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Baidu's MP3 search engine used to be my first stop when studying anything Chinese. Absurdly, even recordings of relatively rare poetry (for instance) were easy to find. These recordings were not copyrighted, and were usually made by individuals just for fun. It was often possible to hear the ambient sounds of people's houses in the background of the recordings. As a bonus, sentimental backing tracks were often included. For a language geek, it was a dream come true.

That said, mp3.baidu.com had an enemy. The last time I ever tried to download a recording, it was of a famous, funny Lu Xun story called Kong Yiji. Most of the download links failed, but when I found one that worked, it was a parody recording of "The Real Slim Shady" by someone with a Hubei accent.

What gives?

I'm aware that librivox has some recordings of Chinese poetry, but really for the amount of stuff that was previously accessible using mp3.baidu.com, it's a very poor substitute.

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  • So it's a search engine for stories recorded by "normal" people? Was the quality good? Apart from background noises?
    – Alenanno
    Dec 25 '11 at 21:36
  • Can you be more specific about what kind of listening material you want to find?
    – Village
    Dec 26 '11 at 13:41
  • @Aleanno yes, the quality was good enough. they were educated native speakers after all.
    – magnetar
    Dec 27 '11 at 16:20
  • @Village anything and everything literary. Short stories, poetry, prose, classical and modern alike.
    – magnetar
    Dec 27 '11 at 16:21
  • Oh, it's dead? Shame.
    – Orion
    Jan 3 '12 at 17:26
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mp3.baidu.com is a music downloading site as far as I know...

If you are looking for professional Mandarin recording of selective Chinese articles (includes Lu Xun's article sometimes), I would suggest the Yuedu.FM.

BTW, VeryCD is no longer a file-sharing site anymore because of copyright issue, and all download links has since been removed. However, the resource pages still active and now they link to many Online Video Streaming sites (but people outside China cannot view them because of region restrictions).

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  • Hellow Md Gao. Please share those resources on our community resource question. Make sure the links you post are official, free and above all legal. Thank you. :)
    – Alenanno
    Mar 9 '12 at 9:40
  • Thanks for the tip, I shared some link to there. :) and edited my answer to remove some link because I forgot the region restriction issue.
    – Mengdi Gao
    Mar 10 '12 at 10:52
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You could use VeryCD which is a Chinese "peer-2-peer" file sharing service. I have found whole novels in mp3 format there.

Another file sharing system used over there is Foxy. However, it has had some security problems in the past.

As for copyright issues, same as with any other file sharing; if the material is copyrighted you shouldn't share it.

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  • 2
    Can you also add if it requires registration? Is the registration free? Are there copyright issues? Such info would add more value to your answer.
    – Alenanno
    Dec 26 '11 at 11:24
  • verycd is the name of the site/client which like most sites of its nature (nfo site if you may), do not or do not need to actively enforce copyright since it does not host or serve the content itself. The p2p service network is actually edonkey or ed2k
    – prusswan
    Jan 6 '12 at 12:15
  • Actually VeryCD is a website not a service. It provides eDonkey links, so as long as you go download and install eDonkey you can download from VeryCD, no registration needed.
    – Gapton
    Jan 15 '12 at 14:22

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