Slashdot Mirror
Review of Pay Napster
An Anonymous Coward writes: "A beta tester for the recently released subscription version of Napster has anonymously posted his impressions of the new service. He finds it remarkably similar to the old one, both good '... browsing through a real person's music collection, sending them messages and recommending them new music' and bad '... broken tracks, cancelled transfers and a complete inability to stream or preview tracks.' The service allows 50 tracks a month, but there was little decent content to fill those slots. Messages to other beta testers found mixed reactions among fellow users. Still, the writer holds out some optimism for Napster's chances."
So what are the chances people won't contact eachother and then transfer the music outside napster, through ICQ for example?
I'm going to want CD-quality rips. I don't want to waste 25 of my 50 downloads a month on bad rips.
There are tons of free p2p services out there, admittedly none as good as Napster was in it's day, but free none the less. Maybe you don't get support, but again free. On top of that no limits to how much you download. Most of them offer IM to discuss choices and new music. I am sorry to say it, I was a Huge fan of Napster, but too little way too late.
Note to self: No more arguing with the faithful.
With essentially indistructable services like Gnutella and Kazaa (etc) out there and working just fine (thank-you-very-much), why would anyone in their right mind pay Napster a monthly fee? Those who are going to pirate music are *STILL* going to pirate music. They'll just ditch the Napster client in favour of Napster and Napigator or Kazaa or Gnutella. So, it's 5 seconds longer to find that song you really want? Big deal.
Besides, I've often downloaded a great song and said, "hey, I want more!" And bought the CD.. If I can't find good/new music, buying CD's is something that really wouldn't enter my mind.
If I am ever to pay for my music.... I am going to want unlimited transfer..... then and only then would I pay for napster....
And I most likely would pay for the service.... playing banner games on hotline, and working with slow networks of buggy / slow / limiting applications like Morphious is getting a bit teadious......
The Code Ninja is swift with his tool, precise in his delivery, and deadly accurate in his execution.
Seriously, does anybody expect this pay-for-mp3's thing to take off?
Napster now is like a little animal that got hit by a car but refuses to die. There's blood everywhere, and it just keeps flopping around prolonging the inevitable. They're only bringing shame to themselves at this point. It's pathetic.
Could they just hurry up and die already?
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
two words: gtk gnutella
I think all of five or six people wil use it. How can they think that anyone will want to pay for the service after it has been down for so long? I don't know who developed their business model but he/she should be shot. It must be someone from the music industry who is not tech savvy (illiterati).
I use AudioGalaxy now and see no reason to switch back. My two cents.
The options
1. pay about $10/month for the chance to get 50 tracks, of which 25 actually came through.
2. pay nothing and get a 90% or better rate on downloading tracks.
I think I will take door number 2 please.
Avoid The Rush, Hate OU Early!!!
How much is the service?
I worked at Napster for a year.
The only thing I can say is they are getting
what they deserve. Any company that treats people
like napster treated their employees, deserves
to die a slow painful death, what they are doing.
I was the 6th systems administrator in less than 2 years to quit, and apparently 4 have quit since I left. The only ironic part is after I left, they fired the main sources of problems.. their incompetent executive staff.. Their IT manager was fired thank goodness, he was a nepotism hire by their vp of engineering Eddie Kessler, who was also fired.
Let them rot, and let the music be free.
"And how can this be? For he is the
If only there was something like that available...
Before anyone cries "Sell Out" put yourself in Shawns shoes; he has 70 million users, the most famous brand on the net, a once in a lifetime amount of momentum.
What do you do?
Shut it down and die, or change it and try and make a buck?
We were one of the first labels to support Napster in public. And whatever they decide to do in the future, they have unleashed an idea that has changed everything, and for that, we as a label and as artists say "thank you".
Its up to anyone who does not like the new Napster to take the many free tools that are out there and create something new that is exactly what the public wants.
Be prepared however, to be vilified, persecuted draged through the courts or worst of all ignored, but whatever you do, dont complain.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
I believe I read somewhere that during Napster's heyday, cd sales were at an all-time high. After they shut Napster down, I believe I read that cd sales went into the toilet.
Coincidence? I think not.
I'll still continue to download various stuffs, and go out and purchase cds when I find stuff I like. Everyone, including the recording industry, would be a lot happier if they realized what a powerful marketing tool these p2p file sharing dealies are.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
My opinion is that Napster is dead. It is dead not because it is a bad idea, or because we lack the technology, or even because it costs something. No. It is dead because free P2P is still around. And as long as Joe Blow Billie Bob is able to download music and leaves his Gnutella/WinMX/limewire/bearchare/etc (TM) client open and shares-all-his-music-while-using-all-the-bandwith (TM2), napster has no chance to recover it's glory of old.
UNLESS
Some big phat cie (ie AOL Time-Warner Microsoft etc) includes a big link on a portal and gets ol' granpa to subscribe.
Imperium et libertas
Autocracy and freedom
We all know that this is will spell the end of Napster. Few will use it to begin with, and, finding the bare library will cancel thier service, slimming the pickens even more.
Who in their right mind is going to pay for it to begin with, with so many other File Sharing apps on the Free market?
Am I Over-Moderating??
Napster was a great service. It was shut down. The free service was shut down. Now they've made another music service that you have to pay for. Why don't they rename it?
It certainly will be much more accepted by the public, because napster was shut down before and that might be viewed as bad by the general public.
The spin will be, that the failure of Napster is due to digital music not being accepted by the public in this form, as its only use is to pirate music.
It has all been said before, and will be said again about introducing a new format. Which is totally right, who is going to want a hard drive full of .nap files ?
But I just had a thought, in Napster's heyday (isn't it scary that last year is already "heyday"), broadband was a lot more prevalent. Now, we have seen boradband companies die, as well as a lot of people losing their jobs and either being off the net (doubtful) or switching to dial up. I couldn't help but wonder how many people are left that will want to sit there on a 56k line and download .nap files.
just a thought...
Learn to Improvise
My god. How lame.
Obviously, its going to fail with the mainstream geek market because of other choices available (Kazaa and similar). Not a bad idea, but it will be the puppets of companies. If I've learned one thing, its that if you pay for something, you'll pay a lot more by being forced to watch various ads (and probably listen to them as well). It will pretty much be like those porn sites you pay for that don't have any content, just popups and banners.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
It has become a parody of itself. I understand that the company had to do this to remain in business, but I don't see why this is newsworthy. The new Napster is a poorly-conceived service that is trying to charge money for a product that is *inferior* to what's being *given away for free* by dozens of other services. Can we please stop talking about it already? It's doomed.
Perhaps the next rev of Slashcode will allow users to define their own kill filters for headlines?
*This page intentionally left pointless*
yea thats great and all, but .nap? I dont think so. Why should a single company get to decide an industry standard file type? Oops... .xls .doc .ppt...
never mind! Sign me up! w00t!
I for one, enjoy the concept of a new Napster. Yes indeed, the day and age of free music for all is over, but I'm willing to fork over a little bit of cash every month in order to listen to some swell new music. Without Napster, I would have never heard of the Dave Matthews Band. Never would I have been amazed by the sensational pop stylings of Britney Spears. Discovering underground music is what this service is all about, and even if the underground involves money and other less-popular stuff, it's still worth it. Sure, I won't be able to trade from my enormous collection of pristine-sounding 128KB MP3s, but hell, there was a time when you COULDN'T trade music over the Internet. You had to settle for lyrics and tablature, and hum the melodies.
