MP3 Alternatives

By Kushal Dave

With the recent demise of Scour Exchange and Yale's continued cowering before a-soon-to-end-anyway Napster, Yalies are searching for alternatives for their free music craving. Luckily, several alternatives present themselves.

Speed Cars on Elm Street Registrar Ease of use Yo' momma A&A library Selection Costco Shaw's Krauzser's Reliability Broadway vacancies College renovations	Audiogalaxy.com Audiogalaxy is klunky. The entire interface is via the web, and it's idiot-friendliness seems to be a product of idiot design: every search requires multiple, time-consuming clicks. The searches and downloads themselves are surprisingly fast, though. It also seems to be quite reliable, and it does a good job of finding more obscure songs. Makes a viable second or third alternative.
Speed Cars on Elm Street Registrar Ease of use Yo' momma A&A library Selection Costco Shaw's Krauzser's Reliability Broadway vacancies College renovations	iMesh (iMesh.com) iMesh is rapidly growing in popularity; in fact, it was one of the top ten downloads at c|net's download.com this past week. One of its coolest features is that it downloads a file simultaneously from multiple locations, accommodating the possibility that one user might disconnect or go particularly slowly. The interface is pretty similar to that of Scour and Napster, and it's quick enough. Although the reliability seemed to be a problem, this is likely a function of their rapid growth. The software also seems to slow down a user's computer quite a bit.
Speed Cars on Elm Street Registrar Ease of use Yo' momma A&A library Selection Costco Shaw's Krauzser's Reliability Broadway vacancies College renovations	Gnutella (gnutella.co.uk) Gnutella was all the rage because of its highly-distributed nature: there's no central company to go and shut down. However, this is also a massive detraction, as users need to find Gnutella servers to connect to and input them into their software. Even then, it takes a lot of time for a search to progress, and the results are often meager. The downloads themselves also vary in speed. Some of the newer software has cool tools like multiple simultaneous searches that hopefully some of the other tools will catch on to.

Napigator (Napigator.com)