Illegal Activities
Written: Jul 22 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great library.
Cons: Moral debate!
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| davidjwest's Full Review: Napster |
Before I review Napster, I should point out that I am not condoning using this program to infringe copyright. You could use Napster to do this if you wanted, but I am not going to be the one to suggest it.
What Napster does allow you to do, is 'share' MP3's with everyone else in the Napster community, several million people strong.
When you first login to Napster (www.napster.com) you will need to download the software, which is relatively straightforward and takes around ten minutes or so (I have a 56kbps modem).
That's all there is to it, now you can access the search facility, to find the tracks you are after. You can search on title of song or by using the name of the artist. You can specify how many matches you want up to 100, and you will be surprised just how mnay matches you get, even for rare songs.
The information displayed once the search is complete includes length of track, quality of track in terms of the 'bitrate' (higher bitrates mean better quality but they take longer to download 128 is pretty well the normal) and also you get to know where the download will come from including information about the 'host' modem, which is useful as you can download from the most reliable and quickest source.
This is the main strength as far as Napster goes, you will be able to find just about anything as there are so many people sharing. The downside is that when you are downloading, other people may be uploading from you collection which can slow things down. You also need to be aware than the downloads can be terminated by the person you are downloading from, if they switch off their computer for example.
I like Napster because once I have downloaded the tracks you can then listen whilst using your computer for other things, it runs quite happily in the background, not interfering with other software. It is even possible to download whilst surfing but this does slow it down a bit. You can expect the average 4 minute song to take about 20 minutes to download under good conditions.
I don't want to go into the morals of using Napster here, this isn't the right forum, but I will explain that I use it to replace old songs which I had on vinyl but were stolen a few years ago. I have managed to buy replacements on CD and from second hand stores but some of the stuff is simply impossible to get hold of now, but Napster solves that problem for me.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
davidjwest
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Member: David West
Location: Leeds, England
Reviews written: 79
Trusted by: 5 members
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