Program you can use to acquire mp3s off usenews for your share directory

[wa2ise]

New users usually have the problem of not enough mp3s in their share directories to offer to other winmx users.  One source is to rip your own CD's to mp3s.  Another source are various usenews newsgroups, specifically binaries sounds mp3s groups.  There's one program I've been using, called "Binary News Reaper", that automates the multi-article download, decode and stitch process.   Find it at www.bnr2.org
It's somewhat buggy, but still usable.  Newsgroups like alt.binaries.sounds.1980s.mp3 are the ones to look for. 

Of course you need to access a server that has usenews newsgroups.  your ISP may have on or more.  Or independent services like  www.teranews.com can be used. 

One annoying bug with binary news reaper is that it hangs from time to time, usually when the file MsgLst.bnr gets too big, like 250 megs big.  Just delete it, and restart BNR. 

But once you got it going, you can download  lots of good stuff to add to  your share directory,  But be sure to test play everything to be sure that the mp3s are in fact good, and not corrupted. 

Remember that essentially you can only pick and choose whatever songs people have posted to the newsgroup.  But these people, by posting their mp3 files to the newsgroups, don't mind leaches. But there's plenty of songs posted. So there likely will be songs you forgot about that you'll find and enjoy hearing again.   Or better quality copies of stuff you already have. 

[SamSeeSam]

I use cdex
Anyways you can download a lot of files from download.com and share it as a start until you get a decent number of files so that you can share properely.

Else you can also take a little more effort and share only freeware.

Cheers

[KM]

news groups are pretty useless for much, the content on them is so limited that you don't so much get to find what you want, but get told what to download, and then half of the time there is a part of a file missing

about the only thing news groups can be used for at any practical level is porn, due to the small file sizes of images... and even then the porn on news groups is rubbish, so i've heard, and confirmed after doing some research for the benefit of the community

[wa2ise]

news groups are pretty useless for much, the content on them is so limited that you don't so much get to find what you want, but get told what to download, and then half of the time there is a part of a file missing

That's what I found on my "home" ISP (Earthlink).  That pieces of files were usually missing.  But Teranews is very good about that, about 90% of the posted songs are complete.  And of course you can't really expect to find a specific song when you use the news groups, but I have found stuff I had forgotten about when browsing the posts.    Anyway, I mentioned BNR as another method of getting material for your share directory, but not the best way, nor the worst.