Napster issues

[Diesel]

Please feel free to post your Napster gripes/comments/complaints/alternatives in this thread.

I'll start.

With all of the talk about a possible shutdown, I figured I'd check out some alternatives. Not that I ever thought Napster was that great, and my reasons for having that opinion are many and varied:
poor connectivity engine
slow speed
unreliable
somewhat ignorant user base

I really could go on and on, but that would just take too long.

I went to download.com and checked out Audio Galaxy, based on all the buzz I've been hearing about it lately.

Well, unfortunately I can't give an opinion on this program because it won't let me register. Some way to make a first impression, huh?
So far, I've been trying for 6 hours to register. Let me just say that it's a total pain in the **** to have to reenter my registration info EVERY TIME because the client can't connect to the server to validate my account. I can only imagine what it must be like once I'm registered.

On top of that, I noticed that there's no uninstall option. If I want to get rid of it, I have to do it manually. That wouldn't be so bad except it decided to put itself everywhere: on my Start Menu, in my Startup folder, the hard drive, and I'm sure it's got crap floating around in the Registry.

Needless to say, I'll probably get even more fed up with it and just wipe it out entirely. Of course, should that happen, I have no intention of re-installing it in the future.
I'll just go back to Usenet and get my mp3's the old-fashioned way: Request that someone post them, and thank them when they do.


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"It's always funny until someone gets hurt, and then it's just hilarious."

 

[Chimpi]

lolWell yeah, Audiogalaxy does have a *few* problems (but Napster has FAR more), but it's all worth it. 99% of the time you can get your song, can change bandwidth, more songs from all the groups (many different options of each song too), and not snnoying. I find Napster annoying cuz there are too many options in it.

So, up to you

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10 years from now, you will worship me. Oh yes, I will be God. I will be yours, and everyones God. I..will..be...TRUMPET GOD!
Justin's Swing Palace

 

[Diesel]

Originally posted by NapoliJ10:
I find Napster annoying cuz there are too many options in it.

lol
That's the first time I've ever heard someone say that too many options was a bad thing.

The one good thing I can say about Napster is that, once it became HUGELY popular, it outgrew the problem where it's users didn't give a rat's **** about sound quality.
When I first used it a few years back, the main problem I had with Napster was that the files sounded like absolute crap.
Now, people are recording at higher bitrates and actually not leaving files on their hard drives that contain pops, hiss, wacked out sound levels, and skips.
Now if they could only start cleaning off all of those partial files, where they only have half a song...

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"It's always funny until someone gets hurt, and then it's just hilarious."

 

[Chimpi]

lol, yeah (I see you're used to lol and can't do

)

I'll give Napster that, you usually do get better sound quality, but a lot of times it's hard to tell the difference, unless you're going from like 96 to 320...then there's definately a difference....

ANd by too many options, it's like, you have to do so much stuff to get a song, and sign on and stuff. Too many buttons. With Audiogalaxy, it;'s type in band name or song, find it (that can be a while sometimes, cuz there's so many), click on it, and download it. SImple! And we all like simple, right?

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10 years from now, you will worship me. Oh yes, I will be God. I will be yours, and everyones God. I..will..be...TRUMPET GOD!
Justin's Swing Palace

 

[Diesel]

Nap> I honestly didn't find Napster to have too many options, and the options they did have made it easier to find what I wanted.

All I had to do to sign on was click on the Napster shortcut in my Start menu. Once it was up, I click on Search, type in the name of the artist and song, and run with it.
If I so desired, I was also able to specify minimum or maximum bitrate, and minimum or maximum connection speed. I found it great to be able to weed out all of the people with crappy connections so I could get the fastest transfer speeds. It was especially nice when I would hook up with someone who had a T3 and I would get over 500k/s download rates.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what your criticizing?


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"It's always funny until someone gets hurt, and then it's just hilarious."

 

[JHowse]

I have to agree with DD on this one. I think the Napster client is WAY more intuitive than Audiogalaxy. Another gripe I have is that once the satellite is running, I'll have to use task manager to shut it down....hardly a good thing. I don't find Audiogalaxy that intuitive as an interface as my first few download attempts were frought with config frustrations...even though the use of the web search engine isn't a bad concept....just that they did it, poorly, IMHO. Download speeds are comparable to Napster, also. I see it as an alternative with potential, but the client side search and download engines need work.

Nap, I too liked the fact that you could specify song and connection parameters with Napster. I don't see that with Audiogalaxy (or if they do have that...it sure isn't intuitive).

Other alternatives?

-UseNet
-#mp3 on the various IRC servers. Not only can you get people to DCC mp3's and do some trading, you can get hooked up with ftp sites.



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Does driving a car from Saturn make me an alien?

I'm just a quick pee. - liltaz, fastest pee in the West!

That which does not make me barf, makes me stronger - possum37, fugly.net guru.

 

[Diesel]

Heck, I didn't even have a chance to complain about the interface, since I never got it to allow me to register.
I probably would've though.

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"It's always funny until someone gets hurt, and then it's just hilarious."

