Great New Napster Alternative (Bearshare)

Member Name: C_Padd

Product:	Bearshare
Date:	25/06/01 (479 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to use + install, Good selection of free music

Disadvantages: Crashed on me a few times

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 need to find the host address yourself, but Bear Share does it all for you, finding optimum download speed and servers to match, so avoiding you to do any complicated searching, you can just type in the name of the band or song and your off. This makes it nice and easy to someone like me who knows very little about computers.

The install and download could not have been easier. Found at www.bearshare.com the file is around one and a half megabytes, so nice and small to download. The install was no problem, although there are several sisters programs and junk that is not necessary, so best to do a custom install, and just install Bear Share itself. Once up and running it connects to its servers (It uses lots of different ones, not one central one) this can take a while. There are several coloured dials in the bottom left corner. When the one on the far left turns green, you are connected and ready to download. Just type in song/band name in the box and press 'add'. Simple! Once again this can take a while but a list of files come up and double click on the one you want to download.

All files have a bar on the left of the information, and works simply a long green bar = stable, easy to connect file, and short red bar = unstable, possible problems. I have never personally c
ome across any viruses on Bear Share, but it is still a real possibility on any of these so watch out. Also potential problems the default setting give a low share rate of only four people on one file at a time, so unless people change it, the files can get busy quickly. This and a link being down are the two most common errors. Generally these are few and far between.

Overall Bear Share is my choice of replacement for Napster. It has no chat facility, that I enjoyed on Napster, but for overall choice of good quality files and no copy write laws, mean Bear Share is a very good alternative. Problems are few, but it has crashed twice on me, but generally seams very stable and if a file is busy, you can almost always find a replacement. Hopefully this will not be closed down, but until it does, consider this as a great option

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