How To Download Music & Video

 

This is the one thing I get asked more than any other question ! For every 1 person that asks how to setup a computer or how to defrag a hard drive, I will have 10 people ask where & how they can download music, films & applications.

Ok lets deal with this topic one stage at a time.

The legality of dowloading;

 

If you download MP3’s, DVD’s, Games or Software from various websites around the internet, then the chances are you are breaking the copyright laws and are leaving yourself wide open to prosecution. Furthermore this website does not condone or support the infringement of copyright laws or the download of any pirated materials.

If you do download MP3’s, DVD’s or Software from the internet then please ensure you use a fully legal source.

Well having given the obligatory legal warning, I can tell you that yes there are places around the Internet where you can download whatever you want. Some websites do it legally by charging you a membership fee that is supposed to go towards paying royalty fees to artists, whilst other websites are blatantly illegal & still others reside in what is termed the grey area.

What you choose to use is entirely your decision & your sole responsibility.

The Software

One of the most common programs used for d-loads these days is probably Limewire, this program made it’s name during the decline of Morpheous & then later Kazaa, both of which were very popular P2P download programs. Limewire does offer a free & a paid version (refered to as Limewire Pro), however I must say I find this program extremely annoying & frustrating.

limewire-installed

It is not because of the occasional virus infected file, (after all I do use Bitdefender & Spyware Doctor to help secure my system), it is because of the number of wrongly named files that you can spend hours downloading, only to find it is either porn or some dick head trying to tout for customers to a new website etc.

This I find extremely annoying, however you may have a slightly better disposition & find it far less annoying than I do ! Having said that, I did run a quick test by trying to download a WordPress Theme. It found what I searched for without any problem at all, so I selected 3 different files to download. When they had downloaded, which only took 15 minutes for all 3 to finish, I discovered that 1 had a virus & the other 2 were not what the name implied. So a total waste of time & just imagine if you had been downloading a DVD, which can take as long as a week dependant on quality & connection speeds.

There is another fairly new program available called Frostwire, which to be honest is very very similar to Limewire, so much so that one could be forgiven for thinking it was a rebranding excercise !

My own preference is a program called UTorrent, the biggest draw back being that you cannot preview the files as you can with Limewire.

 

utorrentThis sweet little program has a very small footprint & therefore has a minimal drain on your valuable system resources. It also works straight out of the box, just install, open the program & type in a search at the top right corner, then press enter.

It downloads by default direct to your Downloads folder in My Documents, however if you want to use the default setup, do not clear out your Temp folder untill your downloads have finished as this is where incomplete files  are stored until download has completed.

You can get around this quite easily by creating 4 folders in My Documents,

1. Working Torrents

2. Downloading

3. Torrent Store

4. Completed

Then go to preferences at the top left of the main screen & set the directory paths accordingly. There are also extensive help files available, however , to be perfectly honest with you, I have never yet had a problem with UTorrent & find that probably the 2 best search sites to use are either Pirate Bay or ISO Hunt, these you would select by using the drop down menu at the top right corner, the same place you would type in your search !

Ok there we are 3 possible programs for you to use, but please do head the legal warning at the begining of this article. Oh & should you have any questions then you can either ask in the comment box below or in our tech support Forum.