As a 39-year-old still stuck in the Dinosaur Land of buying music on little pieces of plastic, I'm finding it harder and harder to discover new songs. There's so much good stuff on the Internet, and tracking it all via MySpace, blogs, eMusic, iTunes, podcasts and Internet radio requires more time than I have or obsessive-compulsive disorder (which, OK, I have, a little, especially when it comes to music, but I'm trying to get over it).

What I really, really want is some kind of new-music sampler, from a trusted source like Pitchfork or Rolling Stone or Spin or the Village Voice, which I can shift to my iPod and listen to while walking or driving or what-not. I realize tons of blogs, etc., make free downloads available all the time, but the crucial thing is the quality control.

A few sites come close:

Hypemachine: Aggregates the really good music blogs (like Stereogum) into an endless, easy-to-use playlist. I found gems this way, like a smoky version of the Moody Blues' "Knights In White Satin" by Midnight Movies; tracks from a Rolling Stones outtakes album (Metamorphosis) that I'd somehow never heard of and promptly bought on CD; and Of Montreal's bouncy, old-school-power-pop "Friends of Mine." The problem is the  service emphasizes streaming -- MP3s are available via iTunes or Amazon, but that makes the process cumbersome.

Pitchfork's Forkcast: The indie-rock critics here select some 230 hip new songs, from rapper Lil Wayne to rocker Jay Reatard, and stream them with a clunky little player. The tracks are super-awesome, just as you'd expect from Pitchfork, but again, this is a streaming deal, so I have to listen via work computer. (The playlist is powered by imeem, which posts other playlists in the same style, but still, no downloading.) 8.8. (Little Pitchfork joke.)

Last.fm's free downloads: Again, mostly a streaming/radio site, but this page compiles a really good list of free, available MP3s -- Sufjan Stevens' "Christmas In July" is here, as well as tracks by the aforementioned Of Montreal, Broken Social Scene and (!) Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You." These, you can download.

And then, yes, there's P2P, which I'm avoiding, not because it's, y'know, illegal, but because most of these services, like BitTorrent, are cumbersome and the quality control drives me crazy. Suggestions welcome!