hey lumpy one .......  do you do any ripping of shoutcast mp3 streams
??   what genre do you like off the 950 pages of stations located on
the  shoutcast home  site  (
http://www.shoutcast.com/directory/index.phtml?sgenre=TopTen  ) ?

I thought  downloading music had taken a very bad turn back when the
feds put the kibosh on all the free music on the IRCs ....... but
it's even bigger and better  ( and  legal I guess )  now that
streaming mp3s  have replaced IRC downloading.  you don't get the
instant  ' anything you want "   gratification of IRC but  I have gigs
and gigs of new  music and love it.  I kinda gravitate towards  "
ambient  chill " in my old age ...... that and I already  have 11,000
CDs full of 60s , 70s and 80s  rock and blues .  

I  listen to  ambient and psychedelic  chill from   
http://divbyzero.de/pls.shtml
http://divbyzero.de/chill.pls

chill salad at  http://somafm.com/

and Ekoms Top  http://www.ekomstop.com/index2.html
most of the time.  

I use the free deluxe  winamp and the  Streamripper 
(   http://streamripper.sourceforge.net/  )  plug to
rip and file all my tunes.   those handy streamripper mp3 files
drop right into my ipod nano and I jack the nano directly into my
truck sound system through one of those cassette deck adapters.
you can load up 4 gigs ( nano memory  )  of new music without
even being there to mess with it  using streamripper !  kewl ......