Why is it that every time a company comes around and decides to charge money for a product, tens of thousands of ninnies decide that it's suddenly no longer 'worth it'? I'll tell you why. It's because they're poor.
There is the option, however, to cancel a download mid stream without depleting your download count.
Wasn't there something called "leech zmodem" back in the BBS days? This version of zmodem would abort the download at the very last byte, so as to fool the BBS's upload/download ratio tracking.
I bet something like this will make the rounds when Pay Napster comes online.
Method of processing duck feet
So you're telling me that Napster wants *me* to *pay them* to use *my bandwidth* so that they can sell *my content* to other users?
I bet I would be fucked more gently by those "MAKEMONEYFA$$$T" pricks.
Yep, That's right, The New Napster is destined toward failure, by design.
Lesse:
A Proprietary Format - So, I can't just deposit MP3s on a CD and have hours of listening delight? That sucks. I'm paying to get music and I get a lame-ass proprietary crap format that can't be read by anything but Napster's own player. That alone is enough to keep me from paying.
Content is slim - Apparently, the record companies get to pick what is distrubuted. They'll distribute the same crap that plays on the radio, and probably at the same crappy quality. You're better off routing your radio receiver to your soundcard, and you can do that for free!
Do I really want to pay a monthly fee for limited content in a proprietary format? Of course not. This is just a clever way for the RIAA to get it to fail so they can come back and say, "See, we told you so, It wouldn't work. They just want to 'steal' the music, and not obtain it legitmiately."
I'm dissapointed. I was one of the first to say I would pay to download music in MP3 (not proprietary) format, just so long as I can get what I want. It's potentially a great service that I think some people are willing to pay for, less than a dollar per track, and you get what you like! It's perfect. Or, at least it could have been. Now it's just the bastard child of the RIAA.
The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout
but why is this even on slashdot? (setting myself up to be flamebait I guess)
.. listen .. ITS OVER .. dont prolong the inevitable.
We know it is going to fail with so many other p2p clients available.
Nothing using a proprietary format ever seems to take off and even if it does is soon forgotten and forever shunned (.gif anyone?)
The time it took napster to get to go from what it was to this now has made them loose 100% of there audience, all who have moved to different methods of file sharing.
How about not one central source of files? What would stop someone from renaming a Rush Limbaugh speech at the local joy club with "Who let the Dogs out". User tampering could run wild unless some md5 checksum is built in. (the article does state some sort of finger printing might be going on, but could not discuss furthor)
What inititive do people have to open up there pipes for people to dl music from there computers? Seriously. Before the mentallity was that "since I take, I shall give." Now it will be "Since I pay, I have NO NEED to give back. Bandwidth does not not come cheap, and I sure as hell am not going to provide it so that Napster can make money."
Napster
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
I just don't undersatnd why people can't use better Gnutella clients. Same thing. No restrictions.
Call me stupid, if you wish, but I just don't get it.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Before everyone dismisses the New and Improved(tm) Napster:
Free web content is only free if your time is worth nothing.
Translation: Sure, you can go get all the free bits you want, but the service here is:
1. Quality
2. Access to what you want, when you want
If those can be provided, then perhaps it is worth a small subscription price. There is an incentive (keeping your subscription current) for Napster to provide value. There is no incentive for some random URL to provide value, because without a purchase there is no value by definition.
However, this only holds true if the value difference remains. If Napster starts providing a substandard service, then it won't be worth the money to subscribe.
But I do think they deserve a chance, espeically if they will be offering smaller or new artists an opportunity to distribute their music as well.
The reason napster was so good is because there were so many people online at any given time you had statistics and probability on your side. It also had bitrate search which was really great.. but now it's incorporated in other clients. Bottom line, napster had it's 15 minutes like every person/company deserves. Don't make it more than it was. I've tried quite a few services like Kazaa and Napigator and Gnutella and I haven't been able to find the few odd songs. I was wondering if anyone knew a public forum with quite a few people where others post requests and contact information for transferring songs. Thanks.
Crapster, instead!!
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
An Anonymous Coward writes: "A beta tester for the recently released subscription version of Napster has anonymously posted his impressions of the new service. He finds it remarkably similar to the old one, both good '... browsing through a real person's music collection, sending them messages and recommending them new music' and bad '... broken tracks, cancelled transfers and a complete inability to stream or preview tracks.' The service allows 50 tracks a month, but there was little decent content to fill those slots. Messages to other beta testers found mixed reactions among fellow users. Still, the writer holds out some optimistism for Napster's chances."
Really. It is obvious to EVERYONE that this isn't going to work. Napster has been replaced by Morpheus, Gnutella, whatever. Who actually thinks this is going to work? I thought investors were a little scared now. Nothing to see here, move along.
We've reviewed the 5000-word review at "http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2002/paynapste r.html", and, well, seeing as how there are a hundred billion other P2P file-sharing applications in the Galaxy (and at least a hundred on Earth alone), and only a limited amount of space in the book's database, we've had to trim it a bit.
"Sucks ass"
Seriously, if you are an independent artist and your music is on napster your not going to see a dime. The money from Napster is going to the RIAA as a licensing fee for their music being downloaded, but what about you? Are you going to payed for your work? Someone in the gov't needs to look at this a cry foul, because now not only does the RIAA get to profit from their own artists, but anyone who writes something that makes its way onto Napster.
Time shifting (record now - watch later) is legal. It's been upheld by the Supreme Court (Sony v. Universal City - Betamax case). So apply the time shifting principal to all media. If I have a friend who owns Shrek, I could watch it with him, or I can record his copy and watch it at a later point (time shifted viewing). I then apply the 'securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors' principal from the US Constitution. The current 'limited Times' is now appoximately 100 years....so I'll dispose of my time shifted material in another 90-100 years. So I'm legally using time shifted recordings for a reasonable and limited period of time. The only qualification is that one of my friends has a copy of something. But I've found plenty of friends. I also us this same principal when I rent a DVD ($1 at Albertson food stores).
The above has all the logical underpinnings of being totally legit, but only the time shifted viewing aspect has been tested at the Supreme court. The 'limit time' period is my interpretation, but I like to see/hear the thoughts from other people. Shoot I'll even read the opinion of the lawyers.
So basically Napster is providing a pay version of this, but there are other avenues, and plenty of them. Think iPods, Lyras, and other small portable and easy to connect storage. I actually stopped using Napster before they died because the connections where a lot slower than dragging and dropping to an external USB drive (I've only had 56k connections). So long Napster, we hardly knew ya).
Religion and science are both 90% crap..but that doesn't negate the other 10%.
Morpheus is FAR better than Napster EVER was. Morpheus gets more traffic than Napster did at the height of its popularity. Napster is a dead dog. People won't pay. Goodbye Napster. RIP 2001.
How long before someone figures out a way to get around the server by wrapping a .mp3 file in .nap format so the server thinks it's a "secure" file, but the mp3 can be extracted from it? Then maybe they would get some subscribers...
