Napster: For the Love of Music
Written: Jul 15 '00 (Updated Jun 22 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Free program to share MP3s with millions of users
Cons: Used for illegal copyright infringement
The Bottom Line: Free filesharing utiliity with legal implications
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| jiwhite's Full Review: Napster |
Warning: Napster is currently embroiled in a number of lawsuits concerning the illegal distribution of copyrighted music. Users of Napster who download or share copyrighted materials illegally may be prosecuted and subject to fines and imprisonment if convicted.
With all the hoopla about Napster as a pirate technology freely available to the public, I finally decided to check it out for myself. As a criminilogist and occasional music lover, I couldn't resist seeing what all the fuss is about.
Napster is a free program that allows individuals to download and share MP3 music files. Registering and downloading the program from http://www.napster.com was quick and easy. The program itself has various areas that support the sharing of MP3s.
The first is Chat. You can join an existing chat room or create one yourself for your favorite topic. You can also instant message individual users if you have a question about their music.
The Library displays all of the MP3s that you are currently sharing. You can specify any number of directories to share from Preferences. You can play any of the songs in your list here, included creating and saving playlists to play continuously and or randomly. The built in Napster music player is not very high quality. I use it primarily to check to see if songs are complete after downloading.
Search allows you to look for MP3s by Artist and Title. There are over 20,000,000 users of Napster. At any given time, thousands of libraries and hundreds of thousands of files may be shared. You can specify the maximum number of search results you wish to receive and advanced features allow you to screen by bitrate, connection speed, and Ping time of other users. The higher the bitrate, the higher the sampling rate and, therefore, the quality of sound produced and the larger the size of the file.
The search area is where you chose files to download. Many of the available files are incomplete. When deciding which file of a particular file to download, I generally order the search results by filesize. The largest files of a particular bitrate are the most likely to be complete.
The connection speed that a user has specified that they are using is often incorrect. Some users do not want people downloading from their computer often so they set their connection speed artificially low. For example, their connection speed may read 14400 when they are really T1.
Users may be added to the Hotlist allowing you to browse a particular user's library. You can instant message people on your hotlist who are online. When you find someone who shares your music interests, add them to your hotlist so you know when they are online.
The Transfer window show both which songs you are downloading and and which ones are being uploaded from your computer. If you add more songs to your download list than you can download at once, they will initially be queued in the order in which they are added to the list. By right-clicking on the songs you can change the order in which they are queued for downloading. You can also abort transfers of your files that your are downloading or are being uploaded from your computer. At 56k, most songs transfer at less than 2 k/s. Using my DSL connection, I can transfer at over 10 k/s.
Finally, there is the Help area with the official Napster FAQ. This program is so easy to use that I never looked at it until writing this review.
Napster is an easy access to sharing MP3s with millions of people around the world. I have used it primarily for downloading individual songs I already own on CD, but I want to have them easily available on my computer. Since downloading and installing Napster, my interest in listening to music has been revived. After almost 2 years in our new home, I finally dusted off my stereo that had been sitting in the garage and brought it into the living room. I'm listening to my music again and thinking about buying some new CDs. While many people do use Napster to pirate music they do not own because they don't have the money to or don't want to purchase entire albums, many also use it to explore new music.
Whether or not Napster is shut down by the current lawsuits, the music industry should learn a valuable lesson from this exchange. The quick and easy availability of individual songs, more than complete albums, may be the future of music sales. Single on cassette and CD are a step in the right direction, but consumers still feel that they are paying too much as they are currently marketed. The ultimate solution will be securely encoded music samples, not the policing of millions of listeners. When the music industry spends as much money researching and developing secure music formats and distribution as they do on punishing copyright infringement, there will be no need for the current enforcement and punishment expenditures.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
jiwhite
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Member: Janine White
Location: Chandler, AZ
Reviews written: 194
Trusted by: 142 members
About Me:
Criminologist turned Software Engineer
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