you should make a portable verson of lime wire. It would be nice not having youre parents raving down youre back about haveing limewire on youre computer, because they think every song you download comes with a virous. Ive downloaded 4000 songs and my computer is runin fine but they still wont shut up. But no offense to you parrents out thare and thanks.
Lizardpocher.
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Frostwire does the same thing as limewire.
...a .mp3 file can't contain a virus. That's just ignorance, nothing more. What can cause problems is if you download a song the record industry is watching. They have faster Internet than you do and more computers, so they will often download their own albums and look at who downloads from them (or they have companies do this for them which are specifically set up to do so).
In other words, there's a concern, but it's not what the file will do to your computer, it's about the letter you'll get in the mail from your ISP or the C&D you'll get from a lawyer. And yes, I know about the security software that works to prevent that, but that's beside the point.
I believe there was an exploitable bug in MP3 files that used additional binary info within the file and exploited an overrun in a few different MP3 decoders. I can't recall the details, though.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
There may be; even in Napster's day, I remember an app called Wrapster which basically "wrapped" one or more files in an archive and made an MP3 header. They had some weird bitrate you could search for, one most encoders wouldn't encode to by default. Like 20 or 24kbps or something. I guess it predates Wikipedia by long enough to not be noted or something, but I know I messed around with it back in the day. And there are ways of putting stuff in .jpg files, too.
Besides, if it overran the decoder, how bad could that mess up a computer? I'd think, at worst, you'd just have to reinstall the program. And if the same song did it twice, you'd delete it and get another copy.
Actually there was one thing the record industry did that could cause real damage. At one point they were encouraging their supporters to make "Napster bombs". Take a song and insert an audio spike in it and hope you rip up some cheap speakers. I only ever found one. Look for a fan-made Evanescence album called "Not For Your Ears" (a bunch of rare demos) and open the first track in Audacity. Look around 28 seconds in. Not something you want to play. But cut it out and the song's fine. No skip or anything. Why someone would want to Napster-bomb an unreleased demo is beyond me, but there it is.
In any case, "MP3 = Virus = messing up your computer" is even worse of a scare tactic or P2P discouragement than when the record industry tried to say that Mp3s were inferior to CDs and that they weren't good enough quality to put artists' names on. Of course, technically Mp3s are inferior to CDs, but unless your dad's Bill Gates (and he spent a small fortune on your stereo) and you have superhuman hearing, you're not gonna be able to tell the difference between your average rock CD and a 128kbps Mp3, especially if you set the encoder to something higher, either --alt-preset standard or just CBR 320kbps, which AFAIK is the peak of Mp3 quality.
It was a buffer overflow. And it allowed you to run malicious code on the machine. Here's one from mpg123 in 2005 I found. And one that affected RealPlayer 10.5 and earlier. Winamp has had one as well. iTunes had one in playlist files.
Basically, by specially crafting an MP3 file, you could trigger this vulnerability and run any code you wanted on a machine with those players opening those files. So, if someone had RealPlayer configured to open MP3 files and downloaded an infected MP3 from a P2P, website, etc, any spyware or malware or anything embedded would be run on the PC when the user played the file.
This isn't that unusual. Windows' image processor had a vulnerability that allowed you to embed malicious code within image files and run anything you wanted on vulnerable machines. Numerous viruses and worms made use of this.
Just because something isn't a program doesn't mean it can't be infected with something.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I agree with silentcon, Frostwire is a fork (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development) of Limewire and I think it is better, it has a lot of the functionality of the pro version of Limewire, but for free.