p2p experience: post-napster and post-ag

post-Napster and Post-AG

at first there is an Napster-era; the era after
Napster is widely called post-napster; for me the post-napster
era has essentially been an AudioGalaxy era;
at the time AG dominated the business of P2P - it was so
overwhelming and formidable that no credible alternative
was at sight at the time. after Audiogalaxy was shut down
we actually entered a new historical epoch, a post-AG
era. this new era, has been an epoch of “warring states”
whichin no single p2p software can possibly dominate.

3) WinMX

i quickly made an investigation into main p2p softwares
at the time - KaZaar, WinMx, soulseek, Filetopia Blubster,
Grokster etc and made a decision to join WinMX.

all these p2ps are modelled following Napster, not AG
(blubster once boosted it followed the AG traditon but it was
obviously not)

i acutally wrote a comparison of all the major p2p softwares
at the time and post it to major rock board forums in
china’s university bbs, including SMTH bbs board.
at that time WInMX is the best choices: the largest group
of dedicated music users; good online community;
good music sources, good connection speed and winmx
has no spy software. kazaar was slow and a resource hog,
slsk was still too weak, at the time. other p2p softwares
constituted no challenge to winmx.

winmx was also a few p2p softwares that support OpenNap,
which means that it has a fantastic music stock. i used
winmx for quite some time and introduced it to my friends.

but i gradually found that i was almost never able to download
a full album from winmx, and users had not really been
increasing; some servers of OpenNap had been shut down
and the site was not fraught with pornography (like Kazaar)

4) soulseek - the heaven for dedicated contemporary music
fans

finally i switched to soulseek. at the time soulseek became
much stronger than before.

soulseek has a unique culture: most of the users are
indie-music lovers, i..e they do not subscribe to popmusic.
this means that soulseek is a fantastic base to find music
like The Aluminium Group, the Angel of Light etc rather than
Britney Spears and Savage Garden.

another characteristic of soulseek is taht most members
prefer to collect full albums. in other words, this makes
you more likely, or easier to collect them in full.

soulseek has also good culture of “share or be banned”
value in that you must share to get. there’d be no free-lunch.

but weakness of soulseek is that its researching engine
is basically crap. the single solution is to use the
wishlist funciton; new version of soulseek is also seriously
a resource hog.

so far, soulseek is the best p2p software as far as i am
concenred; i regularly visit soulseek and my account
is Jeune_Seigneur. welcome to download my music, chamone.