Napster is pure genious, thank you Shawn Fanning!!
Written: Nov 18 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Its still free!!!! can find almost any song and download it
Cons: slow at times
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| stonekoldk's Full Review: Napster |
2 years ago, a college dropout named Shawn Fanning developed programming for one of the most innovative and controversial web sites ever created. Obviously this site is called Napster and has stirred some heated debate as to the legality of the service it offers, unless you live under a rock somewhere you know about the constant court battles of Napster vs RIAA. The ultimate decision of this case will be one of the most important lawsuits in the past 15 years.
Napster offers it's members the ability to exchange MP3's of almost any musical file every created, all free of charge. RIAA has argued that this is copyright infringement with noted backers such as Metallica and Dr. Dre. Since this category deals with Napster itself, and not the legal debate, I will reserve my opinions on this legal battle for another epinion at a later date.
Napster is by far my second most favorite web site (behind epinions of course!). Every time I sign online the first thing I do is start up Napster so that I may download MP3 musical files and listen to them to pass the time online. At this time, Napster continues to be up and running free of charge. However, this may change in the near future pending resolution of their legal battles. Napster may end up settling with RIAA and forming partnerships with record labels thus causing Napster to begin charging a small monthly fee of about 5 bucks to use their service.
The search engine Napster utilizes allows you to narrow your search down for MP3's via artist, song title, or can just put one key word in the song title field if you can not remember a song's full name. More advanced methods of narrowing your search include bit-rate (measured in KB/second), frequency (HZ), ping time (I have not completely figured this one out, lower ping numbers tend to download quicker), and line speed depending on speed of modem.
Napster does a great job of finding what you are looking for and has decent download speed depending on number of users on the site. My best practices seem to be when you want to download multiple files, once one file is close to finishing, proceed with the next download. One nice feature about downloading with Napster is that you can refresh your file library and listen to the portion of the file that is finished downloading, even if the entire file is not yet complete.
On your downloaded file library you have the option to play one song at a time or you can select multiple files and put them in your play-list control panel and play them either in continuous order or randomly. Napster also offers a chat service but I'm not interested in this feature so I can't give you feedback on that.
As with any product or service Napster has a couple drawbacks that are really beyond their control. One is sometimes Napster can be slow during peak web usage. This will cause Napster to freeze and lockup your computer; this is not a frequent occurrence but still it’s quite irritating and inconvenient. Another problem users encounter is when downloading MP3’s the person you are downloading from can abort your transfer at any time, which can create problems and pisses me off. Both of these concerns are generally out of Napster’s control.
Napster is definitely a revolutionary service that allows you to preview and listen to music that you may otherwise not have a chance to listen to. I believe that everyone should try it at least once. Napster is one of the easiest sites to navigate, so if you have not already given them a shot, do it now while it is still a free service!
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
stonekoldk
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Member: kevin jameson
Location: Lancaster, PA
Reviews written: 27
Trusted by: 14 members
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