Lawrence.com

I know Santa left loads of computers under Christmas trees this year. A majority of computers will be going to music lovers, and along with these will come the need for a good soundcard, better speakers, a CD burner and an MP3 player (both on the computer and a portable system).

Once these new gadgets are unwrapped, without a doubt, you will want music to listen to. The only way to quench that thirst will be to find some MP3s.

We all know where the hardware comes from: elves at the North Pole. But where do MP3s (which stands for MPEG Layer-3 and is the accepted audio compression format) come from?

They come from your neighbors' computers. They come from the computer of the kid who skateboards by your house every day, and they come from the office and home computers of people you have never met. This process, called file sharing, is made possible by a hard-working group in Redwood City, Calif., at a company called Napster.

Napster was founded in May 1999, by then-Northeastern University freshman Shawn Fanning, who a year earlier had started developing the technology that would soon revolutionize the music world. The company has since become synonymous with the term MP3.

Napster is offering the eighth version of its software via its site, www.napster.com. This version promises to make file transfers more reliable, and includes new features and fixes. I've been using Napster since 1999, and have found every new version to be noticeably different than its predecessor.

Let's go get some music!

First, be sure you have a good computer with an Internet connection (preferably a DSL or cable modem). The last thing you want to do is wait four hours while your 486 PC with a 14.4k modem downloads an MP3 music file.

If your computer has at least a 56K modem and a processor that runs over 133mHz, you should be in business. You should also be sure to have an MP3 player downloaded to your machine. These come in all manners of options and interfaces (see box).

Now go to www.napster.com. When you arrive at the site, you will see the most current version of Napster on the first page. You must download the program and install it on your system. The easiest way to do that is to save it onto your desktop and then double click on the icon and follow the simple on-screen commands to install it � then restart your system.

Don't piss off Metallica

You've probably gone to search engines such as Yahoo! or Google to find Web sites about certain topics before. Napster works like a search engine for finding songs. Once you've signed up for your account, you can start building a collection of MP3s.

When you sign up, you give some personal information, so make sure you don't download a track that will get you in trouble. Downloading any track with the words Metallica or Dr. Dre in it, as well as a growing list of other artists who are legally fighting Napster, will potentially cause your account to be suspended.

A couple of good places to check are www.ArtistsAgainstPiracy.com and www.riaa.com.

People often make the mistake of thinking that you will download songs from the actual Napster site. This is not the case. Based on IRC chat technology, you are connecting into a huge "chat room" with all of the other Napster users and are actually downloading the songs from other people's computers.

Star search

To find a song or artist, go to the "Napster" icon at the top of the screen and select "search" from the pull-down window. I recommend setting your search parameters in the preferences section so your results will only pinpoint songs from people who have at least a cable modem connection or faster. If you try to download a song from someone with a dial-up connection, it will take an eternity.

You can search by artist or title, and your results will appear in a window called "search results." You can see all of the songs that your search resulted in and file information such as the size of the MP3, the total length and, most importantly, the speed of the connection that the file's owner has.

If you are searching for a very mainstream song such as "Thriller" by Michael Jackson, chances are you will find multiple copies. (I tried it and found about 400 people who had it on their computers at that particular time.) Find a version of the song that is on a cable, DSL, T1, T2 or T3 line, and double click on it. It will begin downloading into your "downloaded songs" folder.

Time to rock

Once the song has finished downloading, all you need to do is open the file in the player of your choice to enjoy the music.

There are times when the MP3 files will not play or download properly. Sometimes people will "log off" Napster while you are getting a song from their computer, or they will mislabel song files so you think you are getting a certain track and it turns out to be something totally different. It can be frustrating, but the best thing to do is just delete the non-working file and try downloading from another user.

As you become more familiar with Napster, you will learn that you can download multiple songs, put them in playlists and even go into chat rooms for specific genres of music and look at other people's track lists for ideas of songs to download.

It is very addictive, so you have to know that you may end up becoming a Napster junkie, searching your brain for the most random obscure songs, all available at your fingertips.