Mp3 faq - newsgroups with Netscape

How do I download MP3 files from newsgroups, joining all the parts and decoding them?

Forget Netscape for this. There are various programs you can use. Fort‚ Agent is a good dedicated newsreader. Even Microsoft Outlook Express will do a reasonable job of joining and decoding posts. There are also programs designed specifically for retrieving binaries. I've been experimenting with a program called "NewsShark" recently. It's free - you can download it through ZDNet (www.hotfiles.com). It's a bit buggy (sometimes crashes when you exit it, for example), and rather clunky - it takes a *long* time to start up and shut down once you've loaded a bunch of headers into it. But it does join binaries fine, and it has at least one advantage over Agent (or at least, the version of Agent that I have) - if it's downloading a large binary and the newsserver kicks it off or locks up on it, it will automatically restart the download, keeping the portion of the binary that it has already downloaded... this can be quite a time saver when you're trying to retrieve large files.

You have to download all the parts. The parts should have a number somewhere in the header like "Moon River 12/25" - this means that this particular message is part 12 or 25 parts. If you're not using a newsreader that automatically joins parts (try Free Agent - download it from ZDNet - www.hotfiles.com - for example), then it's a good idea to sort the newsgroup by subject, so all the parts come together. Check that all the parts are present - if some are missing (e.g. it says /25 but only 22 parts are actually there), then basically you can't download and decode that song. If all the parts are present, you'll need to retrieve them all, combine them, and decode the result. Free Agent will join the parts and decode automatically, most of the time, so you just need to retrieve the joined message... occasionally it won't recognise the way the headers are formatted and you'll have to join the parts manually - by selecting them all, right clicking, and choosing "Join" from the me
nu. Outlook Express won't join automatically, but you can join by selecting all the posts, right clicking, and choosing "Combine and decode". Always make sure you have arranged all the parts in the right order by number before OKing the join operation. Netscape won't join posts at all, so you'd just have to save the posts to a text file in order and then decode it with an external UUdecoder program - you might as well just switch to a real newsreader program

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