Robotiq.com is heavily tested on animals
I know this is a common sentiment, but allow me to voice why I won't be subscribing to Napster any time soon:
... it's all backup, of course, of course ... yeah, that's the ticket!), but if Napster isn't going to give me high-quality service, I'll go about my legal compliance by some OTHER method.
... )
If I'm going to be paying a monthly fee for Napster, I'll be expecting a certain level of performance from the service; even if I'm only paying $4.95/month, that's $60/year that I -- a poor college student and a member of the target demographic -- won't have any more. I'm going to expect Napster to deliver, and I don't think it is going to be able to meet my expectations.
The first thing I'm going to expect is constant uptime. The old Napster delivered this perfectly; I don't think I ever got a "cannot connect" message from Napster. However, even though I could always get on, the selection of files was hardly constant: at times I would go on and have millions of files at my finger tips, from thousands of users; other times I'd find a few hundred users with perhaps half a million files.
This is significant because of my second expectation: redundancy. When I search for a file, I will expect to have at least 20 different copies of the song to choose from -- thus enabling me to download the song even if the first 15 users give me the busy signal. I want to be able to download the same song (down to the bit) from no less than 20 locations; the more, the merrier.
This is part of another expectation I have: quality files. I don't want to download a copy of Nirvana's _Smells Like Teen Spirit_ only to find that I downloaded a 128kbit song that's missing the last 5 seconds -- the last 5 seconds might only be fade-time, but it's the principle of the thing. What if I wanted to download a song that goes straight to the last second with no fade-time? I want only complete songs, at nothing less than 256kbit encoding. People on 56k modems might settle for 128kbit (I always settled for 160kbit) but I have faster-than-god 'net access at school, and I'm planning on using it.
My fourth expectation is speed; I want to be able to download all of my files at no less than 200k/second. I don't care how Napster pulls it off, it's what I'm expecting (my basis for these expectations follows shortly). I expect that kind of speed at all times; 100k/second is acceptable at peak usage, say 6pm - 9pm, but at all other times I damn well better be seeing 200k/second.
My fifth expectation is to be able to download songs the day they are released on CD. I will expect to have nearly immediate access to all new music that hits the market. If there are going to be delays between release dates and availability on Napster, they won't be getting my patronage. If there are going to be certain bands/lables that I can't download on Napster, I want to know about it BEFORE I sign up; I want it spelled out for me in BIG, BOLD, AOL FRIENDLY LETTERING. I want to see a sign that says "these bands will be inaccessable to you: ------ ".
For my sixth and final expectation, I expect to be able to burn these songs onto any CD any number of times at full quality. Period. No exceptions. No DRM bullocks. I expect this to work this way.
I don't think these expectations are unreasonable. Here's why: this is no different from what I can do now.
At any given time, day or night, peak usage or not, all of the above expectations are met by the various file sharing programs I use. I can't always get a complete copy of whatever song I want on the first try, but I can download seven different versions of the same song in just 10 minutes to make sure I got my 256kbit, COMPLETE, error-free copy of said song. I can get these songs the date they are released (sometimes several days/weeks before). I can burn them onto 10000 CDs if I feel like it, at full quality, and no one will think twice. I can almost always find a host that'll give me 200k/second or higher (I get max out between 400 - 700k/second on gnutella, because my school has the fattest pipe I've ever SEEN). If any of these things aren't available to me under my current setup, that's fine; I'm not paying for any of it. But Napster wants my money, so they damn well better deliver. If I can't get something AS GOOD as what I have now, I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing and Napster will be $5/month poorer because of it.
I want to be legal about my downloading (not that I'm downloading anything illegally, of course
(Just don't get me started about LEECHES on the new Napster
~A.
student of animation and the fine arts
Get it right "In a weird twist to Stephen King's real-life horror story, the driver who ran over and nearly killed the bestselling horrormeister last year has been found dead. " From e-online.com
But aside from the uncommon "rare-music-searcher," don't people use Napster so they DON'T have to pay money? Sorry... but people are cheap and this'll never work.
but maybe doing some "packet proxy, filtering and modifications" of data destined to Napsters servers may be more in line.
(do to legal reasons I do not want to discuss into any depth this method) I will let the average 3rd grader figure it out on there own.
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
I pay a fee to a (many) third party companie(s) to download files from not any of those companies -- but to another user like me who is in turn paying a fee -- and most of the bandwitdth exchanged is between the two user parties. Is this not akin to setting up a dating service in a nightclub. Or selling the recipe for ice....I mean there are already many, many, many alternative methods of P2P file transfer....This is akin to selling tickets to the game -- after the game....ROFL
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
www.winmx.com
This whole paying for music that you can't use theory is bogus. Everyone should take a look at http://www.Zeropaid.com. It has everything you need for your p2p needs.
Visit BobtheKing.com it's perhaps the best thing I've ever made to waste your time with.
too little, too late.
sorry napster, the train left about 6 months ago.
- Only tracks which are 'approved' by record labels (or independent artists, maybe, someday) for distribution over Napster will be available.
- 50 downloads a month, now for $10 a month, maybe more later.
They will last just long enough to spend all the venture money. Nobody will sign up. The major labels have no reason to deal with em, since they hate Napster already, and have already started up their own services with identical (doomed) business model. So it will never be the 'jukebox in the sky' which is the only model that even has a shot at competing with free.
You have to have a (good) product to 'leverage the brand'. They don't. So they will fail. Frankly, all these entrepeneurs who have tried to 'leverage brands' without worrying about building good products get what they deserve. Napster should have thrown in the towel once they lost what was good about their service in court, or stood up and added their strength to the Gnutella network. Instead, they tried to play it safe with this approach, and are going to lose everything (except the .05 on the dollar they will get when their assets are fire-saled). Well, they picked their fate. Tough to make a million dollars these days.
I was thinking Napster was dead and gone but I'm starting to think they might be on to something, especially since it looks like MP3.com is losing its luster.
The service should allow artists to choose if they want the "secure" wrapper or plain MP3s, and/or the wrapper should be easy to remove (the way Fanning keeps talking about it the wrapper makes me think it will be).
The system should allow you to identify rips before you download them (ie, there should be "official" rips for each song, preferably at a few different qualities, and that should get passed around, rather than every dork sharing their own "version" of the track full of skips and dropouts and bad encoding).
And there should be plenty of tools for learning about new music, and ways for artists to promote themselves (hopefully not ending up with big guys shutting out little guys).
I think might actually turn out pretty good, especially for indie artists looking for distribution. Better than having to set up your own website and pay for bandwidth, and you might get a few bucks. Just tell people, my new track is up on Napster, check it out.
The Napster brand is pretty strong too, in fact I still use the term "Napster" even if I'm actually using another service.. like, didja Napster the new Boards of Canada album yet?
So they want me to pay to use there service, and host content?
"Hello, McFly!"
They want to charge fine, but I should get something everytime someone uses MY bandwidth and my system to get the content napster is charging for.
We knoe they'll fail, they know they'll fail, there just making as much bank as possible so they can go cry in there million dollar homes.
I am think I should write a script that detects when 99% of a song is downloaded, then terminate the download. Pretty soon everyone will be padding there music a little, and people will be paying for ulimited downloads. Unless its 2 dollars or less per month, they'll fail even with unlimited downloads.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
so this new .nap format is copy protected right?
why bother?
i mean how long is going to be before its allready cracked?
sorry.. how long is it going to be before i can download the application to crack it?
i mean come on. chances are its allready been cracked. so why bother? no really? why do corporations even bother with encryption?
