There are thousands and thousands of MP3 files in the Usenet music groups. In fact, it is a perfect place to discover new artists and music. However it is impossible to download everything available there. No matter how much time and bandwidth you have, it is better to avoid downloading unwanted items.

Ozum gives you a way to find what you like quickly and with minimal expenses. You can sample MP3 files (in fact, other media files too) and decide whether you want a particular file before downloading it. Ozum gives you a chance to choose what you are about to download.

Quick and easy way - works great with MP3s

1. If you've never used Ozum before, install it, start and follow the Wizard. It will lead you through initial steps necessary to get started. If you have any difficulties, click on Help | How To Start. This chapter will give you more information.

2. After you've subscribed to a few music groups, the bottom left area of Ozum window should look like Figure 1. Double click on any of the newsgroups to enter.

Figure 1. Subscribed Newsgroups

3. A dialog box will be shown offering you information about available new articles and asking how many headers you wish to download. Music groups are popular and may contain huge number of articles. It is not advisable to download all available headers at once. A more optimal way is to download a portion of, say, 50000 headers, work with them, then delete when finished, and download the next portion. You loose nothing when you work this way, but save time. Ozum works faster because it does not have to maintain and process huge arrays of many hundreds of thousands of headers.

Figure 2. New Headers Dialog

If you are not interested in the oldest articles and want to skip, say 100000 of the oldest ones, put this number in the Skip field.

Please note that news servers are usually a bit late with unregistering expired articles. This is why quite a few of the oldest articles will fail to download, though are listed in the group.

4. After you have downloaded new headers, make sure that the list of articles is displayed in the Full View mode. Click on View | List of Articles | Full.

Figure 3. View Menu

Media files are large and thus usually can't be posted in one article due to common article size limits. This is why posting software automatically splits them in parts and posts each part in a separate article. In the Full View mode, you see all parts. In the Brief View mode, you see only one line representing all parts of a given file. To assemble a file, you have to download all parts and join them. Ozum does this automatically. To sample a file, you can download only one part of it!

5. To make your work easier, arrange article list by subjects. This will bring related articles together. To arrange articles, click one or more times on the header of the Subjects column. You will see something similar to Figure 4.

Figure 4. List of Articles

6. To sample an MP3 file, double click on any part of the file. Ozum will ask you whether you want to download all parts (whole file) or only that part. Click on Download That Part.

7. Article viewer window will be displayed and the article downloading will start. You don't have to wait till it finishes. You can minimise the window and start downloading other samples in parallel, to save time and make a better use of your connections. After downloading finishes, double click on the part name shown in the lower left area of the article viewer window. Ozum will start your default MP3 player that will play that part.

Figure 5. Part Name in Article Viewer Window

Sampling Other Media Files

Sampling works best for MP3s because almost any part gives you a playable fragment. Ozum supports sampling of other media files as well, such as mpeg, avi, asf, rm, and wav. But, video sampling is not as easy and reliable. It is not always technically possible to construct a valid playable video file from a fragment. This depends on the encoding of the original file and its structure. You can count on first parts of video files giving you valid samples, but sampling of other parts is more a matter of luck. In some files, almost every part is playable, in other - none except the first one. Still, Ozum sampling saves hips of unwanted downloading. This is even more true about video files because they are much larger than MP3s.Try it and you will see yourself.

The quick and easy way of sampling described above for MP3s, does not work with video files, because Ozum has to construct a preview for each file part you want to sample, before you can play it. The method described below works for MP3 as well as video files.

If you have not done it, do steps 1-5 above.

6. To sample files, select the parts that you want to sample (to select more than one part, hold the Control key down and keep clicking), right-click on any selected part and choose View Samples of Selected.

Figure 6. Selected Articles

7. Ozum will shift the view to samples of selected articles. At first, all of them will appear with a red question mark in the center of a square. This will change as the parts are downloaded and samples are ready to play. A new "RS" - read samples job will appear in the jobs area at the bottom.

Figure 7. Samples View

8. As samples are downloaded and ready to play, you can right-click on any of them and choose Play Sample. Ozum will start your default media player with this sample. If you like what you hear, double click on the sample and Ozum will ask you whether you want to download the whole file. If a sample fails to download for whatever reason (e.g. the article has expired or has been cancelled), a square with a cross in the center will be shown in its place, as on Figures 7and 8.

Figure 8. Samples View and Samples Context Menu

9. You don't have to wait until samples are downloaded. You can return to the article list view and continue your work. To do it, click on List of Articles in the samples context menu or on a similar icon on the toolbar. Ozum will continue downloading samples in the background. You can do pretty much anything when you are back to the list view (download articles, save/delete them, etc.), but you can't order new samples until the RS job has finished downloading samples. To stop the job, right-click on it and select Stop.

Articles, for which samples are ready, will be marked with a little icon on the right (the icon is different for video files), in the Status column, as shown on Figure 9. If you want to play them, right-click on the subject and select Play Sample. Articles that could not be downloaded, are marked with a red cross.

Figure 9. List of Articles