I'm not gonna get into whether Napster trading is good or bad. That is up to the individual and that issue has been debated to death.

What I will focus on is my limited experience with the Napster client.

First of all if you have a bad dial up connection or a slow modem, you may as well forget it. It becomes a game of russian roulette whether you will get a file or not. You'd be better off using Audiogalaxy or some other service that allows resuming.

Transfer errors are more common than parrotheads at a Jimmy Buffett concert. This brings up the biggest drawback to Napster in that it has no resume function. You have to start the download all over again. Imagine the frustration of trying to get one lousy file for an hour and a half.

On the other hand, if you have a fast dedicated connection, you can more easily deal with the transfer errors, since once you do get a good connection, the download will be fast.

Main pluses I see:

1) Greatest selection of songs.
2) Relatively easy to use.
3) Still Free.

Drawbacks

1) No resume feature.
2) Can be difficult/time consuming (even using exclude functions) to narrow it down enough to get songs with short/common titles that are relatively rare.
3) Can only have 100 songs max in search. This causes problems presented in 2 above when the song you want is rare, and there is a real popular song with a similar title.
4) More of a system hog than some, especially if you have a slower computer.
5) System only searches for 15 seconds starting on the server you are logged in to. Thus you may not find what you are looking for.
6) It seems the search always takes the full 15 seconds, thus wasting time when you have the more popular stuff that should come up faster.
7) Can't have more than one search going at once.
8) On slower machines for sure, if you share a lot of files, it takes a long time to chug through them. Thankfully with newer releases of the software, you don't have to sit and wait.

In recent weeks of course Napster has begun blocking certain songs submitted to them by the record companies. As time goes by, this list will no doubt grow and at some point, the service may really dry up. If you want something get it now. In fact it may already be too late for some stuff. Their blocked lists aren't shrinking you can bet on that.



Recommended: Yes