Napster is the first of the peer-to-peer file sharing programs. It has also been in Beta for months now. Beta means that it is preparing for final release, with ostensibly no bugs. Typically, a software company will issue a beta release when they want to test out their software for a while, and they are not quite sure that it's bug-free. Napster is not bug free, but it does have a lot of things going for it. I'm not going to discuss the effect that it has on society, there's another category for that.

Let's start with its good points. Napster allows you to get free music. Music you would normally have to pay for at a store, or borrow from your friends. You just type in the name of the artist or the title, and a list of available songs pops up for you to download. Just select the song, or multiple songs, and they download for you immediately. You can sort downloads by the connection of your "peer", which is very important, because their are a lot of people out their on their modems sharing lots of files, that would take hours to download. Each download speed correlates to a color - green is best(T1 and Higher), yellow is ok (Cable Modems , ISDN and DSL) and Red is a normal 56K modem or less.

I'm not going to comment on the ability of Napster to download songs which you do not own. You can, of course, do this, and this is the reason why it is so popular. I will comment, though, on the effect this has had on the program. It's comparable to going into a head shop, where they sell pipes and paraphenaliaand all sorts of things, and then they tell you that they are for "tobacco" use, when we all know full well that nobody smokes tobacco from a bong. Compare this to Napster, where they tell you that it's for downloading "free" and "unsigned" music. They even have a section called "Discover"where you can find the names of artists who wish to give away their MP3s.

The thing about this section is that you go there to find the names of artists. Then you have to go back to your Napster program, type in the name of the artist, and hope the song is there. Doesn't that seem a little strange? Why can't they just have those songs posted on a web server, rather than forcing us to go through the Napster program to do it? I wouldn't be opposed to using Napster, were there not a few technical problems that severely hamper the use of the program.

First, the main problem with Napster, as far as I'm concerned, is the inability of users to automatically delete MP3s that are incomplete. This leads to all sorts of garbage in your download folders. I'm halfway through my favorite song, and then it ends! This might be because the other user shut down their computer during my download, or their was a network problem, or more likely, there was a problem on the Napster servers. Now once you have an "incomplete" MP3, it stays in your download folder unless you manually delete it or re-download that same title. This means that other people will then upload your incomplete MP3s, and you end up with a huge amount of "garbage MP3s" in the system. Hopefully the next version of the Napster client and servers will deal with this problem.

This leads me to the next problem - the Napster servers. Sean Fanning and whomever else built this application didn't build it in a scalable way. You can connect to Napster, and you think that you are connected to all Napster users all over the world, but you are not. You are only connected to the users on that server, and I have no idea how many servers that Napster has. On average, there are 500K to 700K MP3s on Napster. I can't give you a uniqueness factor there, but I'd imagine that it's maybe 1:20 or something., since most users of Napster just download other people's MP3s, and don't add any new ones.

The final problem with Napster is the awkwardness of the playback interface. The "jukebox" features on Napster are incredibly poor. They use the Windows Media Player embedded within their system to play back MP3s, thankfully. There are some other good MP3 players, such as WinAmp, but it's awkward to have to go out of Napster, and into another program for playing songs. It would be much better if Napster managed playlists and catalogs in a manner similar to RealJukebox. I would use that program, but unfortuanetly, the RealPlayer plays MP3s very poorly, skipping every time you close a window or do something else in your computer.

Overall, Napster is great. It makes stealing MP3s terribly easy. It's also a great medium for subversive advertising. Since Napster is search based, and not directory based, just putting keywords in the title of your MP3 will get your MP3 distributed to a wide audience. So go record your political rant about how you love Ralph Nader, save it on an MP3 and call it "Raunchy Sex Sounds" and then before you know it, thousands of people will be voting Nader! So go use Napster, it's your patriotic duty.




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