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Falconius, I would reccomend you try out the Tribes I mod that Tez put together first. That will give you a good idea of the direction he would tend towards in a Tribes II mod. In short, it would be based more on the characteristics of the novels than any of the games, involving a heavy focus on infantry melee combat and shield restrictions. If you like, you can set a date and time and I would be happy to try to meet you on the game server and show you around. --Bashar

As I think on it, these books -are- pretty old. The War of the Worlds is not a bad choice to start with as it's an easier read and I thought the ending quite clever. The slower novels such as Time Machine and Dr. Moreau are a bit dryer and "headier" so if 19th century narrative English is an issue, as it is with me sometimes, it's more likely to ruin your enjoyment of the book overall. --Bashar

It has been a while but I've read four of H.G. Wells' books: The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and The Island of Dr. Moreau. Of those, Time Machine and Dr. Moraeu probably best fit the sort of social speculative fiction that we've all come to appreciate in in the works of Frank Herbert, so I would probably recommend those. Dr. Moreau, though, I think has particular relevence today. Without spoiling the book I'll tell you that it deals with the morality of manipulating nature. While in the book it uses the process of vivisection (considered deplorable in its day, and probably still so), the important concepts of the novel can be applied to genetic science. This is supported by the film adaptation made in the last decade which, while -very- poor, was notable for making this switch. --Bashar

It's a pity he hasn't updated in two years but it's nice that the site is still up for people to download from. I personally recommend "Doomed on Dune" which was a mixture of Leto's Death from the Toto score and level music from either Doom or Doom II. The two compliment eachother nicely to create a very moody piece in spite of the percussion. That and the Dark Forces remix, which is just a fun and upbeat piece, are the two of his I'd say I listen to the most. I'll definately have to check out the Crete theme, though, as I recall liking the original when I played Fate of Atlantis. --Bashar

I was asked in Private Message to elaborate on my suggestion of how to program maps to have odd-shaped regions without having to resort to geometry. Since someone else some day down the road might also be curious, I've decided to respond here publicly. The gist of it is that you create a variable array to associate portions of the map to specified regions. I generally use multidimentional arrays (i.e. matrices); however, a single dimention array is just fine and a little more memory friendly. When you receive the X and Y coordiantes of the mouseclick, that data is used to identify a single variable of the array and that variable contains region index, preset by you. Let's say your screen/map is 640x480 pixels in resolution. Having a variable dedicated for each pixel could be memory consuming so we'll scale our array to a 64x48 matrix, essentially dividing the map into a grid. Each variable in our map array will now accound for a 10x10 pixel square on our map, 100 pixels alotgether. When the user clicks on the map we receive the X and Y coordinate of that click, let's say they clicked on coordinate 281,407. Scaling that down we end up with coordiantes 28,41. Now we use these scaled coordiantes to locate the correct varaable in our array. With a matrix, we'd just plug in the numbers directly so we'd look up variable(28,41). With a single dimention array we'd look up variable(28*48+41), that is the sum of X coordinate multiplied by the Y dimention and the Y coordinate. The array contains the data of which region each portion of the map represents. Since you can associate the same region to more than one part of the map, this allows you to create odd shaped regions. I hope that helps some. --Bashar

Compressed in .gif format, Erijn, my desktop capture is 8.1k... I assume you'll allow me to forego using an external image site? ;-) This image was shrunk to half-size for the sake of easier viewing. My Windows appearance settings are a black background, grey button face, light grey text, and gold for header bars and highlighting (three guesses how I came up with -that- colour scheme). Over the years I'd tried a number of different wallpapers, often involving Dune, Star Wars, or Roman themes; however, upon recently finding myself using the default Mircrosoft Clouds, I realised I didn't care that much and figured pure black would be a little easier on the phosphors, not to mention my eyes. I generally try to maintain only a single column of desktop icons, which appears to common of those presented in this thread. Of those icons displayed, only five are permanent: My Computer, Recycle Bin, My Documents, Network Neighbourhood, and my internet access dialer. The other two are temporary text files of e-mails or posts that I'm drafting. On my QuickLaunch bar are Desktop, Media Player, and Firefox. In my System Tray are McAfee Virus Control, Volume Control, Creative Audio HQ, my keyboard button application (which I probably could do without), and of course the clock. --Bashar [attachment archived by Gobalopper]

