Napster-like sites?

Hi John
The ones with most stuff available appear to be winmx, kazaa and imesh. Another thing which was explained to me recently was ALBW (albumwrap files)these are complete albums in one file, if you type ALBW into the title field in search in winmx for instance, depending on how many people are online you can get as many as 7000 different titles.
You download the ALBW file then transfer to the albumwrap extractor (available for download) and this then splits the file into its seperate tracks. You should also be aware of the virus problem, particularly with kazaa downloads and arm yourself appropriately. Hope this helps.
Regards
Jim

Ditto the Win MX site mentioned above.E-donkey is another good one to try depending on the type/ genre of music you listen to...

Napster 2 New Napster Off To A Solid Start is reviewed by /. with links to reviews by Wired and CNN. Often a good place to see what GenY think of all things thecnical.

Roy

I've had a few problems with ALBWs. Sometimes I just can't get the file unwrapped (get told it's not an ALBW file even though the download looks clean and everything else seems ok) and other times when it's unwrapped I end up with multiple copies of track 1 and nothing else even though all the tracks are definitely there. I've looked for more recent versions of the software but couldn't find any. Anybody else come across this sort of thing?

Everything you could conceivably want can be found on emule. Its slow at first but provided you are willing to leave your computer on for long periods (e.g. overnight) its very good indeed. It downloads files in such a way that you rarely lose bits of the file you were trying to get. I found the slow speeds very frustrating at first but once you get used to the fact that its not Napster then its very reliable. All the various sites / methods are discussed on slyck.com.

Good luck.
Simon

Nobody's mentioned Limewire, although I believe it's a smaller community than Kazaa.

The proper way to go about this is to form a P2P "dark network" with several acquaintances with large music collections, and share files while you're sleeping (the connection lights up at a preset time, and shuts down at another). To be truly "dark", you need to use a proxy service that performs some IP address trickery for each session. Sneaky.

Hi Tom
I have experienced the same probs as you but never found a remedy. Re the albw files not extracting, you can still split them using sound forge , cool edit etc, just make sure they play in media player first.
I also found that the files which extract into multiples of the same track can usually be split manually as well.
Regards
Jim

Jim,
I only recently upgraded my copy of Sound Forge and you're right in saying that it does the job. Also useful to be able to edit MP3s directly.

Thanks folks, food for thought. Now I just have a little over a month to wait, then funtime once again!

John

TC '..'
"Sun went down in honey. Moon came up in wine. Stars were spinnin' dizzy, Lord, the band kept us so busy we forgot about the time."