Handy Guide to Using the Files You've Downloaded
Hey people, here's some info about common files that you might encounter at Bitsoup, and a little bit about using these files for their intended purposes. If you're stuck on what exactly a file is or how to open it maybe your answer lies ahead. If you don't find your answer here, then please post in the Help Forum. So without further ado lets get the show on the road!
Audio Files
.wav
WAV files store music in exactly the same format as on a CD. They're the highest quality sound files, but by far the largest. People have created other formats that try to retain sound quality while decreasing file size. Those file formats can be broadly divided into lossy (some information is thrown away) and lossless (all information retained). The rest of this section talks about those other formats.
.mp3
MPEG Audio Layer 3. This is by far the most common music file type on our site. Like other lossy files, MP3 files are much smaller than the recordings they're made from. That's because some less-audible information is discarded when the file is made. The encoding bit rate, measured in kilobits per second (kbps), is important to the quality of the sound. In general, the higher the bitrate the better the sound quality. In our opinion, any sound file constructed at less than a 192 kbps data rate will sound noticeably degraded. That's why the minimum acceptable bitrate for music files here is 192 kbps. Please note that it's not possible to re-encode an existing MP3 file to a higher bitrate. The resulting file sounds worse than the original as there's no way to get back information that was left out when the MP3 was made.
Any program capable of playing sound files can handle MP3s. The files may also be recorded on CD-R or CD-RW media for playback in compatible DVD players, audio CD players, and CD-ROM drives.
.ape
Monkey's Audio files. These are open-source compressed lossless files. You can download their encoder/decoder program as well as plugins for por players from their web site.
.flac
Free Lossless Audio Codec files are compressed lossless files. FLAC has always been open-source and some hardware MP3 players now support that format. FLAC utilities and plugins are available on their web site or you can download a Winamp plugin.
.ogg
Ogg Vorbis is an open-source lossy file format. It's generally considered to be equivalent or better in quality compared to MP3 files encoded at similar bitrates. You can find out more about them and download applications here.
.m4a .aac
MPEG-4 Audio (Advanced Audio Coding) is a lossy proprietary format. AAC is the audio file format used by Apple in their por iTunes Music Store. According to some listening tests, AAC files encoded at lower bitrates (like 96 Kbps) sound as good or better than MP3s encoded at higher bitrates (like 128 Kbps) despite their notably smaller size.
.wma
Windows Media Audio is a proprietary lossy format developed by Microsoft. Though not as por as MP3, some say that WMA tends to outperform MP3 in the area of sound quality, particularly with files encoded at lower bitrates like 64 or 96 Kbps. This performance advantage makes it handy for applications like portable digital audio players, where total play time is limited by a finite amount of internal memory. The Windows Media Audio format features built-in copy protection abilities, unlike MP3.
Music Players and converters:
Windows Media Player comes with every version of Windows. It supports many formats and there are plugins to play most others.
Winamp is probably the most por add-on music player. There are plugins for almost any music file format.
dBpowerAmp is a good converter for most audio formats.
Foobar2000 is an advanced audio player for the Windows platform.
Archive (compressed) and Split Files
.rar .zip .ace .r01 .001
These extensions are quite common and mean that your file(s) are compressed into an "archive".
This is just a way of making the files more compact and easier to download.
To open any of those archives listed above you can use WinRAR (Make sure you have the latest version) or PowerArchiver.
If those progams aren't working for you and you have a .zip file you can try WinZip (Trial version).
If the two first mentioned programs aren't working for you and you have a .ace or .001 file you can try Winace (Trial version).
