Another? "High Wire," a just released cut from a Rob Brown and Sunny Wilkinson CD that wasn't available at cdrom.com or Barnes and Noble, my usual haunts. Right. It was already on Napster.
Napster works by connecting you to other people wanting to download MP3 music. Once connected, you search on, say, "Brubeck" and Napster's servers find everyone logged on with music that has "Brubeck" in the listing. You can limit the search to a reasonable number of hits-100 is the default-or ask for 900 (and sometime you get your wish, filling the screen with songs). Once the search is complete, a click on the title starts a download; click on the sender's name and he or she is added to your Hot List, providing a way of finding them in subsequent sessions.
So yes, I'm using Napster, feeling conflict and guilt, and collecting songs. I logged on last month and it wasn't for research or a future article. I just had to see it for myself. Free music, all you can download, all perfectly anonymous.
And entirely illegal.
The story is that things get even more outrageous with Gnutella, a free program that provides anything you want. Search on Word and you'll get the program. Music? Easy. Porno? No sweat. But that's nonsense so let's dispense with Gnutella right away. First, Gnutella is more difficult to use than Napster or Scour.
Once you master Gnutella and start searching for items, you'll find more junk and x-rated sites than you can possibly imagine. For example, a search on Wordstar (stop laughing) brought up wordstar.html, a file with an x-rated URL embedded inside. Same thing happened with a search for most popular programs. In a way it's a lot like unmoderated newsgroups with unfiltered files and messages.
Worse, Gnutella is probably the easiest way to pick up a virus or have your system examined by an experienced hacker. You can safely get a taste of what Gnutella's capable of by searching at CapnBry's site. http://capnbry.dyndns.org/gnutella/gs.php If you want Gnutella, get it at http://gnutella.wego.com
Of course, there are a few downsides to Napster. Not all the music is complete, and not all of it is good quality. Some Napster users are conscientious and make it clear in the song's title that the song was cut short. Often a cut doesn't get ripped-transferred from the CD to the hard drive-properly and the music is distorted.
When you log on to Napster, you fill in your connection speed. Unfortunately, not everyone tells the truth. So you might find yourself downloading from someone using a 56k modem, making your high-speed access valueless. Or if you've decided to share one of your folders filled with music, slow connectors may start grabbing songs and you might feel guilty disconnecting them before they get anything downloaded.
What I want is the ability, as with Napster, to check out and listen to the entire song, not a 15 second sample. For instance, I heard about four minutes of "The Time of the Barracudas," a Gil Evans and Miles Davis cut on the radio. I liked what I heard. After I downloaded the entire song on Napster, I realized it wasn't something I wanted to listen to again. I deleted it, just as I would with shareware I couldn't use. Had I purchased the $16 CD, I would've been stuck with it.
And what's the business plan for the 19 year old behind Napster? The program's free and there's no advertising on Napster-no banner ads, no cookies, and no intrusions on our privacy. My guess? The kid's going to sell it to one of the big record companies.
So the question we're faced with is whether Napster is a rogue, a way to let everyone pirate music from the Internet. Or is Napster a change agent, pushing the industry towards reform.
Me? I've gotta go. There are a couple of Herbie Hancock cuts I'm trying to find.
This article is brought to you by the Editorial Committee of the Association of Personal Computer User Groups (APCUG), an International organization to which this user group belongs Steve Bass is a Contributing Editor with PC World Magazine, frequently writes for Forbes ASAP, Working Woman, and Family Circle, and is the president of the Pasadena IBM Users Group. He can be reached at stevebass@earthlink.net.
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