Yes, but how long did it take them to finally see the value of the armour-weapon relationship in producing Warcraft III? Nine years since C&C initialy introduced the feature! Most game companies don't even last that long. In any event, I wasn't really including Warcraft III or C&C Generals in my overall anaysis since, admittedly, I've not played either. A side note, the only RTS I have my eyes set on right now is Star Wars: Empire at War. As for Starcraft, I'll agree that Blizzard -nudged- towards utilising armour; however, the system was so simplistic by comparison to Westwood's that I really don't give it much credit. The maximum differential was about 30 to 50% whereas in C&C it ranged up to %400 or even higher in some special cases, such as the Sniper. As I recall, there were also height modifier and natural cover bonuses in Starcraft as well, but again these seemed to be half-hearted attempts at improving the model and didn't appear to have any significant tactical bearing in the game. In short, it wasn't these features that made Starcraft into a classic game. --Bashar

Over the years I've talked to Starcraft/Blizzard fans and C&C/Westwood fans and I've also played most of the games in question. My impression is that Westwood has generally made great games that were poorly executed where on the other hand Blizzard made medeocre games that were extremely well executed. If you look at the incremental changes between Westwood RTS games and their Blizzard counterparts, you'll find that Blizzard made greater improvements in between games. All that Red Alert really added was the introduction of Sea Power, which made it seem more like an update than a separate game from C&C, and Tiberian Sun's main contribution was isometric graphics, seemingly ignorant of the multi-theatre warfare Red Alert had paved the way for. Warcraft II, Starcraft, and Warcraft III each offered definite improvements over ther predecessors. In short, I think Westwood made a poor move by flooding the market with new titles, raking in a ton of money in sales but losing consumer confidence that they actually -could- advance the genre. They did, of course, but the change was so gradual from game to game that it was hardly noticible. Blizzard, however, never figured out to adopt C&C's most important feature, the paper-rock-scissors effect of armour. As a result, a units were more or less the same and an opportunity to introduce greater -tactics- to RTS was lost; players simply amassed armies of the most powerful units they could produce. Of course, C&C suffered the same problem, hense why we have the term "Tank Rush" rather than "Ogre Rush", but not because the capability wasn't there but because Westwood broke the model by making Tanks too effective for players to bother producing other specialised units. C&C had the superior model but it was never -executed- properly to make it worthwhile until, arguably, Emperor was introduced, a very long six year later. Starcraft is not considered a great game because of anything new it introduced to the genre, in fact it's remarkable how -few- features it had that could be considered unique. It was a great game, though, because it utilised the features it did have to the maximum. The three factions were, in spite of the limitations detailed above, unique and more or less balanced right out of the box. In spite of being more modest in the use of FMV than Westwood, the storyline was nevertheless entertaining and engaging. No quote from any Westwood game sticks out in my mind as does "Thank God for cold fusion." And finally there is the map editor. This, I think, is what pretty much saved Blizzard from oblivion when C&C stormed shelves in 1995. You could play C&C (single-player) from start to finish at most four times before growing stale. Because Warcraft II included a map editor, even allowing you to edit unit values, gameplay was almost limitless. Starcraft took this and went even further, introducing triggers and logic statements that allowed you to go beyond simple map making and create genuine scenarios. You could even develop your own pre-game briefings and string maps together to create custom campaigns, including branching mission trees if you were savvy enough. As companies go, I think I tend to favour Blizzard because they seem to be more interested in the quality of their product rather than produce with an eye always on market share. Being a modder, though, I lean towards Westwood games because even if I don't like them out of the box, they leave me enough functionality that I am able to tailor them more to my tastes with features often in excess to what Blizzard was offering. In regards to Blizzard getting injunctions to shut down external servers hosting their games, this is because Blizzard is notoriously cautious about piracy of its software. You can only play on Blizzard's servers with a -legitimate- copy of their games so if there are rogue servers up, it allows for people with pirated copies to play. The fact of the matter is that after all these years, Blizzard still supports Starcraft, and after all these years you can still find Starcraft on the shelf at software retailers. If they can make a game with that kind of longevity, I don't see why they shouldn't be paid for it and why they shouldn't be allowed to protect the fruits of their efforts. --Bashar

