Where can I Download Mp3's?

Mp3's are one of the most sought after downloads from the internet. When the Mp3 music format was first developed, you could download them just about anywhere.
As time progressed and Mp3's became the standard electronic music format, music owners and publishers began to realize how much money could be made from Mp3's. This started the legal proceedings and court battles with napster, limewire, morpehsue and so on.

The consumer was forced to find alternative places to download music. Then along came the torrent file, or bit torrent and Peer 2 peer file sharing. This also became the focus of the lawyers and media giants to protect their property. Once again, the court battles soon followed. And once again, the consumer is left looking for other sources to download music.

During the rise and fall of napster, morpheus, and popular file sharing programs, one player in the game continues to fly just under the radar of the lawyers, and lawsuits and court battles. This player has been around since the beginning of the internet, and is 30 years old.

The player is called Usenet. Usenet, although not completely unknown to the record companies, software developers, and movie makers, offers a completely unique spin on the whole mp3 downloading topic.

Usenet is a vast resource with thousands upon thousands of music files, movies, software, games. You can literally download anything from usenet. The problem is that usenet is not completely user friendly.
Napster, bit torrent and similar peer to peer file sharing programs are not very user friendly either, however, they are slightly simpler to get acquainted with than usenet.

Usenet is a similar to a listing of thousands of email threads, this thread is arranged into newsgroups. Newsgroups are categorized into thousands of topics, which can include anythinf from music and movies to ebooks and pictures. These newsgroups allow messages to include attachments. This is where you find music, movies, and so on. A typical newsgroup topic can be alt.binaries.mp3. This means that within the alt (alternative) group is a sub group called binaries, which has an MP3 group. The binaries newsgroups number in the tens of thousands, and Mp3 newsgroups alone number in the hundreds. This means that there are Mp3 newsgroups for any kind of Mp3, from brand new releases, to complete albums, to compilations.

Downloading mp3's from the newsgroups requires 2 pieces of software and a newserver to download the messages from. The first software is a newsgroup reader of which there are thousands. Second, you need something to open the downloaded files. This usually requires a program to extract an archived file, such as winzip, or winrar. When somoen posts an mp3 file to a newsgroup, the mp3 file itself is split into small ieces and placed in the newsgroup in a series of sequentially numbered messages. A single mp3 file may be split into 10 or 20 small pieces. These small pieces are then uploaded to the newsgroup. To download them, you need to have informatyion about these pieces and their unique names, or id's. These unique id's are called message headers, and are simply a number. The mp3 file would typically be numbered "mp3 file 1, 2,3,4,5 and so on. So the complete listing of the mp3's message ids would be 5 parts- in this case.

The biggest problem with newsgroups is that when downloading mp3 files, you have to first search for the music that you want. This can take a while because of the sheer number of messages in a newsgroup. The solution is to find a quick way to download the mp3's you want without having to search or read through the messages. This problem was solved with the advent of the NZB file.

The nZb file is a index file that was developed by newsbin.com. They developed a quick way to download mp3's files using a nzb file. The nzb file tells the newsreader exactly where and what to download from the mp3 newsgroups. The mp3 file we mentioned earlier would have 5 parts all numbered sequentially. The NZB file then would have the title of the mp3, the newsgroup it is posted to, and the message id's of the parts within the posted mp3 file.

When downloading the mp3, you simply open the nzb file and start the download. The newsreader will download the parts, and save them in a directory somewhere on your pc (This would have been configured when you installed the newsreader and configured the settings) Once the download is complete, you woudl browse the download folder specified in the newsreader, and open the file attachments.

The file attachments may be archived and is a common practice mainly to save the number of posts required to upload files to the newsgroups. This saves hard drive space, and uploading\downloading bandwidth, and time. The most common archive format is the RAR archive. A RAR archive is opened with a free program called winrar. The winrar archives are similarly numbered as the message headers are, and sequential. A complete rar archive may contain a rar file, and a r01,r02,r03,r04 files. These are required to reassemble the complete archive as it was on the original uploader's computer. Once you have extracted the archive, you have the same files as were uploaded by the original mp3 uploader.