Bearshare

In the beginning there was a little program called Napster. For those of you who have spent a little time on Mars and haven't a clue what this is - Napster allowed you to share all of your music files with the rest of the net. With thousands of copyrighted songs freely available the public loved it and (understandably) the music industry hated it. Hated it so much in fact that they took Napster to court and won. At the time of writing I belive that Napster is pretty much doomed. But the public have tasted something nice and just because it has been taken off the menu doesn't mean that people will try substitutes. In a (loose) nutshell Bearshare is ...  Read the complete review

If you're suffering from the loss of Napster, Bearshare is a fair substitute. It uses peer to peer sharing (Unlike with Napster, you don't connect to a central computer that holds all the files. Everyone on the network is a server.) Basically, it's a program that makes it easy for you to use gnutella. Log on to Bearshare.com, download the software and install it. It all worked well but I'm not a PC newbie and I still found the process a little unnerving. The ugly interface takes some getting used to. (What a choice of colours!) Give yourself some time to get used to it. You'll find excellent help is available. The first program ...  Read the complete review

Now that Napster has gone downhill, charging a fee, plus losing most of its content due to copyright laws, I began to trawl the web for a new alternative to download mp3 music files for free, being the cheapskate I am. Bear Share was recommended to me by a friend as a good, reliable source of music I decided to try it. Bear Share is a Peer-to-Peer network file sharing system, not just for music mp3, but all sorts of other files including movies, pictures and other music files like wav. It is based on Gnutella, another system I have tried before. Both are very good, but Bear Share is my personal favourite, because I found it a lot easier to use. On Gnutella you ...  Read the complete review

Napster could be/ is in real trouble in the moment. And it isn't hard to guess that that isn't going to please too many people (apart from certain musical artists) as people liked having music for free. So now people are looking for alternatives to good old Napster. Luckily (or unluckily in many respects) I was already ahead of the game. This was because Napster had been great for a fortnight or so and then it decided it just wasn't going to work for me for some unknown reason. So I couldn't do anything: searches, downloads, uploads or chat - just wouldn't work and I really was not a happy bunny over it. So I just said to myself - ...  Read the complete review

I was a relative latecomer to Napster and was therefore somewhat unhappy when the law finally caught up with the site. What Napster was doing was dodgy and it was only a matter of time before they ended up being curtailed but the music industry has been short sited in the extreme. What Napster has done is create a demand for a new type of service – one where you choose a track that you fancy listening to and then it gets played to you / downloaded to your PC for you to play back. No need to buy £16 albums for 2 songs. I would be more than happy to use such a service on a monthly subscription basis, and I’m sure a lot of other people would too – the ...  Read the complete review