For those of you familiar with Napster, here's an insider's guide to some cool tips and tricks. Searching When looking for specific songs, always use the song field. Put in a prominent word from the title, the more distinctive the better. For obscure songs, especially for really popular artists, use the song field whenever possible. The song field is also a must when you're searching for a band that has one huge song that everyone and their mom has (such as Blur's Song 2), and you want something else by them. Maybe you want to find a band that shares a word in common with another really popular band (The Verve and Verve Pipe, for example). The 100-results-max fills up really quickly. Most people won't use punctuation for band names, song titles, etc. So if you're looking for Dr. Dre tracks don't use the dot. (Sorry Dre, know how you feel about Napster and all.) Same goes for bands like REM. Switching servers might help if you really want that extra-rare live bootleg fast. If a search doesn't turn anything up, disconnect and reconnect to attempt to get onto a different server. The servers are all discrete so you might find the complete works of whatever artist you're looking for on another one. Hot List is your friend. It can be the most powerful searching tool you'll find. When you find someone who has a similar taste in music (maybe you saw them on several different searches), or with a really fast connection, or both, add 'em to your Hot List. Once there, you can browse through the person's entire library. This can be a great way to find new music, because if you like something they like, they might have other music you might like that you haven't heard. Don't get carried away, though. Downloading The great bitrate debate: What sampling rate is the best combination of size and quality? It's no accident that the vast majority of MP3s on Napster are encoded at a bitrate of 128. At 128 you pretty much get a 1:1 ratio in minutes to megabytes, and also you don't sacrifice much in the way of sound quality to CDs. For this reason many people feel that 128 is the most efficient bitrate. Don't settle for anything less if you at all can, because you get a sharp loss in quality. Also popular are 160 and 192 rates, and it seems that new albums always make their first appearance at 192. This last level maxes out what the human ear can distinguish, and at that point you're well into the realm of diminishing returns. The difference between 160 and 128 is noticeable, with 160 providing more in the way of high frequencies (use headphones to get the effect). The difference between 160 and 192 is much less than 160 and 128, and doesn't justify the big increase in file size between 160 and 192. Anything above 192 is just silly. Don't be a leech. Unofficial Napster etiquette is that you download one track at a time, at most two. Don't take someone's entire collection, either, that's just not cool. If you act like a leech expect to have your massive downloads rudely interrupted. This doesn't go for entire albums, however. If someone has gone to the trouble of sorting and labeling an entire album, feel free to take it, just one track at a time. Beware of truncated songs. Lots of people only have a few minutes of a song, or even worse, like the first few seconds. It's annoying, so just check for the song length. Firewalls are a necessary evil, particularly if you're going to be downloading at work. (I've heard of such a practice, though I don't subscribe to it myself.) Firewalls can considerably increase the time it takes to negotiate a connection between two parties, which means that both you and people trying to download from you will be staring at "Getting Info" a lot. Once the connection is made, firewalls won't affect the transfer rate that much. You just have to be patient. If both parties are firewalled, then nothing can get through. You can use the Napster console to send messages to people. If you really, really want to download someone's entire Rush stash but feel just a bit guilty, you can send a "tell" to that person to make sure they approve. The command is /tell  in the Chat menu. You can also use this to like, chat, bitch at them, or compliment them on their taste. Like all Napster console commands, /tell is undocumented. Configure your maximum uploads and downloads the way you wish. A good rule of thumb is to keep max uploads at one (any more and leeches can seriously hog your bandwidth). Max downloads is another matter. It's a balance between how pressed for time you are, your connection speed, and just how much music you're seeking at the time. I keep mine at six. Download while you sleep. This is becoming an increasingly common practice, especially among Napster users who are pressed for time during the day. What you do is, you conduct several searches and queue up a ton of downloads, and then go to sleep. Next morning you check out what you caught, like an MP3 fisherman. If you're going to do this, it's a good idea to set max downloads at two, so you don't get smacked down for leeching. Sorting/Playing Once you get a nice little collection going, it's time to start sorting and organizing your stash. Think of it as keeping your CD collection orderly. Lots of people create folders in their shared Napster directory for individual bands or genres. If you have any truncated songs, don't share them. Stick 'em in an unshared folder labeled "Unfinished" or something like that. If you have complete albums, you can sort them in track order by sticking a two-digit track number in between the artist and song title. The Napster internal player is pretty functional, but if you want something a little more slick and feature-rich, we recommend WinAmp. Any other external player is either too unnecessarily complex, too memory hungry, or both.