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What's a good MP3 search engine ?
If you go to www.audiovalley.com you can access pretty much all the main search engines from a single page. Kermit, Lycos and Scour seem to produce the most results, usually...
When I search for MP3, all the files are on FTP sites, and I get errors when I try to download them - what gives?
If files on an FTP site are freely downloadable without restrictions, you should be able to download them through you browser. But most FTP sites are "ratio" sites, meaning they won't let you download unless you first upload something. The "ratio" part refers to the ratio between how much you upload and how much you download - a 1:5 site ratio means you must upload 1 Mb for every 5 Mb you want to download. To use a ratio site you will have to work with an FTP client, i.e. a program specifically designed for doing FTP, such as Cute FTP, WS FTP. Programs such as Getright and Go!zilla are useless for ratio sites, since they can't do the upload part. Actuall FTP client programs allow you to define FTP sites in a directory, along with the logins and passwords for them - when you get an FTP link from the web, it will look something like "ftp://mp3:grab@123.45.67.8/mp3z/thisfile.mp3" - in this link "123.45.67.8" is the address of the FTP site (this is an actual IP address - you way
also see a textual address, such as joes.mp3.ftp), "mp3" is the logon id, "grab" is the password, the file name is "thisfile.mp3" and it is in directory "mp3z" on the FTP server... to put this into an FTP program, you'd specify 123.45.67.8 as the site address, "mp3" as the logon, "grab" as the password... then you'd hit the "Connect" button, and once you'd logged on, you'd change directory to "mp3z" to look for your file. Unfortunately, there are rather a lot of complications. Many FTP sites are only up at certain hours of the day (their owners use the computers for other things the rest of the time). When the sites *are* up, you often can't get in because they're too busy - most of these sites are just on desktop PCs, and to function they need to restrict the number of simultaneous logins to something like 3 or 4. If you get a "can't connect to site message" try at another time. If you get a "too many logins" message, just keep trying (it's kind of like a phone busy signal
- many programs will retry automatically for you... see the setup options). Even once you get in, satisfying site owners' ratio requirements can be tricky - they may only want certain types of file, that you don't have. Really you almost need to establish a trading relationship with certain site owners to make this work.
