It's kind of weird, this music sharing system. You sign up for a service with one of those music sharing "companies" with the nice photos of smiling people at their computers and then you are told to get Lime Wire. You never see the original "company" again.
You pay your 25 bucks or whatever, but are we all seeing the same list of songs with LIME WIRE?
What happens if I pay another "service" another 25 bucks? Do I get more songs?
Could I have just downloaded Lime Wire for free and had access to music for free? Are ALL these sites the same "company"?

Yes, there are a number of sites that advertise themselves through the biased search engines and "sell" copies of packages to access Gnutella (when I was starting out, I paid for copies of Morpheus and Mactella from such sites — but not $25 which is excessive by anyone's standards). Mostly what they sell are old versions of the packages they obtained for nothing (business is business). However, Limewire is part of the shareware community and you can either pay a token sum or download for free as your conscience dictates. You need never go back to the original service sites you paid nor go to any other such site. You have found a safe haven from corporate greed here.

What you find on Gnutella is what other people are willing to share. If the world is generous with its music collection, you get a good choice. If the world is mean, you get little. But Limewire aims to find up to 250 hits for every search you make. Separate your searches by reasonable time periods and you are likely to find a different set of sources for the more popular material.

So, welcome to the world of Gnutella, my friend. You made a reasonable choice in Limewire. If you need help in any aspect of Limewire not covered by the FAQ and the many threads in this forum, volunteers here will be pleased to advise.

So then, we DO all see the same files? Or not?

What did KathW mean by "other free clients"? Who are they? How can I find them? Thank you.

No matter which application you use, everyone who accesses Gnutella has access to the same pool of files provided by the other users but, from minute to minute, users come and go, so the content changes dynamically all the time.

Hence, if you seach for something rare, you might find that only one or two users have that file and so, no matter how many times you search, you will never improve upon that level of availability and everyone will only see those sources. Conversely, if you search for a popular file, you might find one hundred sources in your first search and one hundred different sources for that same file if you were to repeat the serarch one hour later.

Further, because the search returns are limited to avoid overloading Gnutella, and which sources any user hits will be determined by random chance, two different users will never see the same selection of hosts for popular files. Although repeating the searches would, over time, probably enable each user to see all the hosts if they should ever want to do that (which would be a strange desire because you can usually download from the first batch of sources you hit).

So the answer to your question is actually, "It depends."

Sorry, I've only just picked up Kath's post. To be able to answer that question, you would have to tell us what machine are you using and which operating system?

Yeah, I was to refering to KathW's comments earlier on this thread about "other free clients" and how to find them. Thanks for the info.

Only 10% of the world avoids PCs, so most of the supposedly superior packages are written to be windoze compatible. Your options are also limited because OS9.2 is getting a little old in the tooth. For example, http://www.xlife.org/ provides Acquisition which, although derived from the Limewire core, is Java 1.4.1 compatible and, in some respects, works better than the original. But it's only available in an OSX version. I've tried packages called Morpheus and Mactella but was distinctly unimpressed. I know some people who want to use the PC packages install a virtual PC in their Macs. By my strange values, this is like buying a top-of-the-range sports car and putting a saloon engine in it but some people will do anything to get access to the PC packages. So, my advice is to stick with Limewire for the time being.

thanks