I’m not letting the RIAA scare me… are you?
Were you a Napster fan? Maybe an old school Hotwire user? Did you find yourself left out in the cold when the first wave of P2P file sharing networks died? I did. Gnutella never had an agent that I thought cut it. Sure there were moments of clarity and even divine splendor in the beginning, but after a while, it became evident that these systems were only defeating themselves.
Nowadays, Kazaa is the reigning king of P2P file sharing. Keep in mind, I’m using the term P2P somewhat loosely, as many major file-sharing networks are not genuine peer-to-peer networking solutions. But, honestly, who cares? Kazaa is huge now. This is great for some. It means that the number of users online at any time is generally going to be huge, therefore the number of files available to any given user, should grow day by day. The downside is that you are now dealing with the general public. Just like when the general public makes punk music and it comes out like Hoobastank, when the general public encodes and uploads media files, they often don’t work out quite right. Misnamed, poorly encoded, badly tagged, sometimes incomplete files plague these major file sharing networks. Lord know how these kids are encoding their files. Even those files with decent bitrate and sampling rate numbers can still sound like crap when not done correctly.
The solution? Be an elitist. Go to the nerdlier P2P networks and do your trading with people who know better. The following services take different approaches to file sharing, but I’ve had great luck with each:
eMule
BitTorrent
SoulSeek
eMule is a bit more complicated than many of your standard P2P sharers. It’s text-only interface and manually updated server lists may scare off the uninitiated, but trust me, it’s easier than it looks. Here’s what the developers have to say:
“eMule is a new filesharing client which is based on the eDonkey2000 network, but offers more features than the standard eDonkey client, because it’s opensource but under the restrictions of the GPL License.”
Once you’ve got the thing installed, you can go shopping for different servers and server lists, thus limiting your searches to those servers deemed worthy, reliable, and quick. eMule is smart enough to tell the difference between two files, even if they share identical file names, sizes, and tags. This means that eMule can reliably download from multiple sources without accidentally taking bits from a mismatched file as Kazaa is oft to do. It’s more precise and targeted search routine should make finding more download sources a bit less of a chore. Multiple file downloads are a breeze. eMule is a developer’s solution and lends itself to almost limitless add-ons and server filters.
BitTorrent is making a lot of waves these days. It’s big claim to fame is the fact that it can download from an unlimited number of sources accurately. These sources can be indexed, unindexed, public or permissioned machines. They can be corporate servers, home machines, and anything in between. Downloaders get pieces of the file from the original server, and from anyone else who is downloading. The more people there are downloading the same thing, the lower the burden on the central server, and the faster everyone’s downloads finish. BitTorrent is being marketed as a means to allow companies to distribute files to their clientele safely and without endangering their own servers. BitTorrent also uses SHA1 cryptographic hashing to ensure the integrity of all files transferred. You want the new Red Hat 9 ISO? Red Hat made news by distributing the new ISO both at the Red Hat sight and via BitTorrent. The result? Most users received the file significantly quicker using BitTorrent. Some groups, such as
FurtherNet are using BitTorrent to distribute legal bootlegs of concerts by groups like Belle and Sebastian and Rocket From the Crypt. Check out the bottom of this post for a list of BitTorrent support files and agents.
SoulSeek is a minimalist P2P agent that allows one to search for files on other users machines and verify their integrity before downloading. One great feature is that if you’re satisfied with the quality of the file and the user has the rest of the album in the same directory, can can set yourself up to download the entire directory. Quite a relief after spending hours on Kazaa trying to find track 8 of 10. SoulSeek uses a system of Download Priveliges, not too unlike Kazaa’s user ratings. The difference here, is that you gain privileges by purchasing them from SoulSeek’s developers, rather than by allowing x-number of uploads. There is one level of privilege. You are either privileged, or you are not. $5 makes you one of the beautiful people for 30 days.
One more solution worth mentioning is
Kazaa Lite K++ edition. This client uses the same network (or rather networks) as Kazaa, but does so with better features, autosearch, and no spyware. Sick of Brittney Spears fans getting a better rating than you?
K++ gives you an automatic rating of 1000 (Kazaa Master). Tired of continually ‘searching for more’ sources? Do it automatically. This program strips away everything bad about Kazaa except the audience. I do hesitate to mention it, though… if only because the more people that use it, the more people on the network have the same rating as me. Rats.
Update: Just wanted to toss one out there for all the Mac users. I’ve recently heard fantstic things about an OSX P2P client called Poisoned. Poisoned connects to the FastTrack network (Kazaa, Grokster, iMesh), the Gnutella network (Limewire, Acquisition), and OpenFT, which means you get a greater number of searchable peers than almost any other client provides. Poisoned is fast, salable, fully supported, and OpenSource. If you are a Mac user, go get it.