There are many different places where you can get them: the web, ftp
sites, newsgroup, irc, p2p. Here, I will just tell you about the first
2.
The web: downloading from web
pages.
There are millions of MP3s on the web.... but... there are also a lot
of dead links. The most reliable MP3 sources are sites that provide
"legal" mp3s, like www.mp3.com which is all straight-up fully
legal MP3 authorized by the content providers. There's lots of good
music there, but it takes time to find stuff you like, since you'll
never have heard of most of the artists.
As for finding mp3s from known artists, you may find them right here
at Bresso.com by using our free mp3 search engine.
FTP: File Transfer Protocol.
It's just another way of transferring files over the net. 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 SmartFTP.
This program allows you 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). 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.
