Hello:
I am running an iMac DV-SE with Mac OS 9.1. Afyer installin g Limewire last week, I downloaded just one music file. After dowloading I went to open and use the file, but no program I had would do the Job. I do have many pieces of sound playing software.

I would like to know just what format the music files are in. If anyone can help I'd surely appreciate it.
Thank you,
Jack Mahon

What's the file extension?

I've been using LimeWire for about a month and it worked just fine on my mac. Then all of a sudden in the middle of downloading some music files, it started sending them as generic files and I too cannot open them with any program. The icons are just plain white instead of the usual mp3 icon. I have always been able to open them in SoundJam and now nothing will open them.

I posted this several days ago and no one responded. I hope someone can help

Same problem. Anyone know anything about this?

I think that the extensions may have been stripped. Simply add the extensions onto the files?

Some of the symptoms described here are very puzzling, especially the one about not being able to open sound files with SoundJam. My experience has been that if I drop a file on the SoundJam application icon it will recognize most known formats and it will not matter if the file name has a proper extension. In fact I'm currently using it play partial/incomplete downloads in progress.

I think this only happens with macintosh users.
I have soundjam, realplayer, quicktime and am no able to open most of the mp3 or mpegs I download.

picked this up from a different reply (which was very helpful): the file you have is an mp3 but your computer doesn't know. Just delete the last 4 digits of the name of the file and just type ".mp3" then open it, it should work. I hope it does for you!

Macs don't use filenames the same way PC's do. It doesn't have to have the ".mp3" tag in order to recognize the file.

Somehow this problem resolved itself for me since I posted my original message. Now when I download the files, they work. I did fiddle around with the File Exchange control panel a little, but I'm not sure if that's what it was or not.