PC Mag Reviews Mercora P2P Radio

prostoalex writes "PC Magazine reviews Mercora peer-to-peer streaming radio. It's not a service which allows anyone to download songs, however you can listen to any of the top 20 million plus songs available on the network from more than 2000 private radiostations. Mercora supports keyword search by genre, song name or artist name, but does not allow to listen to more than four songs from the same artist to avoid copyright issues. Any Mercora user automatically becomes a broadcaster, when the app scans the drive for digital music and then suggests creating an ad-hoc Internet radiostation."

Comments

Too bad it's bundled with adware

[Spic]

I just downloaded and installed Mercora and as soon as I did, my Microsoft Antispyware flagged Grokster as trying to install. Just a bit or warning.

Re:How does this get around ASCAP royalty fees?

[pedestrian crossing]

According to the article, they pay the royalty fees, although it doesn't say where the money is coming from. Hmmm....

Avoid copyright issues?

[TheIndividual]

I don't see the difference between offering an MP3 or offering a stream to allow instant realtime listening.
Technically it is the same thing from the sender's point of view. It sends out bytes of copyrighted material. Just because the client software isn't saving those by default (think hacks, direct recording...) doesn't mean it isn't possible.
This software will probably result in new laws which will trouble normal webradios...

Re:How does this get around ASCAP royalty fees?

[oreaq]

Maybe from "6. INTERACTION WITH THIRD PARTY SITES AND SERVICES" http://www.mercora.com/eula.asp:

... You are solely responsible for any dealings with third parties (including advertisers) who support the Service, including the delivery of and payment for goods and services.

Re:Legal? Not for long!

[Ripper]

MPAA will get their share after Mercora has collected information on all the mp3's the users share + their IP adresses and forwarded this information to the hordes of lawyers that MPAA has harnessed for their newest try on busting mp3 distributors. You have been warned!

Sounds like a stupid idea...

[joto]

So basically we can now choose between 3000 random users random 10-song playlists streamed over inadequate bandwidth without the ability to find any songs beyond the typical top-40 songs, or to save them. Add to that weird claims of legality, and privacy concerns from the scanning of the harddrive, and it suddenly doesn't sound so nice anymore. Not that it did sound any nicer in the first place. Most p2p apps already suck, making it even more artificially restricted doesn't really help.

legit Streaming audio

[andrewzx1]

I provide IT support for a community radio station that provides streaming audio through www.live365.com. First of all let me say that Live365 provides excellent service and hosts many, many wonderful radio stations. We pay something like $1500 for 150 simultaneous listeners at 20 kps. Which is roughly FM quality. It sounds different than FM, but roughly equivalent.

The radio station used to archive all its programming for people who wanted to do time shifting. This was put to an end by the RIAA and the record industry. We came to a settlement with the RIAA and agreed not to their terms in order to provide any streaming at all.

There are a lot of great radio stations streaming programming now but the RIAA put 90% of them off the air with the threat of litigation. There used to be thousands of home/hobby stations broadcasting from homes and dorms. The RIAA theatened them with litigation regarding royalties and poof they were gone. This included a lot of great college radio stations unfortunately.

For anyone who wants to record streaming audio I highly recommend the Windows shareware program TotalRecorder. Don't know if a Linux version is in the works or not.

- AndrewZ