The Freenet project () is even more steeped in technical arcana than Gnutella. You can share any type of files over the network. In one night, we found both a dance mix of Faith Hill's "The Way You Love Me" and a stunning number of Henry Rollins's angst-ridden spoken-word diatribes. Searches through the Gnutella network run slowly, but if you're willing to let your computer chug away, you can find just about anything. But the better Gnutella clients, such as BearShare (), do much of that configuration and maintenance for you. Since the Gnutella protocol is open, there many different applications to choose from, most of which require complicated configuration and regular updating. To use the Gnutella network, you need a Gnutella "servent" (a mixture of "server" and "client") that lets you search for, download and upload any type of file. This makes it very hard to shut down - and hard to use. Instead, there's just a bunch of computers sharing certain files and passing search requests to and from each other. Gnutella () moves a step away from the Napster concept by ditching the directory-server concept entirely. Individual "nap servers" could still be shut down, but it's unlikely that all of them could easily be expunged from the Internet. It's easy to use, folding nearly seamlessly into the Napster application itself. This Windows-only program () lets users select an independently run, Napster-compatible server to connect to, based on capacity and performance data. The most straightforward alternative of the bunch, Napigator, simply uses Napster technology.
In many ways, these "P2P" programs are where the Internet itself was four or five years ago. On one computer, it took us about 25 minutes just to choose a file-sharing program (after reading various frequently-asked-questions files), 15 minutes to download it and 30 minutes or so to get it to work. That makes them more resistant both to legal attacks and new users' attempts to decipher them.
With Napster's recent courtroom setbacks and $1 billion settlement offer, the best-known way to sample - or steal - music online will either cease to exist or be drastically altered into a pay service.īut is Napster all there is? No - if you have have a sufficiently high tolerance for experimenting.įree Napster alternatives such as Napigator, Gnutella and Freenet share the same basic premise - search other people's hard drives, connect to one computer and download the file from there - but they lack Napster's central directory server.
Music lovers are quaking at their keyboards all across the Internet.
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