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
On how many days it takes for nap2mp3.exe to appear on usenet? Hell, I had a activation-free copy of XP Pro about six weeks before it was actually released, I would think the hacker community could knock out a .nap to .mp3 converter over a six-pack.
This tagline is umop apisdn.
[sarcasm]finally, an online music service I can use to get the music I want and without feeling guilty about stealing .000000000002 cents/song downloaded from the artist. and from the looks of it, this thing is going to have so much support, it will never die! thanks payNapster![/sarcasm]
Here's a thought -- maybe if he hadn't tried to make a buck out it and he released it to the world, everyone would have been a little better off. But I guess he wouldn't have been on the cover of Business 2.0 (or whatever) then...
Be prepared however, to be vilified, persecuted draged through the courts or worst of all ignored, but whatever you do, dont complain.
"It's easy to complain"
"Fun too!"
-- Homer J Simpson
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
You can record live audio from microphones to MP3. You can also record from DVD-audio or DAT which have slightly higher audio quality then CDs. I mean. Duh.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
AOL-TW endorsement and links from AOL browser right in to napster- Those AOL freaks will not know that there are "other" p2p services that are better and free to boot.
just my 2cents worth
the operated a lot like ENE.
was Ken Lay on their board?
The assumption that people will suddenly switch to a proprietary format is rather insane, if you ask me. I've heard countless times "Format YXZ will be super secure and stop trading of MP3s"
OK, let's assume for a moment that there is a format out there that won't be cracked within 4 minutes of its introduction. The RIAA and others seem to feel we will all dump MP3s and switch over automatically.
The MP3 genie is already out of the bottle. No one is going to switch to these new formats by choice, and there is no way you can force people to, either. And even if everybody switched, they would go back the second they realized the limitations being placed on them by the new format.
The strategy being put forth by all these groups is simple.
(1) New, secure music format introduced.
(2) Everyone switches over from MP3.
(3) Piracy stops.
This is worse than a dot-com business model. Their stupidity will be their undoing.
Before anyone cries "Sell Out" put yourself in Shawns shoes;
You mean sell your tech to your VC uncle and get subsiquently shafted by him for a few hundred thousand dolars on your million (billion?) dolar idea? Or prance around like an idiot frat boy on MTV, totaly blowing your chance to get the MTV generation to care about copyright law?
Or were you under some sort of impression that Sean Fanning has or ever had any kind of control over napster?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
An Ex-Girlfriend told me once.... "Just Let It Go....its over"
You keep going until you die..."Me".
You know, there are some people out there who actualy create their own music...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It's more like selling tickets to a game where you play.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I can clearly see people killing the download on the last few bytes by clamping down the bandwidth and cutting off the few last bytes in order to save their slots...
+++ath0
MP3 quality is nerve <blink>damaging</blink>[sic]
The consumtion of digital music in the early 90s caused the increasing flood of banal music.
Hear crap; expect crap; buy crap.
Go listen to a vinyl record tonight. Listen to the hi-hats in the songs and take note of the fact that you can hear them.
I mean if you are stupid enough to pay to give bandwidth and harddrive space you are stupid.
Maybe if Napster were more like an mp3.com or CDnow it would work
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
... is optimistism?
Is it like a saxamophone?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Everyone who says this, in one form or another---"if I could buy tunes at a reasonable price, I would!"---put your money where your mouth is.
eMusic.com exists, and other, similar, services probably do as well.
So, I suppose we'll find out now if all that Slashdotter hot air had any substance. I have a feeling that many of the people who espoused the above sentiment, when given the chance to actually pay for the music, won't give up their gNapster, Morpheus or what-have-you.
-grendel drago
[*toot* celebrating my 350th post, whee!]
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
try here.
its not in english, but they have some very cool stuff!
If they brought back the old Napster (tons of files, MP3, failed downloads, shitty RIPs, lame client) I'd willing pay for it now.
Put if it was pay only, no one would use it, and if nobody uses it, there's no files, etc etc.
GNUtella.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
As far as I know, one could just copy to a MiniDisc through an S/PDIF, or at least those of us with a MD and a computer optical out. Unless of course there is a way to stop that. I believe sound is sound as far as that connection is concerned. It will just be a more lengthy matter (Oh no! Real-time encoding...). Just my two cents...
Of course, I'm also pretty sure the hackers will learn the .nap format, find out a way to save incomplete files, and decode/play the file themselves;)
History teaches us that only time will tell.
Gang, stop looking at one who was completely destroyed. Kazza.com is an improvment on an old theme. So now napster is land locked in the world of pay or else ... there is more out there. Let and old dog die in peace.
I know other people have mentioned it in this discussion - but it bears repeating. This is a fantastic service - you get unlimited downloads of the mp3's stored on Emusic servers (and ripped by Emusic, so you know it will be good quality) for ~$10/month, and the artists get paid.
I'm afraid the author missed the boat completely with a fundamental assumption. The client comes with "limited reach", that is you don't hit every server on the network, just a reasonable number of local servers. The author then just decides that this is bad, and that users will want to contact all servers for every query.
That would be a bad idea.
In fact, the user doesn't care if they can contact all the servers, they only care that they can contact a single server with the song that they want. One user shares a song with 5 people, who share with 5 people (25 + 5 = 30), who share with 5 people (125 + 30 = 180) who share with 5 people, (625 + 180 = 805), who each share with 5 people (3125 + 805 = 3930). Well, look at that, nearly 4000 people had the song, and each user only had to talk to 6 other servers (one to download, 5 to send).
If every user had to talk to every other user there would be no way for the system to survive. The key to scaling is to distribute the content, which means you don't need to hit every server . Of course, this doesn't mean the system will survive, but I believe the observed real world is a teeny fraction of what this paper puts forth as reality.
is the hacker community.
.nap format. Someone will write nap2mp3.exe.
First off, I agree with most posters here that Napster's service as it stands is worthless. But three major disadvantages might be eliminated:
1. Downloaded music is in
2. Only 50 downloads per month. Given that incomplete downloads don't count , modify the Napster client so that it stops a few bytes before the end. Losing a millisecond at the end of a song will usually not hurt.
3. Users can only share files that Napster has a license for. This is, I believe, enforced by computing a checksum, or hash, and comparing it to the set of allowed checksums. Again, modifying the client so that it reports false checksums should not be too hard.
Maybe the RIAA will succeed in destroying Kazaa/Morpheus. Then a hacked Napster may suddenly look quite attractive.
I agree with those that say the new Napster has been designed to fail. But it's not just the fact you can get more tracks and a better service for free from the many alternatives, the 'laziness' factor will also play a large part. The reason Napster became so popular was because it was so easy to use. No more hunting through FTP and web sites, just click and download. This is why it was worth the effort of downloading, installing, and learning how to use. And this is why rivals had a hard time gaining any market share... Napster worked so why try anything else?
So Napster went down and people *had* to use alternatives. These are now very good and people are comfortable with using their new software (be it AudioGalaxy, Bearshare, DirectConnect, etc). Even if Napster had all its original content and didn't use the doomed proprietry format it would still need something extra to make people move from the software they are now comfortable with (eg the promise of X TB of cached music with low hit count so numerous tracks do not become invisible when one person switches off their machine). Certainly its glory days are over.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Oh come on - you could pay the same to http://www.emusic.com and get as much as you can download. Sure, you can't directly interact with the other users, but that's way over-rated since many conversations would beging with "a/s/l?" anyhow.
