We’d love any help with testing our latest version of Download Songs — if you’d like a preview and can send in any issues you find, join our tester list, please!

We’ll be setting up a comment space on Get Satisfaction, a site for communicating any issues or comments you have about Download Songs or Skipscreen, very soon. In the meantime, you can use our Skipscreen, Get Satisfaction page here.

Download Songs is a new app (Mac only, for now) that watches your download folders, and imports any music to iTunes with no fuss. Even music that’s buried in archives or subfolders. We made it because downloading music from the web is still so annoying. Right?

Skipscreen helps a ton, but you still have to find the stuff you downloaded, unzip it, drag it into iTunes, and then clean up the mess of useless .zip files and empty folders. If you are extra-unfortunate, you’ll accidentally drag in a playlist file and iTunes will import the album twice. Argh!

Well, if you download a ton of music from the web and are sick of this post-download hassle, you’ll love our latest effort in making downloading effortless: Download Songs. Combined with Skipscreen, it is literally the easiest way to download songs.

You set what download folders you want it to watch, and whenever a new music file arrives, it goes straight to iTunes. You choose if you want it to start playing or not. For zip and rar archives, it peeks inside to see if there’s music– if there is, it imports to iTunes. You can leave all the imported files intact, or you can have Download Songs clean up the redundant mp3′s, archives, and folders.

Before Download Songs, I’d have to spend ages deleting gigabytes of redundant music, zips, and rars from my ~/Downloads folder whenever I started running low on diskspace. The worst part: I wasn’t 100% sure that I’d imported it to iTunes and had to check each time!

Now I know that when I run out of space it’s actually time for a new hard drive

And there’s one more thing about it that’s really, really cool. Especially when used alongside Skipscreen. It adds a simple search field that you can get to in your menu bar, or with a hot-key (alt-D by default, which previously just made the letter ∂… you won’t miss it).

Hit the hotkey, start typing (there’s a focus issue right now but we’ll fix super-soon) and you get taken to the Download Songs search page, which is a pretty comprehensive search tool for download sites (including an option to search only skipscreen-compatible sites). You can also point it to the search engine of your choice.

You can buy Download Songs now in the App Store ($4.99) or try it for free for 30 days. If you download music from the web, it will definitely pay for itself with all the time and aggravation you save, and all the new music you listen to just because–well–downloading songs just got way easier.

UPDATE: New Chrome version available. Download here.

At long last, we have a Skipscreen addon for the Chrome browser ready. Can you help us kick the tires?

Join the e-mail list here and we’ll send you the latest beta version for your testing pleasure.

Being a beta tester would involve, um, going to lots of sites and downloading stuff. Which isn’t a a terrible way to spend a Wednesday and Thursday evening.

(There’s been a Chrome addon named “Skipscreen” floating around out there, but we didn’t create it.)

Skipscreen es un plugin gratis para Firefox que te permite saltar paginas y tiempos de espera en sites como RapidShare, Megaupload, Mediafire, zShare, y mucho mas. Se tu descargas archivos de estes servicios, SkipScreen va economizar mucho tiempo. Prueba-lo!

UPDATE: New Chrome version available. Download here.

We’re looking for bids for a simple IE and/or Chrome alpha of Skipscreen, and wanted to give the Skipscreen community a heads up.

If you’re interested in working on this, send a proposal to skipper AT skipscreen DOT com. Proposal can be for IE (8+) Chrome, or both, and it doesn’t have to be based on existing Skipscreen code.

Also, we’re interested in starting super simple: just wait / click / retry support for Rapidshare and Megaupload– no options, no other UI elements. So submit a simple proposal, and a proposal that includes other features too if you like (but not necc). Awesome!

Some anti-virus app is throwing this alert “Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Swizzor” when people download the new Skipscreen installer.

We looked into it and the detection is confirmed to be a false positive. The anti-virus software is detecting code in the inetc plugin for free and open source NSIS installer (which we use). The trojan writer must have used bits of NSIS, a popular installer used by a ton of projects, and then the anti-virus writers messed up and based their detection on this code.

We’ve alerted the anti-virus company to the error and asked them to fix it. Kinda crappy, but seems like it’s the kind of thing that happens every so often.

UPDATE: The anti-virus company has fixed the problem. Also, within a week or two we should be offering a signed installer, which means you won’t get that fear-inspiring “publisher unknown” problem.

I’m looking for a band or for a blog that posts their own (or 100% authorized, no samples, no ambiguity) songs or albums to a website, where it predictably gets > 1,000 downloads in some predictable timeframe. It doesn’t have to be music either, any other kind of totally authorized download will do.

The experiment would entail linking to a file on a skipscreen-supported site via a redirect on our site that shows a diggbar-like message along the lines of “Hey, download Skipscreen and you’ll never have to wait for this site again!”

We’re pretty psyched about this feature, because it’s the perfect moment to learn about Skipscreen: right when you’re most annoyed by a download site. And it’s the best way to share Skipscreen with your friends: wrapped around some file that’s interesting to them.

I just want to test one or two links for a day or two (like, up to 1,000 downloads or so). This could be in exchange for good vibes and a shoutout on our blog. Or if there’s anything you think we could do for you let us know. Interested? Know anyone who might be? Email skipper+skiptest AT skipscreen.com

We made Lifehacker’s best of 2009: Most Popular Firefox Extensions and Themes of 2009!  

Does Skipscreen make your best of 2009 list? If it does, give us a tweet! Being able to download everything you want is totally futuristic. Whatup 2010!!!

AMO just approved a Skipscreen release in only 2 hours. We’re impressed.

Thanks and congratulations to the Mozilla folks for slaying the addon moderation queue!

So yeah, we’re now offering a self-hosted version of Skipscreen on skipscreen.com. Here are some of the reasons why:

1. There were some important features Mozilla wouldn’t let us include (including captcha skipping).
2. Mediafire is detecting Skipscreen and showing our users fake-friendly “tsk tsk” messages instead of just giving them the file they want. As daffy duck said, “thith meanth war”, so we need uber-fast update capability.
3. AMO has made a great effort to get the download queue under control, and lately it’s been very fast. But around the Firefox 3.5 release things got ridiculous and we were waiting months for an update. We can’t afford to be depending on that again, especially if our growing popularity means that download sites are taking notice and breaking us

Advantages to you, the user, will include faster updates (especially for Mediafire) and some too-hot-for-Mozilla features like anti-captcha. So get the self-hosted version today!