2) Help Information: Searching for Music

Try searching with one or two key words from the artist's name, the song title or even phrases from the song lyrics.

TIPS: 

1. When you have found what you are looking for, left click your mouse on the song title and (depending on server loads at the time) a download monitor page will open directing you to the currently active and fastest server. Next, if your browser is configured to play music, you can left click your mouse on the song title link and play the song, or Download the song by right clicking your mouse on the link title and select "Save Target as.." in Microsoft Explorer or "Save Link as.." in Netscape Navigator.

2. This variant of our search engine, SpiderMonkey3, crawls our server cluster music resources to find MPEG format .mp3/.mpg/.mpeg/.wma  files exclusively. Because music  files are binary they contain no readable text information. On one of our servers we have expanded the database for many of these files with lyrics and other information that will enhance your search capabilities. This is a work in progress and we will keep you up to date. Meanwhile, to increase the effectiveness of your search, use fewer keywords.

3. Don't search for the actual URI unless you are certain of it's correct syntax. It is a hopeless guessing routine and it leaves the engine no option but to make an absolute decline of your search if even one character in your search criteria is out of place. That includes misspelling. The problem is that you won't know if the file doesn't exist or if it does exist if you incorrectly entered the filename.

WHAT IS "MP3"?

MP3 is simply a file format or, more specifically, an audio compression file format. The format employs an algorithm that compresses the music file, achieving significant data reduction while retaining "near" CD-quality sound. A three-minute song that would require about 32 megabytes of disk space in its original form can be compressed utilizing MP3 technology into a file of about 3 megs without a significant reduction in sound quality. Using a 56k modem, the song can then be transmitted over the Internet in a few minutes, rather than the two hours that would be required had the file not first been compressed.

MP3 technology enables users to download, upload and store much more music than before. It is now possible for individuals to create virtual libraries of all of their favorite tunes simply by downloading them from the Internet. They can "rip" MP3 files from their own CDs using inexpensive or, in some cases, free software designed exclusively for that purpose. Users can then enjoy these files in a variety of ways. They can listen to them on portable MP3 players or directly from their hard drives, they can send their files via email to other music fans, or they can upload their files to the Internet for anyone to enjoy. And because the music is in digital form, each successive copy made of the sound file is of the same quality as its predecessor.

MPEG Audio Layer-3, popularly referred to as MP3, is a digital format for the encoding of audio data, developed through a joint effort of Fraunhofer IIS, and the University of Erlangen in Germany. 

The revolutionary nature of the ISO-MPEG Audio Layer-3 algorithm lies in the perceptual coding technique which exploits the understanding of the subjective faculty of human hearing and the mechanism of human auditory perception to evaluate how data can be compressed while retaining very high audio fidelity.