My reccomendation has always been to ignore bothering to edit Emperor and simply extract the mp3s to your hard drive using the BagTool application as mentioned by IxianMace. Then play them in an external program such as WinAmp or Media Player and disable the Emperor in-game music. Since the amount of hard drive space consumed is the same and as Emperor merely acts as a jukebox, as opposed to Dune II which differentiated between "battle" and "scroll" music, you're not losing much this way and you gain a great deal more control over your playlist. This to say nothing of the fact that you can now listen to the Emperor music in or out of the game. --Bashar

If you like you could copy the texture from the Map Editor and move it to the Data/3ddata/textures/ folder in your Emperor directory. If the folder is not there already (no reason to be unless you've been modding), just create it. Moving texture files there will override those in the .rfd archives. Of course, then your maps would appear unique on your computer, everyone else using the original texture; however, I'm guessing in this that that won't be -too- great an issue. --Bashar

This article, http://www.snopes.com/language/document/goodwife.htm, makes the argument that while gender roles in the 1950s placed considerably more prestige on the male than the female, the "Good Wife's Guide" is most likely fabricated. --Bashar

Hmmm... interesting. Well there is only one difference between the Atreides and Harkonnen weapons: the Atreides machine gun has a muzzle flare animation attached to it. This -will- require experimentation for if refire time is cumulative with the animation frames rather than concurrent, that effect will apply to all weapons with a flare and modding (good modding, at least) will all of a sudden become more difficult. ... Not what I expected from so-called IG. As for the Chem and Flamethrower Troopers, neither of their weapons have muzzle flare animations so the refire time of the former -should- be 3/4 the time of the latter, according to the printed times listed in the files. If -that- is different then, again, I can only imagine it's unit-animations that are causing the discrepancy. In any event, Aristeas, giving a house the Elite Sardaukar rather than the regulars isn't a difficult procedure at all. I think there's a rules.txt file in the downloads section; look it over and begin by tweaking it to your liking. If you run into a problem, which isn't likely is all you make are small changes and try not to add new units/weapons/armours right away, you can probably find a solution on the Dune Editing board. --Bashar

Fremen units don't have knife animations as do the Sardaukar Elite and Ixian Slave so the only way to remedy that would be to create a new unit based off the Sardaukar or Ix and retexture them with Fremen colours. This would probably involve new XBF files but since the only major change would be in texture, isn't that difficult for someone who knows what they're doing. Besides which, giving Fremen crysknives is rather redundant in gameplay terms since their weapons are already geared towards anti-infantry utilisation. If they can kill infantry from 10 tiles away, they don't really need to do it from 1 tile distance. I've looked at the statistics for the Harkonnen and Atreides infantry. They have, in fact, identical strength (hit points), firepower, -and- refire rate. I double checked. The only explanation I can think of at the moment is that there is some slight efficiency increase in the Harkonnen Infantry animations that give it a first-shot advantage; however, combat will rarely take place on a level playing field and any such advantage will be further and further negated the more and more units are involved, such as the en masse assaults we're discussing in this thread. When the opportunity arises, I'll run some "field tests" of my own to either confirm or deny Gunwounds' theory. As for your mod, Aristeas, since Ordos and Atreides seem to hold well enough on their own, I'd concentrate on the Harkonnen. Try increasing the Flamethrower Trooper's strength, maybe doubling it, so that it has a chance in heck against the other Houses' comperative units and work from there. That is, if you're just trying to balance Westwood's units so that they play well without the benefit of armour. If you're looking to have a whole new mod developed I'd start with deciding on a flavour for each house and altering the units according to that master design. i.e. make one house the "Missile House" or the "Strength House" or the "Cheap and Mass Manufactured House" etc. Furthermore, taking this thread to the Dune Editing forum might also be beneficial. --Bashar

Once while I was working on a mod I inadvertantly made the Heavy Factory unbuildable. Since I had only modded the building tree and not the units I had the opportunity to play infantry-only games with Westwood units, and I was able to play it online multiplayer to boot. In the end the Atreides ruled by a noticible margin. Snipers, in spite of their refire delay, were far too potent and, as you pointed out, were well enough defended from Chem Trooper attacks by the generic Atreides infantryman. Harkonnen and Ordos were a little more evenly matched but for the fact that the Ordos Gas turret can outrange anything. As for Flamethrower Troops, the additional hitpoints granted to them, like Tleilaxu Contaminators, aren't enough to make up for their lack of speed. While Ordos Mortar infantry are sussceptible to charges, if you can get a group of them together their area-effect damage will make short work of any massed assault, particularly at a "choke point". The Harkonnen infantryman and the Chem trooper are both like water, in my opinion, but I'm more inclined to favour the Chem Trooper thanks to their speed and the lethality of their weapon. In the end, I'd take the opposite view of yours and say that the list of houses with best to worst infantry are Atreides, Ordos, and Harkonnen. Of course, my accidental mod also didn't allow for any air-power so that is a factor I can't take into account. --Bashar

