I have been trying to download some podcast MP3 files from a website. When I click the link I see the files downloading, and can listen to the broadcasts, but would like to save them to a folder. However, I do not know a way of finding where on my hard drive the files have been stored. I can listen to the MP3s after I have disconnected from the internet so I assume that they are on the computer somewhere. How can I locate them? I am using Internet Explorer 7.

This is a fairly common issue as when you click the link for the MP3 file, Internet Explorer realises that the file can be opened using Windows Media Player. To be helpful, as soon as Internet Explorer has finished downloading the file it opens the MP3 file within Windows Media Player and commences playing. While this may be convenient for that one time, it does not give you an opportunity to save the file to a location of your choosing so you can listen to the MP3s at a later date. To get around this issue in the future, when you wish to download an MP3 file instead of clicking normally on the link right-click on the link and select “Save Target As”. This will allow you to save the target of the link (i.e. the MP3 file) to a specific location, overriding Internet Explorer’s default behaviour which is to automatically download and play the file.

However, we still need to locate those files which have previously been downloaded. These are most likely being stored within the Internet Explorer cache. Unfortunately this is not the easiest place from which to recover files, as the cache contains all the other content which you have visited on the internet. Therefore, if you have only listened to a few MP3s the easiest method would be to simply re-download those MP3 files using the method mentioned above to save the files rather than play. However, if you have downloaded a large number of MP3 files and re-downloading those files is not feasible you may wish to recover the files. First, you will need to determine the location of your Internet Explorer cache. Within Internet Explorer, go to the “Tools” menu > “Internet Options”. In the Internet Options window, click the “General” tab. Underneath the “Browsing history” heading, click the “Settings” button. You should see the location of the Temporary Internet Files folder (cache) defined. Click the “View files” button to open the folder. This will open the Internet Explorer cache folder. I suggest that you sort the files by file type, so you can easily identify the MP3 audio files. Once found you can copy the files to a better location. Be aware, Internet Explorer may have changed the file names so do not be surprised if the names of the MP3 files in the cache do not match the original names of the MP3 files.