--- http://foo.ca
With essentially indistructable services like Gnutella and Kazaa (etc) out there and working just fine (thank-you-very-much), why would anyone in their right mind pay Napster a monthly fee?
Something very interesting about the indestructable-ness of the p2p networks:
The RIAA no doubt hates them, but even when (if) it finishes off iMesh, Morpheus et al, there will be no way for The Law to shut down a p2p network. At all. IANAL, but IMO this marks the first timesince prohibition that a law was unenforceable. And this time, it's not through massive public distaste for the law. It only takes about 0.1% of the population to flagrantly and withoug liability, break the law.
Technology has become wide-spread enough and given enough power to individuals that they can ignore the government.
That's how the national-government structure of the earth falls apart in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age.
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
I have to agree with this. I *do* have an emusic account ($10/month, unlimited leeching) and I download when and where I want, using no client other than my web browser, so no-one is mooching off me and using my bandwidth that would otherwise be devoted to Counterstrike. I can't see the advantage of Napster over Emusic at all, given the portability issues (.nap!?), the finite catalog and the bandwidth-mooching issues.
Really, I wonder how this saga is going to turn out. I'm more than happy to pay for content, like I do when I buy books, CDs, DVDs and my Emusic subscription. But I like to feel like I have some ownership over the media and can watch/listen when I want, how I want. That seems fair to me. Not being able to, say, copy music files to my Laptop or an mp3 player is like having a book that won't open when I take it on a plane!
Everyone knows that damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. -Pope Pius XI
i'm eager for the day that p2ps support ogg vorbis. how difficult could it be?
Then go buy a ticket for their next concert. Even if you can'y go, buy one anyway. I can tell you for a FACT that buying one ticket puts more cash into their pocket then buying a dozen of their CD's. Screw the record labels. Screw Hilary Rosen (oh wait, guys can't do her LOL). Put the money where it belongs..in the pockets of the performers!
IMHO an on-line music service should have the following traits:
1) You register for the service (for free)
2) The service provides a wide range of music
3) Music is priced reasonably: say $1 / song.
4) The music DB is accurate, up to date, and searchable by band, performer, genre, date, etc.
5) Subscriber reviews are provided (like Amazon) and moderated (like Slashdot). You can search for music based on review content and subscriber ratings of music.
6) Music is provided in the format of your choice: MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WMA, etc.
7) Your purchase is registered with the site; once you've purchased and downloaded a song, you can download it at a later date in a different format or encoding at no additional charge.
8) You get to preview a song (listen to the first 30 seconds or so) for free.
9) You are free to play the song on any device; your computer, your CD player, your DVD, or your toaster.
10) You may burn the song onto CD's or any other devices for you own use.
11) The site provides services for music fans (e.g. marketing): info on bands, event schedules, interviews, on-line chats with bands, etc.
12) In exchange for the above, the subscriber agrees not to re-sell / re-distribute purchased songs.
This would be win-win. The labels would make money, the bands would make money and get exposure, customers would benefit. Too bad that it'll never happen.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Seems the 'media' isn't interested in covering the new napster.
Personaly, I think the RIAA should supply the music, in full CDA format, not this lossy mp3 compression. Hell, we are doing all the work for them. Using our network resources, our systems, ripping and compressioning - and sometimes the quality isn't even good for mp3. The only way I will pay money is if it's coming off their NAPSTER servers with NO loss of quality. Why should we grind our fingers and have them reap the benefits.
|
o|oo U RIAA
Napster was the best thing around when it came out. Now, since it's fall, I've tried all the other programs of the same type (imesh, kazaa, gnutella, bear share, lime wire, and several others) and since that time, the old napster is by far, one of the worst file sharing programs out there. Nothing was worse than downloading a song for an hour on my 56k, and the song is cut off near the end,or your download got messed up and you had to start over at the beginning. That would be a serious pain in the ass if I still had to go through that. I must say that I truly like resumable downloads and downloading the same song from more than one source much better than the old napster, so I'm sad to say, there is no way in hell I'll pay for this.
Oh yeah, and please correct me if I'm wrong(cause I'm really not sure, and am too lazy to check it out), but wasn't kazaa ordered to be shut down by a judge, lest they have to pay some outrageous amount daily? I don't know if you've checked, but they're still up, and I'm still not paying for it. I wish napster had balls that big.
"It stinks."
I'm not sure if it was on leech zmodem or not (I never really used it) but I did have a hacked version of HSLink that took advantage of the fact that the protocol required an ACK to say the whole file had been received, it would ignore this and you would have the file, the BBS would think you didn't and voila...no more ratio problems. :-)
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
Everyone here keeps posting these "what if" situations where you can encapsulate file formats to beat their copy protection, or screw with the network to beat their download limits. What the hell for? Why *pay* to use a hacked up napster instead of just use kazza or gnutella in the first place. Nobody will hack the new napster. There will be no need to.
First major artist I put into the Emusic artist search: 0 files found. 2nd major artist: 3 files found. Third artist: 1 found.
There are numerous other file sharing apps out there with an insanely high number of users and files available.
I use:
Kazaa - Fast Multisourced Downloads with amazing search refinement.
Direct Connect - The must be around a PetaByte by now. Good search options, DivX heaven.
AudioGalaxy - Just Select your Track, Select your bitrate, Queue them up and leave it running.
There are probably more and I'm sure you're all familiar with them.
So who in their right mind is ever going to pay for 50 downloads when:
1. The track probably is'nt there.
2. Prorietry file format ?!?!?!
3. Does'nt stream or preview so bad rips really suck.
4. I like to look for Oggs or Flacs.
5. It costs money.
6. Its not free.
7. Its not illegal. (read: Does'nt make you feel naughty)
8. Its legal.
The new Napster will fail.
"Pay Napster" hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha... "Pay Napster" hahahahahhahaa no really, Pay Napster... hahahahahahahaha...
.nap format. MP3 is what I want, and the only thing I'm going to pay for.
Yeah right.
Earth to Napster: I used your service (previously) because I could find what I wanted, and download it w/o restrictions.
If you want me to pay for the ability to utilize your clearinghouse, then it's going to have to be on an unlimited basis. Because if it's not - then every single time a transfer craps out - I'm calling you for a credit. I plan to cost you 10x what you're charging me for a subscription...
Also, forget the
Give me what I want, at a decent price, and I'll gladly pay. But try to screw me, put restrictions on me, and I'll keep my money - thanks.
Every major artist I put into the search on eMusic comes up with from 0 to 3 files... rather pathetic. Do you have to sign up to even test the searching?
- Reasonable monthly fee ($9.99/month)
- No restrictions on how much music I can download or what I can do with it.
- Large selection (found a bunch of electronic/industrial stuff I've been wanting (Covenant, Frontline Assembly, Informatik, etc.))
- Can download single mp3's or entire albums with a single click, all ripped and named professionally
I can't believe this is the first I've heard of them.Disclaimer : I have no financial connection to emusic whatsoever but as an enthusiastic new customer I hope more people check 'em out so they succeed.
