Thursday, 02 May 2019
I’ve downloaded a song as a «zip» file – how do I get to play it?
OK… there isn’t one simple answer, because when you download a song and it has a zip extension, it could be one of two things:
1) An MP3 file, that has just been renamed to change the extension to «zip»
2) An actual zip file, i.e. one that has been produced by using a zip compression utility (although since MP3 is already a highly compressed format, putting an MP3 file through zip compression rarely makes much difference to the file size…)
Web site owners who post songs as «zip» files use both of these strategies randomly, so unless there’s a note on the web page, you just don’t know. The simple answer is just try to «unzip» the file with Winzip (or some other zip utility – downloadable from ZDNet or any popular shareware source), and if the zip utility tells you that the file is not a valid zip file, then just rename it, changing the extension from «zip» to «mp3» and try and play it…
How do I change the extension of a file (e.g. from «zip» to «mp3»)?
Assuming you are running Windows:
1) Start up Windows Explorer.
2) Select View / Options (in Win98 it’s «Folder Options») and make sure that the box beside «Hide MS-DOS file extensions for file types that are registered» is *not* checked. (This is a pernicious option, which will only confuse you by showing you something which is not the real name that the file is actually stored under).
3) Find the file in whatever directory you stored it in. Click on it once. Pause a second or two, then click on it again. You should see that the filename becomes enclosed in a little box and highlighted, with a bar cursor flashing at the end of it. This means that you are editing the filename. You can type an entirely new filename now, but if all you want to do is change the extension, press the end key to position your cursor at the end of the filename and unhighlight the name, then backspace three times to delete the characters «zip», type «mp3», and then press enter.