I know the sound of the word "Tournement" and Agent's ASCII Atrocity might be enough to put off the casual reader of our humble forum so I just wanted to chime in and say that the event is open to all, veterans and newcomers to the Tribes mod alike. As long as you know what a "Holtzmann Effect" is (and more importantly how to prevent one), you are welcome to play and join in the fun. Furthermore, don't be put off simply by the fact that the game is a First Person Shooter. I'm not an FPS player, myself (and it shows), but the attention to detail Tez has put into designing the mod yet makes it worthwhile. Some of the features included are: *Working Shields. That's right, your Holtzmann shield will make you completely invulnerable to projectiles, leaving knives as the only effective weapons against these defences. Don't leave your shield up for too long, though, as your breathable air will eventually grow stale. *Holtzmann Effect. Think you're the baddest Conscript on the block with your fancy Lasgun? Avoid hitting a shielded target or you'll blow yourself up as well as everything within a sizable radius. For some reason, near-by allies never appreciate this tactic very much and you'll be faced with a 60 second cool-down period before you can continue playing. *Sandworms. What Dune mod would be complete without these terrible beasts to keep us hugging the rocks? And I'd avoid using your shield in the open desert or you'll quickly become something's lunch. *Melee combat. A rarity in FPS games, Dune Tribes focuses on close quarters fighting. While initial reaction might be just to charge your nearest opponent "knives blazing", to achieve maximum effectiveness in melee a player should know how to Tackle enemies and Block their attacks as well as how to attack while minimising their own vulnerability. It takes practice, but it's more fulfilling than simply gunning somebody down. Tez's tutorial can be a bit daunting in its scope, I know, so I have decided to personally host an orientation for newcomers of the game on Friday at 8:00pmGMT / 2:00pmET / 12:00pmPT and again at 8:00pmET / 5:00pmPT on Friday the 22nd. Downloading the client-side pack (which can be found through following the link to the tutorial) is highly reccomended not not necessary to play. I also reccomend trying the first few in-game tutorials provided within the game to get a feel for the basic controls. I hope to see many of you there. --Bashar

It's not as far-fetched as it sounds. After the Butlerian period had ended, a rigid feudal system was -intentionally- set in place to prevent the seeds of a new Jihad from sprouting. What is amazing was that the faufreluches managed to stay in place for over 10 millennea before it was ultimately overturned by Muad'dib and his followers. Relatively speaking, though, it was a boring 10,000 years with very little of the "legendary" sort events occuring. By contrast the Butlerian Jihad was a time of great upheaval. All sides had momentum, there was no ban on technological development, and so events moved at a very quick pace. A lot more events occured in a shorter amount of time, including the origins of the society portrayed in Dune. Even the Dune Encyclopedia places the Jihad, the rise of House Corrino, and the formation of CHOAM and the Spacing Guild all within about 100 years of eachother and this is a source that we -know- to be independant of Brian Herbert and KJA. My guess is that the time-proximity is actually something Frank would have approved of, and likely spelled it out in his notes. --Bashar

FED2k is currently hosting a collection of Dune II mp3's; however, I don't know whether or not they were recorded off of the MT-32. I would suggest going to the downloads section and downloading them to see. If not, Gob might be willing to host your files here as the MT-32 recordings should be regarded as the definitive Dune II music. I'm curious, though, as to where you your MIDIs came from; whether you extracted them from the game or found them floating around on the internet. As Dune II was not General MIDI compatible I assumed that the only way acquire the correct instrumentation was from the game itself. Or does that problem not apply to Roland modules? --Bashar