.001 .002 (alternate possibility)
Sometimes a long file is split using a file splitter tool like HJSplit or MasterSplitter. Either of those programs can be used to reconstruct the original file. The original is simply split into equal-sized slices. For example, if the split files are each 5MB in length, the .001 file is the first 5MB of the original, the .002 is the second 5MB, etc. The trick to spotting these files is that the .001, .002 extension is added after the file's original extension. For example, if the file application.bin was split using this method, the files are called: application.bin.001, application.bin.002, application.bin.003
.cbr .cbz
These are usually comic books in an archive format. a .cbr file is actually the same thing as a .rar file and a .cbz file is the same as a .zip file. However, often when opening them with WinRAR or WinZip it will disorder your pages. To display these archives properly it's often best to use CDisplay.
These files are usually movies or TVshows, or a host of other types of media. They can be viewed using various media players, but I gest using Zoomplayer, BSPlayer, VLC media player or Windows Media Player. Also, you'll need to make sure you have the right codecs to play each individual file. Codecs are a tricky business sometimes so to help you out with your file and what exact codecs it needs try using GSpot. It tells you what codecs you need. Then just look on the net to find them, below are some common codecs and their download links for quick reference:
Can't find what you're looking for? Check out these sites...
• DivX-Digest
• Digital-Digest
• Doom9
• DVD-R Help
.mov
These are QuickTime files. Hopefully you won't have to open these as I hate quicktime, but if you do you can get it here. There are however alternatives to the original program, Check out QuickTime Alternative.
.ra .rm .ram
These are RealPlayer files, a proprietary lossy format. RealPlayer IMO is the devils work. It installs lord knows what on your system and never really goes away when you want to uninstall it. Still if you insists you can get the player here. There are however alternatives to the original program, check out Real Alternative.
vcd/svcd
These can be a pain on some peoples setups, but more so, on your stand-alone DVD player. For all your vcd needs check out www.dvdrhelp.com. These guys know their stuff, and can help you with all kinds of media related questions.
CD Image Files
.bin and .cue
These are your standard images of a CD, and are used quite alot these days. To open them you have a couple options. You can burn them using Nero (Trial Version) or Alcohol 120%, but this proves to be soooooooo problematic for a lot of people. You should also consult this tutorial for burning images with various software programs You can also use Daemon Tools, which lets you mount the image to a "virtual cd-rom", so basically it tricks your computer into thinking that you have another cd-rom and that you're putting a cd with your image file on it into this virtual cd-rom, it's great cuz you'll never make a bad cd again, Alcohol 120% also sports a virtual cd-rom feature. Finally, if you're still struggling to access the files contained within any given image file you can use CDMage to extract the files and then burn them, or just access them from your hard drive. You can also use VCDGear to extract the mpeg contents of a SVCD or VCD image file such as bin/cue.
.iso
Another type of image file that follows similar rules as .bin and .cue, only you extract or create them using WinISO or ISOBuster. Sometimes converting a problematic .bin and .cue file to an .iso can help you burn it to a cd.
.ccd .img .sub
All these files go together and are in the CloneCD format. CloneCD is like most other CD-Burning programs, see the .bin and .cue section if you're having problems with these files.
Other Files
.txt .doc
These are text files. .txt files can be opened with notepad or watever you default text editor happens to be, and .doc are opened with Microsoft Word.
.nfo
These contain information about the file you just downloaded, and it's HIGHLY recommended that you read these! They are plain text files, often with ascii-art. You can open them with Notepad, Wordpad, DAMN NFO Viewer or UltraEdit.
.pdf
Opened with Adobe Acrobat Reader.
.jpg .gif .tga .psd
Basic image files. These files generally contain pictures, and can be opened with Adobe Photoshop or whatever your default image viewer is.
.sfv
Checks to make sure that your multi-volume archives are complete. This just lets you know if you've downloaded something complete or not. (This is not really an issue when DL:ing via torrent.) You can open/activate these files with SFVChecker (Trial version) or hkSFV for example.
.par
This is a parity file, and is often used when downloading from newsgroups. These files can fill in gaps when you're downloading a multi-volume archive and get corrupted or missing parts. Open them with QuickPar.
r players from their web site.
