Downloads: Decoding

This may answer some questions...

Multiple successive orders problem...

If you are a macintosh user, we have identified a problem with placing successive orders on our shop - whilst your first order should process perfectly, there is a likelihood that your second order may not process at all. This seems to be due to the way cookies are handled on mac browsers (both Safari and Firefox have this problem), and despite much discussion with our software partners, we have been unable to find a fix for this issue. However - it is easy to work around. To make multiple successive orders, simply quit your browser and launch again, which should clear the problem. This bug does not appear to affect Windows users.

What to do with your downloaded files...

If you purchase a track from us, it will come as a single mp3 file, which can be imported into iTunes or your music player. Album downloads however contain many tracks, and they are bundled together into a single 'zip' file, suitable for downloading. To decode/expand this file you will need a decompression utility (software or program). There are different ones of mac or PC...

Windows (Listening Earth runs on Macs, so this advice has been offered by a friend who uses Windows XP Professional. If anyone can add to or improve on these suggestions, please email us):
"1) Save the file to your selected folder, eg; My Music in My Documents.
2) Double left click on the saved file, this opens up WinZip in my case (not sure what other unzipping options there are, but you could try versiontracker.com for other utilites, mac or windows), click on the Extract icon, select where the new folder will be put, click on Extract button to start the extraction process.
3) Go into the new folder and double click on one of the files to play it, in my case using Windows Media Player, and check the extraction has worked. The whole album can be imported into iTunes for playing or uploading to iPod."

Mac (OSX): You could begin by right clicking on the zip file and see what applications are available on your computer to open it. If you don't have anything suitable, there are several applications we know of; 'Stuffit Expander' is a well-known extraction utility, but we actually use 'BetterZip'. There may have been a program called 'zipit' for OS9. A range of compression utilties, both current and retro, can be downloaded from download.com. Usually one can simply drag and drop the album folder onto your decompression program icon, or else choose 'open' from within the program, or double click on the zip file icon. It may expand automatically, or you may have to follow the instructions and save as a folder. Once you have the extracted folder of mp3 files, simply drag and drop, or import them into iTunes or your music playing program.


If you have any other questions or difficulties with our shop, please email us. Worthwhile suggestions will be added to this FAQ.