Where would I be without Kazaa (and a LAN) (KaZaA)

Name: aratherbadusername

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Product:	KaZaA
Date:	05/06/02 (1311 review reads)
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Well I wouldn't have downloaded 20 films in a month that is for sure! Anwho, on with the op.

Well I shall be writing about two products in this article, KaZaA, and KaZaA Lite.

What is it? The program is simply a way of allowing other people to share whatever files you have on your computer - A peer-to-peer file sharing system. Now hold on there, before you run away I should say that you get to specify which files these are, people do not have unrestricted access to browse your computer. However, I shall go into this at a later date.

So you have decided to hear me out? Good. Now then, KaZaA is a small program that you can download from the internet, it can be found at http://www.kazaa.com and the file is a mere 133K, thats about a minute or two on a standard 56K line. The new version (1.71) has just been released and is available in English, French, German and Spanish languages. Once downloaded you run the installation by double-clicking the file you have just downloaded, this will be named something along the lines of KMD. This process is very simple and straight forward, and very user-friendly, perfect for those who are not that confident with computers. After the installation is complete you will be given this option of launching the KaZaA application for the first time.

Once you have started KaZaA be it right away or at another time, you will be asked to supply a username, just type in your desired name and submit, if it available you're in, if not simply try again. Once you have found a username that isnt taken you are ready to go. Before you start trying to download you will be asked to specify what files you want to share. You can do this by manually selecting areas of your hard disk, or by allowing KaZaA to search for all types of media - MP3 MPEG etc - you have and include these files. Personally I recommend the first option, manual selection. You of course get the option not to share any files, but being a fil
e-share program this defeats the point of sharing if you decide never to share. And one last thing in the dropdown menu 'Tools' choose 'Options' then 'Traffic' the first box allows you to select the area where all downloaded files go to.

Right, now that you have all the essentials configured, time to get cracking. You are initially presented with the page that is displayed at kazaa.com this is found under the 'Start' tab at the top. Along from start you find 'My KaZaA'. This is a place where all your downloads in shared sections are stored, and they are grouped by various catagories and sub catagories. Music files may be grouped by Artist, Album or Genre for example. You also get access to reccommendations in this area. I have no idea how this principle works but I have a huge list of things, none of which I have selected personally, if anyone knows how this works please enlighten me. Next tab is 'Thratre', I would start a new paragraph for this but I feel it is unworthy, as the only positive side of it is you can listen to/watch songs/mpegs as they are downloading, but if you are not on a very fast connection, the file soon catches up to the point you are downloading and this becomes useless.

Now the real goodies come into it. Search. You can search in many ways, you can search all files, or you can specify what type of file you want - audio, video, software, document. The good thing is that with audio for example, it searches for all types, not just MP3's. If you specify a specific file type you also get a choice of further options. Artist / Title / All. Then you get choices specific to the files found in relation to the keyword you enter. E.G;

Audio

Title - Specify a title
Artist - The Artist who sang it
Album - The Album it was on (all three of these can be specified easier than in the standard search)
Catagorey - This will depend on what song tag (somethin
g that gives info about the file) a user has given, it could be something like Audio, or Music and so on
Language - Whatever language you want the peice to be in
Year - as with others it explains itself
Quality - The bit ratio - Higher number better quality sound, but larger file. You can choose to find files less than, equal to, or at least a certain number
Rating - A lame choice, simply how the other person rates the piece
Size - as with quality you have the three choices relating to the size of the file.

It is important not to specify too many of the criteria or you probably won't get a result.

In your 'traffic' section you can keep track of all the files you are exchanging in either direction. You can limit the number of files transfered, and the ammount of your bandwidth (connection speed is a good enough translation for the non-technical) you wish allow others to have access to. Your traffic section shows lots of info, the most important bits being the title of the piece, the username of the person you are getting it from, its status - whether it is downloading, needs more sources, is queed etc - the ammount downloaded and total size, time remaining, speed of download, and the filename.

There are a few more tabs at the top of KaZaA, but I do not have them for I use KaZaA Lite, you may recall I mentioned it at the start of the review. What is it? Well it is an identical system designed by people who object to KaZaA's 'Spyware'. This is a way of tracking what people are downloaoding in order to attempt to market goods at them, and at the pop-up adverts in KaZaA. It can be obtained from http://www.kazaalite.com, and installs and configures in the same way.

So thats the review out the way, now for some tips on its use from myself.

In the 'tools' area found in the dropdown menus at the top of your screen you will see an 'options' option. Select this. I
n 'traffic' if you have a normal speed connection I recomend a maximum download of 2 or 3, and upload of 1 or 2. In the 'advanced section set the bandwith option to about 256 or 128, this gives people the opportunity to gain files from you, but also allows you to have most of the speed you are running at. And choose to gain as many results as you can, if you are using 1.71 this will be 200. The filter option is unfortunately poor, but it does get some of it, so you could filter offensive language or pornographic material if you wanted. Like I said earlier, do not get too picky in the search boxes, or you limit your results.

Any other info? Yes, the great thing about KaZaA is that you can resume downloads. That means you can take a week to download a song, where as with Napster, or downloading files from the web (unless you had special software) you had to complete it in one sitting or all downloaded data was lost. Another feature is that if you find a member that has a song by an artist you like but is not very popular, you can right click and see if they have any others - simply select 'find more by same user' then in the seach tab area if you deselect 'more info' all their files are shown, excellent.

Well I am quite stumped as to what else I should include, but if any seasoned KaZaA'ers can point something out then I will consider adding if it is of great ommission.

Luckily for me I keep Kazaa, but I lose the LAN in 4 days time :-(

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