3

Baidu is a mainland China search engine with a large number of services and a very strong standing in the local market. One of those services is Baidu MP3, which indexes music files on the web. This might sound illegal somehow but it isn’t and it shouldn’t be under any sane copyright regime. However, western countries’ copyright regimes are increasingly insane and our record labels have gotten used to bullying others into doing as they want. Presumably in order to stay off their radar Baidu MP3 sometimes block searches from outside China. If you’re not in China and can’t find any music when following the below instructions, skip ahead to the proxy section.

Now let’s get down to business. Baidu MP3 is a great place to start when you want quick results and quality is not critical. Go to http://mp3.baidu.com/ and you’ll see something like this:

Just enter the enter the artist name (周杰伦) in the search box. Baidu is clever enough to understand either traditional or simplified Chinese, but the results will always be in simplified Chinese as it’s a mainland service. If you’re only interested in MP3 files, select the “mp3″ option. The search results will look something like this:

From left to right, the colums are:

• 歌曲名 song title (e.g. 青花瓷) – click this to download an individual track
• 歌手名 artist name (e.g. 周杰伦) – browse the artist discography and most popular songs
• 专辑名 album title (e.g. 我很忙) – show the full track listing for the album
• 试听 sample – listen without downloading (not very useful)
• 歌词 lyrics – useful, but Mojim.com is better
• 铃声 mobile ringtone – you probably don’t want this
• 大小 file size – bigger usually means better quality
• 格式 file format – use mp3 for portability, you don’t want wma or rm
• 链接速度 connection speed – the more the merrier

In the simplest case you simply click on one of the songs and start downloading, but you often need to try a few different servers before finding a file of acceptable quality and download speed. The artist and album pages are useful for exploring new artists, but I would advise against collecting full albums from these listings as the files would be of uneven quality and have inconsistent metadata (ID3 tags).

The 歌曲TOP500 (top 500 songs) is also well worth mentioning. The chart is based on the number of downloads and is – due to the service’s popularity – arguably the best measure of what’s hot in China right now. Other useful top charts include 新歌TOP100 (top 100 new songs) and 歌手TOP200 (top 200 artists).

See also Sinosplice for an older Baidu MP3 guide.

Chinese Proxy Server

If you find that you can’t get any search results from Baidu, I would suggest first trying one of the other methods below. However, in the rare case where you really need Baidu, you can still do it no matter where you are geographically. Just like many Chinese netizens use proxy servers to get out of China, we can use a proxy server to get in to China. I’ve been able to use Baidu MP3 using web proxies from mainland China, Taiwan and Korea. Others may work too, so finding and configuring a proxy which works for you shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes.

Do note that the only place where you actually need a proxy is when searching. When downloading you aren’t connecting to Baidu so you can get much better speed if you turn the proxy off. As this requires switching the proxy on and off repeatedly, I suggest using a browser/extension which makes this convenient. In Opera you can use Tools>Quick Preferences>Enable Proxy Servers (or F12+r) to toggle the proxy. Using Firefox+FoxyProxy it seems that you can use a proxy only for mp3.baidu.com, which is even better.

Again, if using a proxy seems like a lot of trouble, just keep reading for some other services which may serve you better.

VeryCD

When I had been in Beijing for only a few days I was at a meet-up for new expats and friendly Chinese. I got on the topic of music with a Chinese guy and he soon suggested that I visit VeryCD. That was in 2006, and VeryCD is still the file sharing portal in China. It indexes files on the eDonkey network and just about everybody seems to use it.

It’s quite easy to use VeryCD: just type the artist name at the top and search away. Unlike Baidu, VeryCD doesn’t handle traditional Chinese very well, so make sure that you’re copying/inputting simplified Chinese or you may not find what you’re looking for. Except for that, the search box is very clever and will even suggest additional search terms as you type.

As an example let’s look for Jay Chou’s 2006 album Still Fantasy – 依然范特西. Searching for 周杰伦 依然范特西 will find the album in both MP3 and APE format, as well as a bonus DVD, karaoke videos, etc. Jay Chou is exceptionally popular so the results won’t always be this good, but you’ll almost always be able to find something. Go to any of those results and you’ll find a box like this:

These are the files you are looking for, but since VeryCD is just a fancy index for the eDonkey network you need an eDonkey client to actually download anything. I recommend aMule for all operating systems except Windows, where eMule might be better. After you’ve installed the client, simply clicking on the links should add the files to your download queue. Usually aMule will be able to find a peer sharing the file in question and start downloading. It’s not always fast, but it will finish in the end if you’re patient. Here I’ve downloaded and extracted the 320 kbps version:

Basically, that’s all there is to it. One nice feature worth mentioning is that VeryCD provides RSS feeds for all pages, including categories and search results. For example, you can subscribe to the Chinese music category or Jay Chou search results, which is very useful for staying up to date with very little effort. Paradise for the music fanatic!

Kad

Now that you have aMule/eMule installed, there is another method well worth mentioning. Kad is a distributed network for indexing and searching eDonkey files. If you can’t find what you’re looking for on VeryCD, try using aMule/eMule to search in the Kad network. In the search view, select type “Kad”. You also need to pay attention to traditional/simplified Chinese as there is no automatic conversion. I suggest doing one search in traditional and one in simplified to cover all the options.

Here I’ve found a karaoke (KTV) version of a song I like. Even for things that you can find on VeryCD, searching the Kad network will sometimes give you better quality or alternate versions. If you find an album in both a mainland version (大陸版/大陆版) and a Taiwan version (台灣版/台湾版) get the Taiwan release as mainland releases are often bastardized by removing/renaming tracks to please the censors. Hong Kong versions (香港版) sometimes contain Cantonese bonus tracks, which might be nice.

