First of all, forget about all these buttons and options! It’s not even necessary to have a special user-name; just choose the directory where eMule will store your downloads. You do by going to “Options” > “Directories” and browsing for the folder where you want your downloads to arrive. After that,

1. Ensure eMule servers are updated. Go to Options > Server, and mark the option “Auto-update server list at startup”. Then press the Search button; in eMule’s search page again forget all options and take care of the following:

2. At the “Name” input-box write what you want to download. If a song, write the name of the artist and some words of the title, e.g. Beatles Submarine. You don’t need to write the full title of the song. In fact, the less words you write, the more results you are going to have. You must write more words only if less is vague. E.g. If you write just “submarine” you will not find only Beatles.

3. At the “Type” box, if you want a single song select “Audio”, but select “Archive” if you want an album or a complete discography.

4. At the “Method” box select “Kad Network” for your first search, and if you don’t find much, select “Global (servers)”.

5. Press “Start” to let your search begin. Results arrive, and here many people are confused even more, not knowing what to do with these results. Read carefully and you will see that it is not that difficult.

1. Sort results according to availability. Results are divided into columns and each column has a header (File name, size, availability, Complete sources, etc.) Click the “Availability” header one or two times, as needed to have the large numbers at the top. This column says how many people have what you want.

The more they have it, the sooner your download finishes. However, it is very important to combine maximum sources with other characteristics, as is the quality of the encoding. Note also that something you don’t find today, may exist tomorrow; emule uses various servers and not all of them have everything available.

A high quality encoding results to a larger archive, so that, if the same song is available in a 3 MB and in a 10 MB version, the latter’s sound quality is better. If you are after sound quality you must select the larger archives.

If a high quality song is available in 3 sources and the same song in a lower quality is available in 12 sources, you have to choose, if you want to wait longer to download the high quality version, or if you prefer to download quickly, but a lower quality version.

Besides these, you must ensure that the song is available complete. This you can see at the “Complete sources” column. 100% means that the sources of your song have it complete. This is usually the case with percentages as low as 80%, i.e., 80% usually means 100%!

2. When you decide what to download, select it and double-click or press Enter to start downloading. Then go to the Transfers screen (press the “Transfers” button at the top icon-bar of eMule). You see here the song you selected in the search screen. Right-click on it and select the “Details” option. At the window that opens notice the information at the bottom, where it says “Seen complete“. If there is a date here, then your song is indeed available complete, otherwise (if it says “never”) you are downloading an incomplete song, which means you’d better delete this download and search again to find your song complete.

Note: If you exchange files with your friends often, then you have to go to Options > General > UserName, and select a special username by which your friends will be able to recognise you and open for you eMule’s “friend slot”, giving you thus priority over all the other eMule users who wait to download.

* To obtain maximum download speed and more accurate search results, you need to have a HIGH ID in eMule. TheFreeWindows publishes a brief and clear guide on what is high ID and how you can configure eMule to get a high ID

* If you are going to download a lot of archives, you can have a tool like ExtractNow to monitor your folder and extract them automatically as soon as they arrive.