Face it, nobody cares about the other features in Napster. It was all about content (and the easy UI). Who's using Napster to play MP3s ? or to chat ? If the content isn't built in, no one will come. And making it "legal" will prevent all that from happening.
"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana." - Marx
I didn't sign up, but it's on my radar now. Disappointments: No REM, No Police. However, when I was searching for the Police it gave me "Music Like the Police" which had the following artists:
Men At Work
Madness
Go-Go's
The Fixx
Blondie
I wonder what Sting would think of that.
If it weren't for the selection issue, I would sign up for something like this in a heartbeat. Eventually, the major players will probably consolidate and form a monopoly which will solve the selection problem and impose a price problem. Then, the government will sue them, yada yada yada. So, instead of doing that the messy way, I think we should impose a licensing fee on all MP3 transfers and kick it back to the copyright holder. Yes, it's government intervention, but I don't see any better way.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
AudioGalaxy IMHO is the best free client out there . The others such as MusicCity's Morpheus, Bearshare, Limewire, and KaZaA all have been held accountable for copyright violations. You might remember the slashdot article entitled P2P vs. RIAA: RIAA Wins. Now aren't we glad that our government passed that wonderful law called The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)[pdf]?
Thinking of downloading a free share program, ever wonder how RIAA can attack you? The following was taken from their website outlining how the DMCA can be used against you and I.
"The DMCA law also delineates the responsibilities of Internet service providers (ISPs) in cases of infringement online. For example, the law formalizes a notice and takedown procedure between ISPs and copyright owners. It is now clear that when an ISP is aware it is posting or transmitting infringing content, the ISP must act to remove the infringing works or it may be liable for any resulting damages." snip
So what has RIAA been up to? The following is proof that they have been busy using their precious DMCA.
The RIAA Anti-Piracy Unit seized 1,257,796 illegal CD-Rs by midyear 2001, this is up 133% compared to midyear of 2000. Here is a link to a pdf with their mid year statistics for 2001; and then I will end my rant on RIAA because I don't want to get too offtopic :)
On Cnet they keep track of the most popular mp3 search utilities. Morpheus comes in first this week with slightly less than a million and a half downloads; it has an impressive 42 million total downloads. Remember back to the height of Napster's popularity, they had a supposed 200 million users. This number shouldn't be compared to the number of total downloads due to the possibility of users creating multiple accounts.
Also on Cnet, Napster 2.0 beta 10.4 the one that was reviewed in the article has a ghastly approval rating of 0.099. That means that less than one hundredth of the people that downloaded the new pay-for-play Napster actually liked it. Going through the user reviews of the products it appears that they find that Napster falls short of the free clients, it certainly is apparent that it does not yet have the user base that Free Nappyster enjoyed.
For the electronic junkies out there I would recommend a less well known file sharing client known as SoulSeek. You can download it not from Cnet, but from their own website. The latest version is 104 and it includes dedicated techno/electronica service with a great user base; "Private messaging capabilities with both online and off-line users; Folder based file-sharing, which allows for more convenient browsing and downloading; Fine-grained control over file-sharing, with the ability to restrict access to a select list of users, as well as the ability to disallow access to specific users; Fine-grained transfer queue management, with the ability to restrict the number of uploads and downloads per-user and in total; File searching with users in room or in user list; Wishlist that takes search patterns for easy automatic notification when certain files become shared; A generic personalized recommendation system." snip
Now that these Pier to Pier file sharing networks have taken over, they are looking for ways to make money. Maybe to pay their programmers and lawyers. Beware of the adervistements that come bundled along with the install for the more popular sharing clients, such as Audiogalaxy. These bundled programs are known as SpyWare.
-If I metamoderated myself I would care more about karma
/.................../ \\
Now, I understand what these services are striving for (and I hope this hasn't been mentioned in the previous discourse), but...
.nap files to record to WAV? Unless the system has some way to ensure that I'm not intercepting the audio (or unless TotalRecorder is somehow made illegal and erased from my computer by Giant RIAA-controlled EraserBots), the "protected-format" issue should be a joke to circumvent, no?
What's to stop me from using TotalRecorder in tandem with these
-JWLIDTNET
to illuminate the Napster controversy for people of an older generation (my age, e.g. 30's and above) i like to ask the following question: of all the people you knew in college, who had the most extensive record collections, and spent the most money on music?
inevitably, when they think about it, they realize that their friends with the CD collections numbering in the 1000's and the $100/month CD habit were college disc jockeys.
sure there's a selection effect, but think about it! the people who were constantly being exposed to torrents of new music, music of all sorts, not just the week's top 40 ad infinitum, for free, courtesy of their radio station, were precisely the ones spending the lion's share of their disposable income on same.
when i went on napster for the first time i suddenly knew how they felt. look at (listen to!) all this great music out there! i have to have some! and not just on my computer - for home and the car, and for the album art and liner notes, i had to have the cds.
i never spent as much money on cd's as i did during the 2 years i was using napster - even gnutella has yet to make as fanatic a music fan of me yet. (collecting albums on gnutella still being a substantial pain in the *&@!)
Corporate Music has let down their shareholders in devastating fashion: the blood of their fanbase is on their hands.
-renard
Eventually, the major players will probably consolidate and form a monopoly which will solve the selection problem and impose a price problem. Then, the government will sue them, yada yada yada
They already have...just look at the RIAA and what it does. I just wish the last part of your statement would come true one of these days.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Why do people say "faster than God"? Hasn't anybody noticed that God is SLOW?
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Please look up sarcasm in www.m-w.com
Thank you!
I was just pointing out that enjoying rectum does not necessarily equate homosexuality.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If you go to emusic and starting searching for specific bands you're likely to be disappointed. The best approach is to browse by genre or by label. They have a very hit-and-miss selection but I found a LOT of albums that I had been wanting to get (or were curious about) for a long time but weren't necessarily at the top of my buy-list. Some genres seem to be better represented than others.
I like industrial and techno so I browsed their electronic/industrial list and also browsed their listing for the record labels "Cleopatra" and "Metropolis" and came up with about 30 or 40 albums I plan on downloading.
I've tried collecting this stuff via Napster and Morpheus and, while they're better than nothing, it's a real nightmare trying to get a complete album or even quality tracks with correct titles, etc. On emusic I've downloaded 20 complete albums in the last hour or two (gotta' love DSL!).
Even though $9.99 is a mere pittance, I feel better about getting music this way because half the money is going to the artists (or the artist's label - I'm not clear on how that works exactly). I'm downloading a ton right now but after the first month I'll probably just download few albums a month which will work out to 2 or 3 bucks per album. I think it still works out pretty well for the artists/label because a lot of these albums I wouldn't have bought otherwise (not willing to risk $16.99/album).
Anonymous because I'm shy,
AC
People will refuse to pay for this; not because of a refusal to pay for content, but a refusal to pay for such limited, proprietary content. That won't stop the RIAA from pointing to the failed pay Napster business model and claiming it supports their claims that only music "pirates" used Napster.
Then they'll jack up CD prices a little more. All in a day's work.
-Legion
Time to post the obligatory Steve Albini reference. For perhaps the first honest view of the way the music industry does business ... check out this essay.
Peace,
(jfb)
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
Cars suck because they do not scale, as soon as you drive them above 400 km/h, they use way too much petrol, and are very dangerous.