 

[JHowse]

Being someone who has had human-machine interface development training, I do know the issues.

That's what I'm here for!

I would say the largest development problem on the Audiogalaxy UI is the interface between the chair and the keyboard!

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Does driving a car from Saturn make me an alien?

I'm just a quick pee. - liltaz, fastest pee in the West!

That which does not make me barf, makes me stronger - possum37, fugly.net guru.

 

[monsieurjohn]

i like napster okay, it's served me well

the sound quality difference only matters to me when it's less than 96 - i can't tell the difference between 96 and 128, and cds only record at 150, so anything greater than that is pointless anyway.

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monsieurjohn: Professor of Metaphysico-theologico-cosmolo-nigogology

"Maybe *this* is what 'cooties', the disease that every grade schooler is terrified of, yet knows not the symptoms of which, is!" - KNSinatra at 3:34 AM

 

[Diesel]

mj> Not sure where you heard that CDs are recorded at 150. That number just sounds WAY off.

I've done side by side comparisons, and I can tell a drastic difference between an mp3 encoded at 128 and one encoded at 192. Less drastic, but still a significant difference between 192 and 256.

Of course, it helps to have a really good set of speakers or good quality headphones. I have a set of KOSS headphones that are decent for gaming but lack the mid-range for music, but I have Klipsch Promedia's that really allow you to hear the quality of the MP3 come out. On the one hand, it's great that you can hear all of the nuances of the music. On the other, it's disconcerting that you can hear all of the imperfections in the music that you never realized were there before.


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"It's always funny until someone gets hurt, and then it's just hilarious."

 

[jadedskies]

Audiogalaxy's been great for me. I didn't have any problems setting it up, and despite it having the interface from hell, the option to resume files has been very useful.

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One door closed is one door opened
One more memory fades away
Such grand dreams we all have chosen
We lost our innocence along the way
- Rose Bygrave, "Innocence"

PsychoticIckyThing.Com

 

[Goshzilla]

I've been looking for napster replacements for a while and really nothing has replaced it. It's fast (if you choose you're users right, try connecting to some 14k users, they're lying). It has a huge selection, and i don't get any firewall problems. Scour was good, but it gone. Everything else, either has no users thus no selection, it's slow, has poor searching capability, or just won't get through my firewall.

At least napigator will let napster live on.

Now before you flame, me, I've been d/ling MP3's for about 5 years, and have used everything from ratio/banner ftps, to webpages, to leech sites. Out of everything that came along, Napster just makes it so easy. I can get a whole album that hasn't even been released yet in a short amount of time.

Just to balance things out, I'll post some nagatives about Napster:
some slow users
200 limit for results
allows other users to stop your transfer
disconnects sometimes when I do a search and cuts off my d/l's

*opinions off!*

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--Dann
I am the Lowest Common Denominator

 

[Diesel]

Goshzilla> I think your estimate as to how long you've been downloading mp3s might be a little off.

While the MP3 compression patent has been around for quite a while, the first acknowledged software that could actually play files compressed in mp3, AMP, wasn't released until 1997. WinAMP, which took the AMP engine and ported it for easy use on the Windows platform, wasn't released until 1998.

I seriously doubt you were downloading mp3s before you had a program that could play them, so it's probably been more like 3 years.

I know how things can seem like longer than they actually are when they're that far back in the past. Heck, I can barely remember what I ate for lunch yesterday.

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"It's always funny until someone gets hurt, and then it's just hilarious."

 

[nootch]

Actually, I remember listening to MP3s as far back as spring of 1997 (possibly even sooner, but I'm sure of at least spring 97 because I was listening to MP3s at the place where I worked at the time), using an old program called WinPlay3 (which I believe was actually written by the Fraunhofer Institute). They even have a 16-bit version of the app for Windows 3.x. So I'm not so sure that Gosh's "about 5 years" estimate is that far off.

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"May those who love us love us. And those who don't love us-- may God turn their hearts. And if He cannot turn their hearts, may He turn their ankles, so that we may know them by their limping." -- Keeping the Faith

 

[Diesel]

True, it's just nitpicky on my part, but even if it was 4 years ago, stretching it to 5 years on such a short timeline is still stretching.

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"It's always funny until someone gets hurt, and then it's just hilarious."

 

[JHowse]

Nootch, I remember getting my first mp3s during the spring of '97. I also used WinPlay3 until Winamp first came out, that summer. I remember have a good portion of an 850 MB hard drive filled with mp3s for playing at home during the summer.

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Does driving a car from Saturn make me an alien?

That which does not make me barf, makes me stronger - possum37, fugly.net guru.

 

[Goshzilla]

You're right, i mess up dates like that all the time, but I remember being in Junior year of highschool, so I was 16, so early '97. So it should be about 3 1/2 to 4 years.
Not that it's important.

Yeah, winplay3, my first experience using cracked software.

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--Dann
I am the Lowest Common Denominator

<FONT COLOR="#000000" SIZE="1" FACE="Verdana, Arial">[This message has been edited by Goshzilla on March 01, 2001 at 10:53 PM]</font>