If you looked at P4K's best singles of 2007 list and thought, "you know, I'd like to get a collection of all of those songs but I don't have the time or money or patience to accumulate all of them." Our friends at Stereogum are feeling your pain and are here to help.

I can't vouch for the legality for all of this (although Stereogum does boast of offering only free and legal mp3s on their website), but a reader named Adam from Madison, WI accumulated all 100 songs as mp3s and made them available to everyone in three zip files. For now, you can download all 3 parts via links from Stereogum. Although you should be warned that it also takes forever to download — and I have a fast connection at home.

Another free EOY mix, which will likely have fewer legal problems and may even be a better idea, is from Paper Thin Walls. They asked 32 top music critics to offer their favorite song of 2007 and compiled those in to two mixes. Or, as PTW walls explains better than I ever could:

We asked more than 30 of our favorite music writers to pick just one song that sums up 2007—one fragile, downloadable fragment to drop in our time capsule, to be buried deep under the cornerstone of the PTW servers. We’ve collected all of them here as the Paper Thin Walls 2007 Mixtape, two CD-Rs worth of the familiar and the alien, the hits and hits that should have been, Bible-versed power-pop and environmentally conscious black metal. Our list is not ranked, not very scientific and not exhaustive at all. But every song on it is a number one to somebody. (Or, in a few cases, the closest thing to a number one that a record label would let us post for free… -ella, -ella, -ella, etc.)

Besides a ringing endorsement, each song comes with a short conversation with the artist about what inspired it, how it evolved and, in one case, a brief explanation as to what exactly is an “Aerosmith gun.” We’ve posted all 32 MP3s, so please feel encouraged to download all the songs and burn them to CD (once again, they fit very neatly on two discs). But get moving, since when the silver ball drops on ’07, our cruel, vindictive webmasters (and thorough legal team) are dropping the free tunes as well.

The most anticipated album of the year didn’t cost a penny—and yet we still whined about the bitrate. How could this year possibly be any good?

The PTW mix and track list is here, via Idolator.