hiya - hope you're enjoying exploring limewire

yes - you can listen to songs as they come down - if you're using a recent version of LW you can just highlight a downloading file, right click and then choose the 'launch' option - that'll kick the LW player into life (you'll see the progress of the file on the bottom right of the LW window/screen) - but - the LW player is not very good and sticks and skips when playing files that are downloading - a better idea is just to use whatever player you normally use and when selecting a file go to the LW 'incomplete' directory and select the file you're downloading

and yes - you need hosts - if there's no connections to hosts you won't get anything in your search results - remember the hosts you're connected to keeps changing all the time which is good because it means you get an ever changing spread of files to think about downloading - but not so good in that every now and again you'll find you're connected to hosts with very few files or worse find you're not connected to anyone at all

have fun, bad_vlad