With the ever-growing news stories about Napster blocking MP3 transfers, people have been scrambling to find alternate ways to satisfy their desire for free, downloadable music. Personally, I have been trying to find a suitable replacement since mid-November, when my school banned (and blocked) Napster usage on the T1 Network connection line. I have tried many alternatives and few of them actually work. I have found Audiogalaxy.com's server to be the most efficient and useful Napster replacement to date.

The Audiogalaxy software is a quick, free download, and it is very easy to install. It also does not take up much room on the computer screen, and the server is done on a website (Audiogalaxy.com), and I believe this is one reason why students will be able to use this software in their campus dorm rooms. I am not certain of how many songs there are on Audiogalaxy, but I have never been unable to find a song that I wished to download - anything from a live rendition of a Broadway musical, to folk music, to hard-core rock songs.

Instead of choosing a particular person to download songs from, the Audiogalaxy software will choose the download based on nearest availabilty. One good aspect of this fact is that if the song is interrupted mid-download, it will continue as soon as the server finds an alternate download site for the song. This is unlike Napster, where if the person goes offline, the song download stops completely, presenting the user with an annoying "incomplete" stop.

I have also found that the downloads most often occur at a high speed rate. While some of this is attributed to my lovely T1 Network connection, I never had these high rates when I was able to use Napster at school. Sometimes it will transfer at over 100 bytes per second, where the highest I ever had with using Napster was approximately at 60 bytes per second.

In order to make sure that you get the correct version of the song you want, you will need to click on "Choose Version", or else you might only wind up downloading a portion of the song you wanted. As far as I can tell, that is the only downfall to this software, and it is very easy to get past this and download exactly what you want.

I have been using this program for about a week now, and I have no true complaints. It is a very suitable replacement for Napster, and allows me to download all the music I want, at a high download rate. I honestly don't think it gets much better than this.

Recommended: Yes