I'll leave that up to others to suggest. There's many Gnutella programs to choose from. But learning how to pick good from bad quality music is a skill you should learn. There are many tips on these forums, sometimes limited to specific forum sections, but the principles are the same for all the gnutella programs, and if you wish to learn about them, worth searching unless someone wishes to suggest them. Here's one example where to find them. eg: How to find music, & Typical file SIZEs of Spammed Virus files posing as audio files.

I'd recommend two sources of music. (1) with due care using a gnutella program, using hopefully new learnt skills to find decent quality audio files. (2) using a genuine Torrent program, either uTorrent or Vuse (Azureus).

Well , I think I have just found an excellent P2P software program. At least so far it has been just excellent. It is Limewire. It gives great download choices and also puts the song in my beloved iTunes. So what can be more perfect than that? Hope I haven't spoken too soon lol.

if not Shareaza, what would you suggest? Your response time is unbelievably fantastic. I was typing out what I understood about the static address info. Take it you don't want it.

There's lot's of gnutella programs to try. Your response surprised me too, I just moved the other posts into its own topic.

If your router utilizes UPnP then there are up to date gnutella programs that can usually communicate with such & open a port when needed for listening & connecting, etc. If your router does not have a reliable or any UPnP support, then not much can be done on that front if you cannot port forward. You must have a static ip address in order to port forward a router. I do understand some ISP's are a bit touchy about users deciding to set a static ip on their own. It's purely a marketing ploy. Even when I set a static ip address, my external ip address kept changing every few days at least. Thus had the effect of a dynamic ip address but the internal address was static (stayed the same.)

This message has 2 parts:

1) I know there are a lot of programs out there. The question was, which would you suggest? In my first lookings around this site, it almost seemed to be a LW forum. Is that what you use? Does it require a static ipaddress, too? I just want a reliable tool that is not subscriptioned based. Good file orgainzation is a plus.

2) I found the default settings pl;us option 1 and option 2 for setting up static address "on devices in your network". That's not going to work, is it? If not, I really want another tool that will work for my situation.

Static: 192.168.1.1 - .63
Dynamic: 192.168.1.64 - .250
Reserved: 192.168.1.251-.253
Subnet: 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway: 192.168.1.254
DNS: 192.168.1.254
CIDR: 192.168.1.0/24

Static: 172.16.1.1 - .32
Dynamic: 172.16.1.33 - .250
Reserved: 172.16.1.251-.254
Subnet: 255.255.0.0
Default Gateway: 172.16.0.1
DNS: 172.16.0.1
CIDR:172.16.0.0/16

Static: 10.0.1.1 - .32
Dynamic: 10.0.1.33 - .250
Reserved: 10.0.1.251-.254
Subnet: 255.255.0.0
Default Gateway: 10.0.0.1
DNS: 10.0.0.1
CIDR: 10.0.0.0/16

OOps!! Guess I'm in the new thread and just found the suggested AVS link up above. I'll go study it. Thanks.

I went. I studied. I continued thinking thoughts I had already started and I can now -- pardon me Lord -- make LW work as effectively and speedily as the first service I tried. Where should I post my hints?

(1) I've used LW for many years, next longest would be Phex which is also very good & has some advantages over LW. I have tried the other gnutella programs but because I use Mac OSX, the other gnutella programs do not have Mac versions. That limits me to only using the other gnutella programs on a part time basis.

Sounds like you have already decided on LW as an alternative. If that's your decision, I suspect LW 4.16 might suit your file organisation desires better than LW 5 at present. LW 5 is still arguably in beta stage with changes, slowly bringing back tools with each release, & next they will be re-organising the library window. Though there are some things I do like about the separation of file types in LW 5.

(2) Most gnutella programs that have continued development until now have UPnP support, some better support than others. However, all will still require you to give exceptions to them in your Windows firewall.
If you need assistance, feel free to begin a new thread topic in one of the LW sections of the forums.

Here's a starting point to learn about LW: http://www.gnutellaforums.com/gettin...ire-4-5-a.html

For LW 5.1.3, get it here: http://www9.limewire.com/download/LimeWireWin-full.exe or even better would be the LW 5.2.2 beta: LimeWire 5.2.2 (Beta) - Lime Wire

Alternatively for LW 4.16: http://www.gnutellaforums.com/downlo...downloads.html