I think you're making way too much of all this. If that were the -real- Ring then the bearers would have been invisible to the camera photographing them. What you're seeing are the results of the World Leader's annual game of Lord of the Rings Risk! where the winner gets to keep the ring that comes in the box (and thus Lord it over everybody else at high publicity events such at that aforementioned). The alliance between Jaques Chirac and Vladimir Putin should, of course, have been obvious by the fact that as a pledge to their pact they agreed to share the same style of hair, continuing the precedent of Bush and Blair back during the '02 game. --Bashar

I wish I had a copy of Chapterhouse, myself, to refer to but basing on what has been written in this thread it seems to me that both quotations say the same thing. Both give reference to the idea that an important ingredient in manipulating a people is the importance of apearing to be in posession of the Truth. MrFibble's "should teach history" does not necessarily state an -unbiased- history whereas Dante's version directly announces the importance of "control". By controlling/teaching history you can limit to your own design people's ability to draw upon experiences outside of their own. Therefore, you would teach history in such a light that it gives credence to events similar to those you -wish- to repeat while damning those that you do not. Aside, teaching/controlling history gives you the very, very useful ability of being able to create a social "Identity" which people can associate themselves with, thereby disassociating themselves of other Identies rival to your own purposes. Or ... ... perhaps not. I don't claim to know what Frank Herbert was thinking when he wrote Chapterhouse, only that the two quotes when stated in context with one another can be perceived to have the same meaning, though I think Dante's version is clearer. --Bashar

>>>armor-piercing weapons can't kill infantry quickly<<< You have to bear in mind that Westwood made its figures with the intention that they be -abstract-. By this I mean that they are not intended to be realistic figures of firepower but are also intended to take into account world factors. For example, in Dune2000 I think it takes a rifleman about 10 bursts to kill another rifleman. At three rounds a burst that's 30 rounds. Now we all know a human being can be killed with -far- fewer than thirty rounds, with good aim even a single shot is enough to be lethal; however, when you take into the account that a person being shot at will naturally take action to protect himself such as moving or taking whatever cover is available, the fact that that a soldier would probably be armoured thus decreasing his body's vulnerability, and the fact that in the heat of battle the shooter's aim might not be 100% accurate, 30 rounds all of a sudden becomes a much more realistic figure. Rather than developing a monstrous engine to simulate all of the aforementioned factors, Westwood and IG simply decided to combine them all into statistical probabilities. Rather than trying to calculate every individual defender's ability to protect himself and every individual shooter's aim and all of the other conditions that might affect a firefight, they determined the -average- ability for one individual weapon type to inflict damage upon one individual armour type and applied those values to -all- of the units on the field that utilise that weapon or armour. Given the technology of the time, this allows for the most efficient application of "realism" to the amount of computing power required. So, yes, you're correct when you state that a missile or tank round could potentially kill a soldier with a single shot; however, in spite of this, if you look at casualty reports from any modern engaguement you will find that the number resulting from wounds inflicted by armour-piercing weapons to be fewer than those caused by small arms, explosives and other "anti-personnel" weapons. Additionally, of those caused by armour-piercing weapons, more will have been the result of shrapnel rather than direct hits. In short, don't confuse raw firepower with actual effectiveness. --Bashar

"Frank Herbert" is a biography written by Tim O'Reilly while "Maker of Dune" is a collection of Frank Herbert's essays compiled by him. They are two separate books. I have to thank you for asking the question, though, as it caused me to look more deeply into Mr. O'Reilly. As it happens he is the founder of O'Reilly Media group, an important publisher of IT manuals of which I happen to have two on my bookshelf. "Frank Herbert" was his debut book, now out of print but may be read online at the following link: http://tim.oreilly.com/herbert/ I have not read the book, myself, so I can not coment on it. What I can coment on; however, is judicious use of your local library. I've been a strong proponent of lending libraries ever since the death of my father, whereupon we were forced to throw away the majority of his book collection because nobody wanted them. This made me examine my own growing collection, where I found that I owned a number of books that I would probably never read more than once, as well as some books gifted to me that I probably wouldn't get to altogether. All of this seemed a collosal waste of money, paper, and valuable shelfspace and so, as a result, I've adopted a policy of restricting my book purchases and utilising my library as much as possible. I think the practice of buyig and selling of used books is also a good idea, particularly for older books that might have already circulated through the library system. --Bashar

