napster.com > Reviews (378)

Napster was by far the most accurate, fast, efficient and one of a kind peer2peer mp3 downloader. I use the word “was” because no one has writen something since the day that we had to pay for it. Suddenly became the “bad” guy on the web, because now everyone has to pay for something that it used to be free.
I don’t say that I wasn’t disappointed when I heard that I have to pay for the songs, but I thought that it was something like demo or free trial software, where they want you to get used to it, and then they say that you have to pay. Common sense.

I guess I was lucky because I was one of the 200 people that had the opportunity to use the new Napster. To be honest a friend of mine was a member and so I have the chance to have a look. So one day he gave me his password and I was ready to rock-n-roll.

Why only 200 people?
They wanted to run a pre-test trial to see if there are problems downloading songs. Why? Because there are some changes.

So, let’s see the NEW NAPSTER
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The new Napster has been designed upon the prototype -free- Napster. They have the same “feeling”. Everyone can see others’ files, chat each other, and been able to share your musical preferences with other subscribers. The only problem that I noticed was that there is a minor delay when you want to listen the song that you are downloading. At the other hand the client seem to be more stable than before.

The bigger difference had to do with the nature of the subscription. When you subscribe every user will get a monthly “download counter”. Thus, there is a counter which controls the number of downloads that every user can do within a month. This number in our case was 50, but it will depend on the amount of money that you are willing to pay…more £££ more songs to download.

But this counter has a crucial effect. There were some mindless users who had some songs with faulty file name. That means that if you fully download it then your credit goes down by one song, without taking the song you actually wanted. The good point is that you can listen the song while download it and you can cancel it without losing credits.

Another semantic point I noticed was the existence of two file formats: .nap (napster’s format) and .mp3. Actually mp3 files are the minority in a search result (they are really rare). The nap files are the majority as those files are legal for sharing. In the previous version of Napster, the program was sharing all the mp3 files from your computer’s specific folder. This is not happening with the mp3 files any more. This is because the directories with your mp3 files are been “scanned” and sent as ”fingerprints” in Napster’s servers, without allowing automatic sharing, as they have to review the files and buy the copyrights from the artists. Of course only the Napster’s client can use .nap files

A downside is that there is not any more classification of the music files. So you can not search a song by its musical classification (rock, pop, ethnic…)

~~Price?

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I was trying to find how much it would cost to subscribe form official lips, but I couldn’t. My friend (some how) had free trial. But it is heard that the price will be around £80 per year for the basic pack (50 songs/month).

~~~Conclusion~~~

The version that I used was the beta-trial- one, but this gave me a feeling on how the new Napster will be. Although at the moment I use Morpheus I will subscribe at Napster when they will launch official the server. That’s not because I have lots of money to spend, but because things get really nasty. Yes, I’m talking about security issues that we do not have. I’m pretty sure that Morpheus will be forced to close and may be re-open as a pay-per-download server in the near future.
Until then...happy downloads

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