As soon as you try and build them to carry more than 1000 people at once, they get too big and heavy for the materials they are made of.
You will note that Gnutella is sweet as with hosts and hops set to a reasonable level, not the rediculously high 8 and 8 as assumed in the article.
In the same way, cars are sweet as if you drive them at a sensible level, and build them to a sensible size.
This was supposed to be a response to this, but I feel that it applies to the aarticle as a whole as well. Here goes...
/.
Oh man, you sure want it all dont you? And for only $4.95/month!?!
As someone who has been running a small, non-profit (illegal) streaming audio service, and is now offline:
Do you really think that it is possible/feasible to host an all-you-can-eat, $5/month, 200KB/sec filesharing service that offers files that are encoded at avg. 128kbps and are approx 10-15MB in size, in a non-proprietary format, with no DRM?
Let me see, you college kids with "faster than God" connections go to class all day after queuing up (conservative estimate) 50 songs @ 10MB apiece. You pay $5/month. You do this only once a day, everyday for 30 days each month. So, not counting the bandwidth lost to control frames, dead tranfers, and lost packets, lets say you use 50*10MB*30 days=15000MB or 15GB of bandwidth. Now, lets say I find a *really* good provider that will give me 1 managed server with a single burstable 100Mb line and 100GB of traffic/month at a cost of $300/month. Extra bandwidth is $5/GB.
I have 100GB of traffic at a cost of $300, avg user eats up 15GB for a fee of $5/month...
100GB / 15GB = 6.67 users * $5 = $33.35 - $300 = -$266.65
I just lost $266.65. Any traffic on top of that is charged at $5/GB. Lets say I have only ONE more user who uses only 10GB/month. 10GB*$5/GB=$50 and they only paid $5, so add another $45 to my bill, and then add sales tax and whatever and I'm broke. And then you go and share all your downloads on Kazaa/Morpheus, and nobody needs to go use my service. Yay. And this is a single, non-redundant server on a single, non-redundant line. Factors such as overhead for the website, license fees, will eat up more money.
This just happened to me, I was running a streaming service, no fees, no downloads, no sign-ups, just music. I had one popular month and I'm $800 lighter in the wallet, and the site is bye-bye. I didn't charge because it's not my music, and I didn't allow downloads because the songs are only on vinyl and I wanted the entertainment value of my site to remain. Not a great business model on my part, but the bandwidth issue will affect anyone, including
I want to see more online music, and I want to see artists get paid too. The problem is, despite the low production/reproduction costs of digital media, the *distribution* costs remain high. Only the big boys can play, whcih means no indie bands, private radio stations, eclectic websites or whatever.
Hmm .. america the land where the consumer is supposed to be king.I know this has been said many many times before but I think it is worth while repeating,' why Should I pay more to get less ?', The music industry realy needs to think hard and long on this fact IF they want to make money out of digital music.However in my opinion
,(save changing the channel), over the songs they listened to, with Napster and other music sharing related programs , people had direct control over what they listened to and here in lies the real problem for the music industry .
,and Then imagine a horse race with 1000 competitors. which race will be the easiest to predict?
8 .html
,driving it beyond the grasp of the majority and forcing the majority on to a music industry run napster, which would ultimately lead to a senario similar to the race course analogy where the music industry owns all the hourses and the race course
the music industry's primary problem with people sharing mp3's is not that they will not pay for the music , but rather that the music industry loses control over what music people listen to.
Traditionaly,(of late pre napster), the Main way most people formed musical tastes was through tv and radio or mediums where people did not have direct control
Imagine a horse race, with ten competitors
The music industry faces this problem .
They also face the problem that there control of the race course or rather the mediums by which the majority listen to music and hence decide which horse to back is thretend by music sharing programes. ALso they are treatend by the relatively cheap price of pro audio equipment and the fact that a band does not nessicarily nead a whole lot of backing to put together a high quality album.
Music sharing programs and the internet level the playing feild a bit and allow small record labels and bands to break through to wider audiances more easily and ind doing this undermine the importance of traditional music premotion platforms that the majority use,(tv and radio),in my opinion The record companies do not like filesharing primarily because it treatens there control of the mediums by which the MAJORITY decide what music to buy.
In the short term Napster in its new incarnation will probably fare badly. but what about the long run things like this http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/1571
and the strong lobey the entertainment industry has in politics could well work in destroying enough of the competion to napster
No, really, how many people read it and actually analysed what it said?
Uh, why should it be remarkable that the pay service should be no worse than the old free one, or any of the many free alternatives now?
The author then contradicts herself by going on to list the negatives, some of which are old, some are clearly New and De-Improved:
And of course, the whole damn point of the thing:
So, we're saying that it works fairly well, only it doesn't really, but that's to be expected because it's all new technology. But it doesn't do anything. It neither shares nor find MP3's or even .NAP's.
The fact that there's anything positive in this (fairly literate) review makes me think that it's been written by a shill. Note:
Perhaps in the early days, but what Napster really achieved was to change attitudes. Napster made it so easy to copy files that it didn't seem wrong to most people. Remember that /. is one of the few places where you'll see people even debating the legality and morality of it. Jane Sharer doesn't even consider it. If it's got a pretty, professional looking client, it must be OK, right? Otherwise The Authorities would put a stop to it, surely.
If the reviewer isn't a shill, she's someone who doesn't realise that a beta should be reviewed as though it is a release candidate, without making allowances for basic lack of functionality (sharing files!) that should have been caught in alpha. One glance at the Kazaa clients should clear that up right away. Filter and search by type, artist, content, sort by file size, bandwidth, download times, user rating, automatic multi-part download from multiple servers at once, pause and resume, search for more servers while you're downloading. My god, if New Napster launches looking like Old Napster, I might as well submit my search requests by snail mail on pieces of papyrus.
If this is the best that anyone has to say about new Napster, they might as well give up pouring more money into it and go buy some stock in manufacturers of blank CD's and flash media, because this is going to tempt nobody away from the Kazaa/Gnutella free-for-all, no matter how many "RIAA Approved!" stickers they slap on it.
Here's why Napster has no chance against Kazaa. I own a bought copy of "Dungeon Keeper 2". Last week, I fancied playing it, but the CD is hidden somewhere among my vast collection. It was - honest to god - easier for me to suck in a ripped version across Kazaa at 500kb/s than to stop what I was doing (developing software), move away from the desktop, find the CD, run the installer (as opposed to unzipping one file), and then have to swap it in and out of the drive simply because the developers assume I'm a thief until I prove otherwise. Is what I did illegal? Probably. Is it immoral? Hardly. Does it make sense? Absolutely!
The paradigm has shifted. It's all about ease of use and personal integrity. I actually do use Fairtunes, and I use it because it's easier than jumping through hoops to get crippled tracks from a label download service, or buying a CD at retail or waiting for one ordered online. Labels deliberately make it hard for us to get or use tracks, because they assume we're thieves, so they have to wrap it all up in (ahem) security. God damn it. If I am a thief, I'm going to rip their pathetic attempts at security right off, and all it'll do is piss me off and make me less inclined to play by their rules in the future. So screw them for their blind ignorance, and screw New Napster too, as it's no different.