If you want some insight into Frank Herbert I would reccomend "The Maker of Dune: Insights of a Master of Science Fiction", a collection of his essays compiled by Tim O'Reilly. It covers a wide and disparate variety of topics. Only a small portion directly addresses Dune; however, it shows a very intelligent and quite wise man with a corespondingly wide and disparate variety of interests. Included in it is TMA's favourite quote, not simply attributed to Leto II but as we find drawn from Mr. Herbert's own repertoire, as well as personal favourite short story of my own: "Doll Factory, Gun Factory". --Bashar

I don't typically read any of the forums other than Dune 2000 and Other Dune Games (occasionally Politics etc.) but I had to read this thread specifically for the title. When the news was first out that Brian Herbert would be writing in conjunction with KJA, I was as excited and hopeful as everyone else, envisioning a nice array of hardcover, first-edition Dune books on my bookshelf. After reading House Atreides I promptly decided not to pick up another of the series. While I had been teetering in my conviction upon hearing that the latter books -had- improved, this thread has convinced me that they're just more silly adventure stories. Not that that is a -necessarily- bad thing but it's just not the sort of story I want to read in this particular venue. I have always maintained that KJA would have been a fine writer if only he'd stuck to his own universes. Having in prior years been a member of a Star Wars fan community, I can tell you that his foreys into Lucas' world has earned him ire there as well. If it were up to me to decide who would write a continuation of the Dune series, my pick would be CJ Cherryh whose writing, above all others, has always reminded me most of Frank Herbert's own. An aside, I am in agreement with Mahdi in that hiding his post in unnecessary. His consideration in tagging the thread subject with Spoiler should be enough insofar as internet etiquette is concerned. --Bashar

John Quincy Adams became president in spite of having come in -third- during the election. This, however, was not due to the electoral college but because of the rule that stipulates if no candidate wins a majority of the votes then determination of the presidency goes to the House of Representatives, the lower body of Congress. It should be pointed out, though, that the manner by which Electors vote is determined by the laws of the individual state they represent and not by federal law of the United States of America. That the winner-take-all policy exists in 48 of the 50 states (Maine being one of the exceptions, I can't recall the other) is due to those states choosing to have that policy. I say again for emphasis, there is no uniform code for determining Electors, it is given to each state to decide for itself. State law also determines eligibility of presidential candidicy, which is why not every candidate is always on every state's ballot. You must all bear in mind that the United States is just that, a federation of individual states, each with its own laws, taxes, police forces, social services, and system of government. That is why, as TMA-1 stated, the United States is a democratic republic, because the federal government is made up of representatives of the states, elected through democratic proceces within those states. Therefore, while Senators, Respresentatives, and state legislative officials are all elected directly by the people, the President, the executive official of the federal government, is instead elected by the states. As for the Electoral College, it was a mass of hastily pieced together compromises created primarily for two reasons. One, as HasimirFenring pointed out, was to serve as a moderating power between states, so that less populated states' issues would be heard and not allow the more populated states from overpowering the federal government. Another, as TMA-1 was hinting to in more flattering terms, was as a safeguard from so-called "Mobocracy", to ensure that a mainly aristocratic electorate would not put a demogogue in power, even if the public elected one. The problem I see with the College is that the latter reason is based on antiquated social assumptions whle the former never really worked from the beginning, instead focusing candidate's attention on "battleground" states that had the best polarity to vote ratio. The only real advantage of having an Electoral College was that in the early days of American History it was that it was a more efficient system given the technology of the time. With the advent of television, and to a somwhat lesser extent with cyberspace, though, that is no longer a concern. --Bashar

Solid, Unfortuantely I don't think I can be of much more help than I have been already. Frank Klepacki's website is to my knowledge the only source for "Unsuspected Attack". Frank's mp3s are unreadable by standard mp3 players so copying from your internet cache is of no help either. The only option is to record to a .wav file as the piece is playing on the jukebox. This, of course, will also pick up any other sounds such as the various Windows "beeps" so I would reccomend not touching the computer as it is recording to prevent such anomolies. If you are unsure how to record directly from your sound card's digital audio track, let me know what Windows operating system you're using and I'll try to write you a quick tutorial. As for the intricacies of various recording software, that I'm afraid you will have to figure out on your own. Also, if you're a 56k modem user like I am, bear in mind that you have to let the jukebox download the song in its entirety before it will play without "skipping". That should take approximately 18 minutes. You can press [stop] in the meantime and it will continue downloading. --Bashar