So far my experience with Napster for the most part has been pretty pleasant.

In case anyone has not heard of Napster yet and what they are about, well let me see if I can explain it to the best of my experience so far.

Basically, you are looking at other people's hard drives and this software allows you to do that with anyone who happens to be connected on the site using the Napster software.

I find searching by Artist first works best and it will only give you the first 100 hits that it finds. But after you find the song you are looking for, then type it into the song window and then it will find only that one particular song and return back with as many as 100 hits.

Since I am only connected with a 56K modem for now, I try and find a song that is showing DSL, Cable, T1, T3, or any of the faster connections that are also displayed. I think if one of the above have a high ping rate it seems to work better also.

The other nice feature that you can do is also create a Hot List. Simply by right clicking on the particular user you are downloading from, you select to add the Hot List. Go to the Hot List section and again select the user that you just added. This will then search their complete hard drive and show all music files that he/she has available from their drive.

So far I have downloaded about 50 songs and plan to do a lot more.

I guess for the most part it is sort of like when you used to make a copy of a cassette, or record stuff off the radio and just use it for your own personal listening. Now this is on a much larger scale.

I really like this software, but the legal cases seem to be stacking up against it from various music artists. I do see their side of the case, but it's basically going to force the recording industry to make some drastic changes. I mean come on $15.99 or more for a CD, when I can get a pack of 50 CD-R's for about $30.00 and make a copy of any music disc that a friend might have that I would like to have.

Who knows what will happen in the coming months. Even if they do decide to start charging or shut it down, the fact remains that its time has come and if it is not located here, it will just start up somewhere else in the world.

Anyway, I highly recommend this software and site to anyone who is looking to maybe find a few songs or rare stuff that they haven't heard.
Make yourself a collection on your computer to listen to while surfing the net or even put it on CD, or get you a MP3 even better.



Recommended: Yes