Recommendations

You shouldn’t have any problem finding music now, but if you don’t know where to start I can recommend a few of my favorite artists:

• Mayday/五月天 is a Taiwanese rock band who perform in both Mandarin and Min Nan dialect. I am ridiculously fond of their song Rainbow/彩虹 from the album People Life, Ocean Wind/人生海海.
• Jay Chou/周杰倫/周杰伦 is extremely popular, but his style may take some getting used to. New album Capricorn coming out October 9!
• Wang Leehom/王力宏 is a successful Taiwanese American artist who also starred in Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution.
• Michael Wong/光良 is a Malaysian Chinese singer who specializes in love ballads. His newer albums are only so-so though.
• Eason Chan/陳奕迅/陈奕迅 is a Hong Kong artist with a nice voice. I especially like his 2007 Mandarin album Admit It/認了吧.
• Faith Yang/楊乃文/杨乃文 is a Taiwanese singer with a good voice, good songs and none of the painfully “cute” image that most other female Chinese artists have. I think of her as Taiwan’s Alanis Morisette, but as I don’t really like Morisette the comparison only goes so far…

The list could go on, but if you don’t trust my taste in music (who would?) do have a look at Baidu’s top 200 artists to see what people in China are listening to instead.

Tagging

The variations in character encodings, translations, romanizations, mixture of traditional and simplified Chinese and plain errors that you can find “in the wild” makes it necessary to clean up the tags (metadata) of your files. Unless you do this it’s going to be a mess when you want to play your music in a player which uses the tags to sort things (as many portable players do). The best tool for consistent tags that I know of is MusicBrainz, even though far from all Chinese music is in the MusicBrainz database. Still, it is better than trying to fix everything by hand and you’ll probably want to use it for all your non-Chinese music anyway.

That concludes this guide. I hope that it makes sense and that it will be of use.

Karaoke is possibly the best social activity ever (五月天 – 彩虹)

今天乱写一些与华语音乐有关的事情。1999年父母、哥哥和我到中国来旅行。我当初一句汉语也不会说，不过我在北京友谊商店决定买一张唱片。看了看架上摆着的流行专辑，拿下张信哲的《回来》，听了之后感觉不错。去年又到北京来了，发现张信哲还在出音乐，风格跟过去还差不多。接着喜欢上光良的歌曲了：《童话》、《第一次》、《约定》等等。不知道他什么时候会录下新的唱片。张信哲和光良都唱情歌……好听是好听，不过我也喜欢摇滚乐，中国真的缺乏这些。我刚发现了台湾乐队五月天，不是什么Iron Maiden，可是我觉得他们还不错。

如果中国缺乏摇滚乐，那难看的（女生）歌手更不存在。这并不是什么好事，漂亮并不相等于唱歌的才能。电视上天天都出现长得好看但是唱起来像喜鹊乌鸦一样的女人。当然，欧美也如此，不过在东方这个毛病似乎更严重一些。也许我不太了解华语音乐因而忽视了那些不漂亮但是很会唱歌的歌手……

我一般是通过百度MP3或者VeryCD找到新的音乐。last.fm中文版称为“推动社会音乐革命”，也是个很好的东西。有兴趣的话你可以做我的last.fm朋友。我也特别想推荐MusicBrainz音乐资料库，跟Wikipedia相同的是谁都可以编辑。如果你的MP3文件中 ID3标签不太标准你可以试试MusicBrainz，结果让我非常满意。不过MusicBrainz有两个缺点，首先网站和软件全是英文，如果你的英文不好可能有点困难。其次资料库中的华语音乐不算多，不到一千个专辑……我经常编辑，希望你也会喜欢上MusicBrainz！

After some investigation I found that some players (including Rhythmbox) and tag editors have support for a DISCNUMBER tag. I edited my tags using easytag which isn’t great but still the best Free tag editor I know of. I’ve had some issues with the DISCNUMBER tag mysteriously disappearing, but have been unable to reproduce the bug in the latest version of easytag. In any case, I changed the ALBUM tag to “Rock In Rio” and added DISCNUMBER tag with a value of 1 or 2. Rhythmbox now shows only one album entry and puts the tracks in the correct order:

However, there is still one problem which is unresolved. Some albums have names for each disc. One example is Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by The Smashing Pumpkins where the first disc is called Dawn to Dusk and the second Twilight to Starlight. Googling didn’t turn up anything so I decided that a DISCTITLE tag would be a good idea and proceeded to add those tags where needed (using metaflac). The disc title is not shown in Rhythmbox and I am not sure what might be a good way of presenting it. A DISCTOTAL tag might also be useful for storing the number of discs in the set, although I haven’t used it myself.

A recent google search turned up a slimdevices.com forum thread where the DISCNAME tag was suggested. To my knowledge it is not supported by any software. I think that DISCTITLE is better because it is consistent with the TITLE tag, but if either were agreed upon that would be great. Adding support for the tag to easytag would be easy, but without any idea of how the tag might be used a patch would probably be rejected.

Update 2006-04-29:

I’ve discovered MusicBrainz. I love MusicBrainz. You love MusicBrainz. MusicBrainz mandates the use of “(disc x)”, or “(disc x: disc title)” for multi-disc albums. This brings back my unpretty Rhythmbox album listing, but the benefits of MusicBrainz far outweigh this nuisance. Use MusicBrainz.