A gift from the Bulletin: this year’s edition of their Near/Far music coverage, which includes 36 free and legal songs to download. A snip of the blurb on their page:

[Y]ou can click "Lists and Reviews" to check out my favorite albums and concerts of the year, plus the faves of folks connected to Central Oregon’s music scene. Below, the good stuff: Stream or download 36 songs by local and national acts, for free. (Each half of this double-length compilation will fit on one CD, so click the links right below this text to download a .ZIP file of all the songs in MP3 format, plus CD artwork with tracklists.)

I covered this last year, and was very impressed that the Bulletin was able to pull this off. Of course, Ben Salmon (the Bulletin’s music writer (editor?)) was the driving force behind this and it represents a ton of hard work he’s put into it.

The downloads this year are nearly twice as big as last year’s: two zip files (local music and national music), 112 megabytes and 102 megabytes each. So be patient when you go to download them. (Of course, you can stream the music directly from the page, too.)