Easy as Napster (Bearshare)

Member Name: JACGriffith

Product:	Bearshare
Date:	02/04/01 (54 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to use, good GUI, newcomer friendly

Disadvantages: standard Gnutella drawbacks

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 benefits would be huge (smaller more professionally made MP3 files, new formats etc). Sure enough various players in the music industry are moving in this direction, unfortunately the demand for this service is there today, and the new services will not be for some time.

So I decided to investigate Gnutella, which I had heard a variety of stories about. Gnutella is a peer-to-peer technology that turns your PC into a server and links you in a web like fashion to a range of other PCs that are running the protocol. This means that there are no servers to get hit by pesky law suits so the system is more or less immune to the record companies’ lawyers. This also means that the system is less reliable and user friendly than Napster, so maybe it will attract less of a following and less unwanted attention than Napster did. Furthermore, it is not just an MP3 hunter – you can share any file that you place in your shared folder.

My first attempt to use Gnutella was a dismal failure – I downloaded a program called ToadNode, which stubbornly refused to find anything in response to my searches and continually crashed. I was on the verge of giving up, when I came upon BearShare. This Gnutella program is not only stable and a small download, it is as easy to use as Napster. You load
the program when you are connected to the Internet, wait for it to find a few other hosts and make contact with them and start searching. You can filter the results so that you don’t accidentally load some nasty VBS script and you can monitor what is being searched for and what is being uploaded from your system.

There are a couple of drawbacks about the Gnutella protocol: it is more technically complex and because it is not just music files that are being shared, if you look in the searches window you can see signs of the internet’s seamier side in the names of files that other people are searching for. There is also a risk that someone will use the system to spread some virus or worm, but then you have that risk every day when you receive an e-mail.

All in all, Gnutella is an excellent tool to getting at online music, before the paid subscription services start up and eliminate the demand for pirated files, and BearShare is the best client to that system that I have come across. It is as easy to use as Napster, and in this market, that is what is important.

Summary: