As the music is slowly stripped from Napster by a combination of court injunctions and record company persistence, thoughts are beginning to turn to the alternatives. Napster will probably hang in there for months yet, offering unlimited downloads from a dwindling collection of licensed tracks, but the genie of free music is definitely out of the bottle and thieves are not noted for their loyalty.
"Hey - has anyone tried Limewire?"
"Yep - it's rubbish, almost as bad as Bearshare."
Such exchanges are now common in the Napster chatrooms as users try to work out whether their craving for free music can be fed elsewhere. Naturally, there are already plenty of alternatives. The question is: are they any good and how long will they last before the record companies notice their existence and shut them down too?
For those who may have missed the Napster revolution, the key jargon to remember is Peer to Peer (P2P). When you download a file from the internet, it is usually stored on a server somewhere, taking up disk space either owned by a private company or donated to users by ISPs.
This system has served the web well since its inception. However, the growing availability of multimedia files (in particular music and video) causes a huge capacity problem. Not only are the files larger, but should they prove popular it is easy for users to jam that server with their download attempts.
This is already a major problem for the porn industry, with servers crashing on an hourly basis and ISPs - like Yahoo - imposing strict download limits on thousands of accounts. P2P avoids this problem by putting all the strain on the user. Companies like Napster simply provide a window; the tracks you download are coming directly from some other user's hard drive, and they in turn are uploading material directly from yours. When it works, it works brilliantly.
When it fails, it exposes your PC to greater risk from viruses, hackers and unexpected crashes. You have been warned!
Finally, do remember that the transfer of copyright material other than for personal use is illegal. However, as these programmes can be used for legitimate sharing of your own files (photos, music etc) we feel obliged to tell you what works and what will simply mess up your system. How you choose to exploit this advice is a matter for your own conscience. Bearshare www.bearshare.com is the most prominent new file sharer and, like the others, free to download. The interface is unusually drab despite the highly colourful website from which you download it.
Unfortunately, the main problem with Bearshare is that it doesn't seem to work! Despite multiple attempts I could not even make it perform a search, while its own bulletin board strongly suggests the problem does not end there. As one user put it, with remarkable restraint, "I appreciate the effort to help us, but I think I speak for a large group of people when I say that I can not download anything !"
Limewire ( www.limewire.com ) is a nicer looking interface with some useful gimmicks, for example, the ability to perform multiple simultaneous searches, each of which is tabbed in the main window. Also useful is the ability to define your minimum download speed, so if you have ADSL or cable and wish to avoid users with humble 56k modems, you can. The searches are quick and unusually productive (I found over 3,000 Madonna files in seconds plus most of the UK top 20).
However, 20 attempts to download the same track all ended in a connection failure, and the one success I did have (downloading a 15mb mpeg file) took over an hour to complete despite my ultra-fast ADSL connection. The prettiest file sharer around is probably Gnotella. It is also one of the easiest to use, accepting both Bearshare and Limewire users and clearly marking which clients are using firewalls, which may make the files harder to download. Once again you can perform multiple searches and the results were both faster and more plentiful than Limewire.
There's even a snazzy window to show how your transactions are eating up the available bandwidth. However, the success rate was appalling, with fewer than two files transferring from the 50 or so I tried, and it was appallingly slowly given both parties were using cable modems. The final site, Gnutella, has been around for a while now. It originally provided the core code for the first true alternative to Napster, but is now more of a community for other P2P engines.
The key advantage of using a Gnutella variant is that you can swap almost any kind of media file over them, including pictures (JPEGs and GIFs), MPEG or AVI video files or small application programmes as well as the most popular MP3 music format. For an introduction to P2P file sharing and a mix of some of the best engines, this is a good place to start.
The more you use P2P programs, the more you appreciate the sheer genius of Napster. Here was a fluid and functioning music sharing system, with a world class search engine, one of the best instant messaging facilities around, and a built in media player so you could preview files as they were downloading. In comparison, the new wave of P2P engines are slow, inaccurate and largely ineffective.
Admittedly, some of this is down to the nature of the files - an MPEG video is much bigger than an MP3 file, consequently the host you are trying to download from handles fewer simultaneous connections, each taking longer to deal with. There is, of course, another problem with most of these P2P programs. Once activated, the software will scan your drive for files you wish to share with fellow thieves (sorry, users). Unfortunately, once the world can see your own files, it also knows a fair amount about your personal habits. Got any embarrassing JPEGs? (be honest, now). Well, prepare to let colleagues, friends and file sharers see them too. Admittedly, there are ways of selecting which files you choose to share, but as many users will use the same folder for uploads and downloads, red faces are probably inevitable.
All in all, however, if this is the future of P2P, Metallica has nothing to worry about. Napster's children ain't half as dangerous as the old man was.
