- Where Can I Find MP3 Music?
- Buying Music Online
- Search Sites
- What's FTP? 'Cause If I have to Learn One More Three-Letter Acronym, I'm Going to Hurl
- Ratio Sites
- Reading FTP
- Searching for HTTP and FTP Music Files: The Quest for Billy Idol
- Using a Web Site Search Engine–Audiogalaxy.com
- Finding Music with MP3 Fiend
- Verifying Fiend Search Results
- Interpreting MP3 Fiend Verification Logs
- Finding Songs with MP3 Fiend's Music Charts
- Newsgroups–MP3s the Hard Way
- Using a Newsgroup
Reading FTP
The Internet address, which is called a universal resource locator (URL), for typical Web pages looks like this: http://www.mp3under.com/. FTP servers look different from the URL you use for a typical Web page. For example, Microsoft has an anonymous FTP server at ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/ where you can download updated files. But most FTP sites are weirder than that. Most times you'll be dealing with such unlovely names as ftp://224.12.343.748 and ftp://382.409.131.24. The computers that make up the Internet see site names as four sets of numbers separated by dots. (Actually, URL addresses are also numbers, but the World Wide Web is kind enough to translate the numbers to words, which humans have an easier time remembering.)
In theory, you can go to an FTP address using Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. But don't. Neither browser was designed for FTP, and so the results are awkward and uncertain FTP connections. They're not worth the effort. Instead, we've included on the book's CD a program that lives to connect to FTP sites: CuteFTP. It's an easy way to connect and transfer files. We'll get to CuteFTP in the next chapter, where we cover downloading files. Right now, we need to get back to the current taskfinding MP3 files.