Corrupt or Invalid torrent downloads

[xplicet]

I am going crazy with troublesome torrent downloads.

I use pirate bay and the likes to download albums before i buy them and so often the files are unusable. They get good ratings and reviews on the websites but after downloading the mp3's I am unable to play them with a host of different players and codecs. I have tried winamp, Winmedia player, media player classic and even VLC. None of these work, they just say invalid or corrupt file. The downloads have the correct extensions and are of the appropriate size but they just wont work. I have just downloaded a album in RAR format that i cannot even unzip. Yet before downloading uTorrent showed me that there were in fact mp3's in the RAR file.

Is this common or am i missing something? I wasted over 2gigs on worthless downloads and want to know if they can be fixed or how I can avoid this waist in future. Anti virus doesnt pick any thing up so what can these 100MB plus files be?

Thanks

 

[BeVonk!]

Somewhat off topic but related ... I'm trying to stay on the straight and narrow by buying my music from the Nokia Music Store but the rights management is so riddled with problems and unfair restrictions that I cannot blame anyone for using torrents etc. to get music. I discovered that Nokia only allows four "licenses" for the music I paid for and then one is forced to buy the music again. Four licenses equates to four different locations (example: laptop + desktop + iPod + 1, then purchase again).

 

[LazyLion]

Use News Servers rather. It seems that your stuff is getting corrupted somehow or you are downloading dummy files. Yes, there are a lot of fake and dummy files on the BitTorrent network. At least with News Servers that is not as prevalent.

What ISP or network are you using?

 

[Hectic]

Are you double clicking the file to extract? I find that right click and then extract work better?