I am sure you have all tried to download anime from websites, peer2peer and other filesharing utilities. In my own opinion, they don't work! The bad thing about downloading from websites is broken links, banners, popup's and other pita's that either force you to quit your download, or some technical aspect decides to shut it down for you. Peer2Peer networks are nice, but 95% of the files I encountered are either extremely shitty quality, or incomplete.

IRC has been around for as long as there has been an internet, but for some reason it seems to be the least known (among the masses anyway) way to get your files. IRC is in the first place a medium where people chat, the files come in second place, or they used to. There are tons of channels (rooms) on IRC that are dedicated to the spreading of files of all sorts, we just want anime!

This small guide will get you setup with mirc (most popular IRC client for windows) and familiarize you with the use of Fservers (small-large file servers ran mostly by people from home on a cable or dsl connection) and XDCC-Bots (extremely fast servers which usually only serve a limited amount of files).

The first thing you need to do is download and install mirc. click here for download links. if the link is dead just open www.mirc.com and find the download page for the most recent version of mirc.

Mirc does not automatically connect you to a server, there are literally thousands of small and large server you have to choose from, some better known (and well used!) ones are Undernet, Dalnet, and Efnet.
Our example will connect us to a channel on Undernet called Animetrader. At the end of this how-to there will be a huge list of places where to get anime.

Step 1 - Anyway, on with the show, the first window that pops up after the nag screen about licensing will look as the picture below. Fill in all the blanks, this one is pretty self explanatory.

NOTE : The Email address field should NOT contain your real email address since everyone will be able to see this!! just make something up for now.

After you have filled everything out click 'OK'. The next thing we will want to do is connect to a server. Lucky for us, Mirc comes with an address book prestocked with all kinds of servers.

Step 1.1 - Click on the File tab in the left top corner and select options from the drop down menu. The same screen as in the image above should pop up with the information we just typed in. In the IRC Network tab select Undernet, and from the box below select a server that is somewhat close to you. If for some reason you can not connect after about 30 seconds, or a minute, start over and select a different server from the bottom box.

If everything went well you should know be connected to the Undernet. As soon as you connect a window with channels will popup. Ignore this and select the box next to 'Pop up folder on connect' before you hit ok and you will not be bothered by this again.

Congrats! you are now connected to Underent, and unlike the name implies, this is not a hangout for the bottom half of society. Quite the opposite, Undernet is probably the most friendly Network you can connect to (with Dalnet being the most obnoxious). In the next step we will go over some commands you need to know to join channels and look for files.

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