after i down load a song and open it with windows media player, a screen appears saying i need MEDIA PASS to play it. i opened it and it wanted to add all kinds of stuff. i can't play any of my songs. sorry if this has been asked before. please help

What kind of audio file is it?
Are these problematic ones WMA files?
I'd recommend staying well away from WMA format. Such files are spammed on the network to either promote businesses or to try to curb file sharing by putting viruses and other dangerous website links inside the WMA files.

Also, some mp3 files that show up are not really mp3 files but have hidden .exe file extensions.

I'd recommend looking at these posts: 1. Virus thread: Typical virus spam file sizes - Make a note of them (click on blue link to see)

2. How to find music (& check the links Sleepless put in, they are not necessarily obvious links.)

I've encountered this with a few files labeled mp3.

Stay away from visiting sites that spring up in your player. Just delete the bogus files. You should also set your player to not connect to the internet. If you want to get album info for your music, there are many free programs that will do so without using your player, thus making you less vulnerable to trojans.

i have read everything connected with the above posts, my head is still spinning and i'm a computer geek. thanks lord of the rings and blackhorse. these problems take the fun out of this site. you would think limewire could do something about this, such as a program that would strip all this bad stuff out while in the process of downloading their stuff. again, thanks so very much you guys.

Supposedly the Junk filter is supposed to help remove the bad files. However, the Junk filter is a dynamic learning filter, you need to train it so it knows the good from the bad files.

Unfortunately yes, there is a lot of spam on the network, and learning some basic skills to recognise what is genuine & what is spam is needed. At least with the sample images in one of those links, it gives some clues. Such as ignoring audio files that show no audio bitrate or are smaller than a particular size. You can use LW's filters to filter the search results by size. Most audio songs are between 1-10 MB depending on their length & Bitrate. The higher the bitrate & song length, the larger the file size will be. Make sure you set your LW window up to show bit-rate. Song files with no bit-rate will most likely be fake (viruses or such.)

Example: a 3 minute song encoded at 320 kbps is going to have a larger file size than the same song encoded at 128 kbps.

THANKS