A monitored, capped, clunky, hard to use, music-only, proprietary format service which assumes you're guilty until you prove otherwise and which you have to pay for is simply laughable.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Something that I haven't seen mentioned specifically in a parent post. Why on earth would you leave Napster running and serving tracks after you've sucked down your pathetic 50 per month?
Think about it. The clock ticks past midnight, it's a new month, you've got 50 more tracks to suck. How long does that take you over a decent commection? Two hours?
Then what? You leave Napster running for the other 718 hours of the month, serving up content and pissing off your ISP? Or, more likely, you only turn it on to play the .NAP crap, and you probably disable file sharing while you're doing that, because, hey, you ain't getting anything from the network for the rest of the month, right, and you've paid for what you got (and probably had to throw half of it away), so Napster can damn well use your money to serve it's own content, right? (Try to think like a typical paying netizen rather than a Slashdotter)
One of the strengths of P2P communities is that you can spend a lot of time browsing for stuff, during which time you're part of the community and might as well be serving files as well. But after you've used up your Napster allowance for the month, what's your incentive to keep using (and contributing) to the service at all? You can search for files but not download them? How frustrating would that be?
So they might get a million customers, but at 2 hours use out of 720 a month, they'll have, what, less than 3,000 online at any given time. That's a lot of Britney Spears, but very little Stan Rogers.
My god, picture it. People sitting watching the clock, waiting for it to roll over to the 1st of the month at Napster HQ, when the feeding frenzy begins, knowing that's the only time they've got a chance of getting a good selection of content. Doesn't bear thinking about.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
MP3, or any lossy compression format, really kills the audio quality. If you're going to pay for music, it might as well be in the best format available, which is CD, and DVD-audio in the future.
Most of the time if I really care about the music I will go out and buy the cd. Sometimes you can find uncompressed wav files on gnutella though.
What's this "Napster" thing I keep hearing about?
I just have to give you props on the nickname, Furious George. God bless monkey knife fights.
the disadvantages - broken tracks, cancelled transfers - and a complete inability to stream or preview tracks.
The thing I hated about Napster, and which I still hate about its replacements (Morpheus et.al.), is the unreliability of it all. I can theoretically access an enormous library of files on Morpheus, but in practice, half of these files are undownloadable from other people's machines due to inaccurately-reported download times, spontaneous shut-downs or crashes on their end, and so forth. The ability to download a file from multiple users is only useful insofar as I can connect to their machines in the first place.
This is why the music label's efforts to put their own music online will eventually supplant peer-sharing -- provided they try to provide their entire library of songs. To typical consumers, it won't matter in the end what file format they offer or how open it is -- only whether they can find and download it reliably and quickly. In almost all cases, I can do this better from a central server or network of servers (Akamai could make a killing here) than I can by hitting some other user's cable modem.
I'd gladly pay $10-$15 a month if it meant I could download music online without having to constantly check and make sure it'll get to me by the end of the week.
and the record companies --- they do pay for the promotion and all the associated crap
ahem. No, they don't. This is a commonly held myth, even by those (such as yourself) who are otherwise disgusted by and adamently opposed to the parasitical middlemen who stand between artist and consumer, ripping off both. Courtney Love did a great writeup on this, explaining in detail (almost like a line-by-line audit) how the finances of a successful band work, and how the recording industry makes millions on gold and platinum albums while the artists make a modest $40,000 or so.
In short, all of the expenses for promotion, CD pressing, etc. are charged to the band. The record company acts as the band's vendor, providing the service and charging for the service, often at a rate higher than the band would have gotten if they had shopped the service themselves. This can happen when the entity (Tthe recording company) representing someone (the band) is the same as the one being negotiated with (the recording company), and in any non-cartel industry would be considered a serious conflict of interest. Alas, this is but one of many caveats that commonly result in many of the most successful artists working for what amounts to slave wages (and slavish hours) only to die in poverty while the recording industry gets ever richer (even posthumously long after the artist is gone).
I'd pay $1 or even $2 per song to an artist I like gladly, but I will never pay for music again where such goes through the thieving hands of a recording company. If this means I get all my music from the radio, recorded myself for my own personal use, with no cover art and no shiny disc, then so be it. If someone comes along that really rocks my world I'll attend their concerts, buy their t-shirts, or send them a donation via fairtunes or something. I will not support a cartel industry that is not only stealing from the consumers and the artists, but actively trying to destroy the greatest potential of the internet and the computer industry as a whole, namely the free sharing of information, and I would encourage anyone who gives something more than a rat's ass about such issues to do likewise.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The Weekly World News, it appears, is not distributed Up There in Canada. It's a tabloid that really doesn't take itself seriously. They don't even try to make their stories plausible.
I occasionally get a copy for fun. It's pretty funny.
I like my cd's. I take reasonable care of them, and after 10 years, I can still listen to that depeche mode cd with no loss in quality. MP3 is great, I like more songs on a cd, but the file swapping crap is retarded. The only thing I ever use it for is those hard to find skinny puppy tracks, that only appear on some stupid benefit album or something. One thing I love about cd's is the other tracks. I hear three or four on the radio or at a friends, decide I like it, and go and buy the full cd. And then theres all these other tracks on it that I like that I haven't heard. If I'd started out by just sitting on gnutella 20 hrs a day, I still probably wouldn't have all the songs I love. Now as for paying 15-20 $ for a cd, who the hell does? In the mall maybe, but not at the local music store, where I have found some suprisingly good stuff in the $1.99 clearence bin... But seriously, I buy mostly used, and the stores I buy from don't over charge for the new stuff. Shop around dammit, don't go straight to Borders or some other corporate entity. Let them know that if they really want $18.99 for that soundtrack, then they can do without your business. Or hell, just go buy some blanks and copy all your friends cd's...
Shift happens. Fire it up.
You can record live audio from microphones to MP3.
Archiving live audio directly to a lossy compression format? Wow.
Now if you'll excuse me I have to go write the Great American Novel... on the back of old lunch bags.
Please tell me about your reasonable finance rates.
thanks now.
So Napster just wanted to give back to the music community right? That's why they went to court to fight it right? The truth is, Napster was hoping to make a buck off of artists without compensating them in pretty much the same way that those parasites the RIAA do. If they'd gone the gnutella model, I would have no issue with it.
If you want to "support the artists" (which everyone claims they do) go to a concert and/or buy a t-shirt. Everything else (CD's, MTV videos, etc) just goes to pay the parasitic middle men.
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
Why are we trying to lock down the audio? Every audio format that has ever existed has been easily pirated. The current model seems to be:
1) offer the music in a somewhat unprotected manner and allow consumers to pay for the privledge
2) prosecute those that abuse that privledge (pirates)
Why change it? Instead of CDs vs. Cassettes we're talking MP3s vs. CDs. The new model should be:
1) offer the music in a somewhat unprotected manner and allow consumers to pay for the privledge
2) prosecute those that abuse that privledge (pirates)
Or am I missing something here?!
I'm a 2000 man.
All three companies are all at least partially owned by media conglomerate Vivendi, which owns Universal Music. Looks like they're trying to find some sort of system that works financially. Whatever it is, it's definitely not Pressplay.
aw
I just find this article exceptionally funny - nothing like a non-existent organization and a fake expert to instill mindless fear in the Compaq Presario owners of the world.
--- http://foo.ca