Some tips for users.
Written: Jul 31 '00 (Updated Oct 10 '00)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Huge selection of MP3s.
Cons: Can be confusing.
|
|
|
| oscen's Full Review: Napster |
Napster is a great service for obtaining MP3 versions of songs that you have on CD ….or otherwise have legitimate reasons for obtaining. It suffers from some problems which a few simple tips may help you avoid. So here goes:
1) There are many Napster servers and the users on each server change over time. If you don’t like the server that you are on, disconnect and reconnect (or exit from the systray and restart the program). You might also consider using napigator.
2) Use the search feature carefully. Sometimes a user will cram words together in a title or otherwise cause a simple search to fail. Leave out the song title to see what you can find. Names and titles vary widely. Try reasonable varieties (spelling) or some subset (e.g. “guns” for “guns and green elephants"). If you are getting the same old selections try titles like "best" or "1", "01", "2", "02", etc. CD titles (or partial ones) can also work well. Concert dates and/or locations can be useful for certain groups. Remember that the napster search is essentially(!) a word search, but certain other characters qualify as "white space" ("_", ".", "-", " ", "," and others). Setting Max Results to a number beyond 100 appears to be a waste of time.
3) Try searching periodically for songs that you are looking for and download them immediately. If you are patient almost any song can be found---sooner or later.
4) Set search parameters. For most music 128K is good enough, (MP3 is lossy compression, the higher the bit rate the less the loss), below 128K music quality drops off noticably. Cable or better is desirable for the music source. Odd numbers like 167 indicate (typically) a variable rate of compression and are best.
5) Generally select the lowest ping time (at cable or better) for a source. You can use "Get User Information" to see how many uploads/downloads a user has going on. Be warned, it is often inaccurate. Try to get a feel for users who stay connected for long periods of time, by searching periodically for the same stuff. These users are the best candidates for downloading from. I also believe that you can tell from a users chosen name whether or not he will likely let you finish a download... but I may be reading a little too much into things.
6) If you have a low speed connection, download ONE song at a time.
7) If within a half minute or so the data rate doesn’t rise to acceptable levels, delete/abort and try a new source.
8) Keep on your hot list, users with good collections AND good connection speeds.
9) If you show a large good collection, you will get lots of uploaders …. Many of whom are hiding most of their collections.
10) Check the quality of the download as soon as you have enough to play; some cuts are wretched.
11) Check the entire download to see that it is complete. Napster suffers from an epidemic of incomplete downloads, propagated to the nth degree.
12) Practice a little courtesy, let uploaders finish when possible.
13) The servers go down regularly, don’t expect long download sessions to complete without a hitch. Your ISP will also probably cut you off once in a while.
14) Use 2.6, 2.5 and earlier versions are not as good. The Hot List on 2.7 doesn't work, so it is not recommended. Also remember that 2.5 and earlier don't support private messaging.
15) The chat rooms are (way) lame, but a good place to find people with nice collections. Use "Get User Information" to determine that a hot list candidate is running 2.6 or earlier.
16) If you get disconnected from the server, ongoing downloads may finish, but if you reconnect you will lose them. When I used "Resume" it seemed essentially to start from the beginning again, so I haven't used it since.
17) Set "Delete partial files when download fails" on the download preferences tab. Otherwise you can get a huge quantity of incomplete files taking up space on your hard drive. In general pay close attention to all preferences settings.
18) Some configuration data is kept in simple format data files. You might want to back these up. Also keep a copy of the napster 2.6 source file. It may be the last with the hot list working.
19) If a user on your hot list switches to 2.7, you still may be able to get at his collection with a tight search. Set the appropriate parameter to his connection type (speed) and search for an artist who remember him having, or some simple word like "the", "you", "and", etc. Once you have a few hits you can leverage these into more, by setting search strings and ping time (which unfortunately changes). If he favors high data rates be sure to set this parameter.
20) Start playing with whatever program you are going to use once Napster is shut down. This will ease the transition.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
oscen
|
|
Reviews written: 15
Trusted by: 0 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.