The so-called boundary node method (or NDIF method) that was developed by the authors has been extended for free vibration analysis of arbitrarily shaped plates with free edges. Since the proposed method requires no interpolation functions. no integration Procedure is needed on boundary edges of the plates and only a small amount of numerical calculation is involved, compared with FEM and BEM. In order to explain tile reason why spurious eigenvalues are generated when the NDIF method is applied to free plates, the NDIF method has been considered for free vibration analysis of both a fixed string and a free beam. Finally, verification examples show that natural frequencies obtained by the present method agree well with those given by an exact method or a numerical method (ANSYS).