[johnfowles]

Originally Posted by charlene

I'm hesitant to download from the winrar site..is it safe?
is it available in MP3 form anywhere?

I had noticed that Char in another thread had referred to the rapidshare.com site as the "winrar site" an understandable confusion when you realise that twice recently Tony G has discovered and given us links to download files with the ".rar" file extension, and the common program for dealing with rars is Winrar (just as the common program for dealing with zipfiles is Winzip
I have now looked into the question of rar and zip files in more detail in order to help anybody else who might be confused.
As usually happens when I set out to explain something I feel the urge write it in the style of a tutorial so that in due course I can use the text for another of my world famous tutorials (yes they are not unknown down under)
and will be illustrating my presentation with suitable screenshots.
cue for a timely plug for my just rewritten and uploaded
Screenshot Tutorial
As I understand it both zip and rar files are created by archiving utilities
which basically lightly compress a collection of files to save space and reduce the ownloading time
as a topical example I will use Tony's latest find (the two different concerts held in Seattle WA on May 16th 1974
The two rar files you can download are
1. the first (7PM) set
file GLSW741.rar 98MB which is a most worthwhile compression because
this "unrars" to 18 mp3s that total 145 MB plus 4 other files 141KB
and loading them into the freeware burning program burrrn.exe shows:-　

2 the second (10PM) set
file GLSW742.rar 98MB
unrars to 17 mp3s totalling 135MB plus 4 other files 117KB

Before I downloaded the two rar file I satisfied a long standing curiosity and found out why "rar" files are so named. a quick Google found as often happens a "wiki" at:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAR where I read:-
"RAR stands for Roshal ARchive. It is a non-documented archive file format that supports data compression, error recovery, and file spanning.[1] It was developed by a Russian software engineer, Eugene Roshal (the first letter of his surname contributing to the name of the archive format), and is currently licensed by win.rar GmbH"
the next thing to note is that both winzip and winrar are not free programs but shareware
the winzip website says it starts at $29.95
and winrar is "Free to try (40-day trial, some features disabled); $29.00 to buy"
whilst unrar for windows is $12.95
I even once went to the trouble and risk of searching for a winzip "crack" or illegal registration code, but as so often happens a more diligent googling revealed a superb altruistic piece of freeware that IMHO is vastly more user friendly than either winzip PK-unzip, winrar or unrar
This program is jZip – a free WinZip alternative


whose home pagedescribes it as
Create, open and extract Zip, TAR, GZip and 7-Zip. Open and extract from RAR and ISO. jZip is absolutely FREE for everybody, home and enterprise users jZip is an easy to use and fast archiving software jZip is based on proven7-Zip technology by Igor Pavlov
With jzip for me the best thing is (having previously with winzip had to break off unzipping to create or find a suitable location to unzip to)is that with jzip the right click menu contains a context jzip option meaning that simply right clicking on a zip or rar file's filename includes a specific jzip item that handily expands to include a choice of several most useful options, especially the automatic creation of a suitably entitled receiving folder in the same area as the downloaded rar file itself.brilliant


OK now you have the sets of mp3s what do you want to do with them?
Presumably play them either in Windows Media Player or a player of your choice
I prefer the original version of Musicmatch (not the vulgarised castrated and basrtardised Yahoo Player replacement and versions 9 and 10 are available as free downloads from
http://www.oldversion.com/MusicMatch-Jukebox.html
or of course burn to a CD.
Whilst most burning programs will happily burn direct from a set of mp3s.
I heartily recommend the freeware Express Burn from
http://www.nch.com.au/burn/index.html

which is a great program that proves that not all Australians are hooligans!!
which I found when trying to find a program to burn directly from FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) files
which I was delighted to find has a most user friendly built in facility to select
"Session At Once"
with the most useful option to select a variable pause or gap between tracks
and this can be set to zero. If you do that when the set of mp3s is from a concert the resulting CD will run continuously with barely perceptable "joins" whilst still having the provision of being able to select an individual track