Bearshare & (S)limewire = virus central Your best to get yourself Bit torrent or something similar and get your downloads from one of the many great torrent sites out there. I use Iso hunt mainly for my torrents because my ISP has blocked pirate bay for me but it usually has everything i need.
^^ X2... do not use limewire or anything like that. Use Utorrent and then download torrents. I used to use newzbin.
torrents are the way to go. depending on what music you are into, there are different places to actually dl the torrents themselves. step 1.) download a free torrent client (like Utorrent, Azureus, theres many of them) step 2.) do a google search for the album you want, and include "torrent" after it. click search. it will bring up various sites that have the album you want in a small "torrent" file, usually only a few KB. step 3.) open up UTorrent/Azureus or whatever program you got. open the small torrent file of the album you just downloaded in this program. it will start downloading. step 4.) just leave it open so when its done dl, it "seeds" to others. this means you are giving back and not just leaching stuff. this step is not required to actually dl music, but its a good habit to get into.
yea, i hate when i finally find a torrent i have been looking for and there are like 10,000 leech and only 10 seed...WTF?? *EDIT* Make sure you set an upload bandwidth if you do seed.
That's why you go for a paid torrent sites like Iptorrent hell of a lot better seeder/leecher ratio and there's nothing wrong with programs like Limewire,Shareaza,Winmx ect.
i use bearshare have not had any virus problems , you only get them if you dont no wat your looking for
remember: IPFILTER.DAT block all those corporate IP's. bluetack.co.uk i think is the site... just search around for it.