With the recent uproar about peer to peer file sharing, I thought I'd attempt to throw up a nice little guide to help you newbies out.

What is File Sharing?

File sharing is a process by which one computer gains access to another computer for an exchange of (what else) files. Files sharing isn't a new technology by any means. I believe the Internet's creation was founded on the belief of the exchange on information. The first, lame 300bps modems used were for Universities and the Gov't in order to swap files/programs/etc. Recently though, programs such as Napster, Scour, and Aimster have come into light which makes file sharing incredibly easy. It's just that the certain types of files being exchanged are questionable.

Ok, so how would I go about finding (insert file type here)?

Glad you asked. I'm sure there are tons of new file sharing programs, but I'll primarily focus on two. Napster and Scour. Eventually I'll get some more info on Aimster, but I've only played with it once. Also, I am NOT putting up a guide to warez, so we won't dig in on that subject. As for multimedia files go, Napster is only, repeat, ONLY used for mp3 files. Scour Exchange (although bankrupt now) is a nice program used for exchanging almost any type of multimedia file including mp3 files. Here's the breakdown:

FTP?

FTP is oldschool by modern standards. File Transfer Protocol. It's like how www = world wide web, and in a similar format. It's used for the sole purpose of transfering files. If you know anything about networking or the Internet, WWW is on port 80 while FTP is on port 21 (usually), so it was created to basically free up WWW lines so people had dedicated lines for downloading/uploading. And generally, you can find anything/everything on FTP somewhere. It tends to be trickier to use though than the file sharing programs. Also, for the most part, FTP is used for warez and such so I won't have a guide up for that. I can only reccomend LeapFTP and I highly discourage you from using IE or Netscape for FTP stuff as they are horrible. Good Luck.

Ok, so how do I got about getting those programs?

Check the links on the right and hit up their download pages on them.

I have Napster, now what?

Here's a quick glance at the settings I use

Bitrate is just the quality of the song. The higher, the better, but also, the bigger it gets. 128 is cd quality and unless you're getting live recordings of songs, or just want the best possibly quality, leave it alone.
Connection is the speed of the people you're looking at downloading from. I leave it at cable so those filthy 56k punks don't cut me off. Also, cable upload and up is far superior than anything below it, meaning, you can get really fast (80kbps and up) downloads. Sometimes though, cable/dsl/T1/T3 people like to hide around as 14.4 people so no one downloads from them, if their ping time (if you have it on, I don't because it slows the search) is really low (like sub-100's) download from them, it usually pisses them off. =) Another quick tip is that the artist and the title search fields are the same. Meaning, if you type the artist and title in the artist field, it will still find what you're looking for. I don't know why they seperated it, but whatever. Usually I don't mess with max result because it always gives me around 100 entries anyway. Play with it if you want, maybe it's just my machine.

I have Scour Exchange now what?

First off, think of every video file you can possibly think of, and start searching! Really, Scour filed for bankrupcy very recently, so sooner or later the program won't be available. The main benifit of Scour over Napster is that it has multiple files for download as opposed to just mp3s. The cons are that most of the users will disconnect you if you're downloading too slowly. Which, most of the time, you are. The connections for Scour just aren't as reliable as Napster, so I reccomend Napster for mp3s and Scour for the other file types it can get that Napster cannot.

Pretty similar to the Napster settings. I only lowered the min connection. 64k and up people are generally ok to download from on Scour as opposed to Napster. Bit Rate, Duration, Frames don't work at all. Do not mess with those settings. Max results on the other had does. 200 usually yields what I'm looking for. If it doesn't then there is a show more results buttons. You can be very general about your search under the media type with Audio, Image, or Video settings, or you can specify which file extensions (i.e. mp3, asf, mpeg, viv) you want to look for. There are only two issues with Scour that I can think of. Case sensitive, If you're looking for "Dave Matthews Ban" and you literally forget to type the "d" then the search won't find any results. So, make absolutely sure you're typing in what you want, or if worse comes to worse, search for only one word of what you're looking for like "Dave" or "Matthews." Secondly, there's a bug in the program that causes it to crash EVERY SINGLE TIME you download over 300k or so. So limit your downloads from the same person to about 3-4 and limit the max number of downloads you can have to about 8-10.

There are many other programs like Gnutella and Gnotella and such, but since I can't ever get those things working, I can't really post tips on how to use them. Aimster looks like it's dodged the legal bullet for now, so I may switch over and start using it. When/If I do, I'll post some tips later. Any mistakes, corrections, let me know.

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