Why we don't recommend peer to peer sharing

There are many things wrong with peer to peer sharing, made popular by Napster and now purveyed by other music sharing programs such as AudioGalaxy, Gnutella, iMesh etc.

The first, and most obvious one (because it's gone through the news) is overall, it's of dubious legal quality. However, bootleg trading by nature is of dubious legal quality.

Napster was great for a specific purpose - downloading single songs. However, when it comes to downloading an entire set, you couldn't always guarantee that you were going to get it. For a start, the very nature of it means that the server you are downloading from is only up while the person running that PC is connected to Napster, and downloading music. Which is likely to be when they're saturating their connection anyway.

People with the rare music get 10 people trying to connect at once, so you can hardly ever get what you want. And some people have only managed to get two or three songs of a set anyway, and then share them up. You may never find the rest of it.

And because of the nature of Napster, if you connect to one server, you see one set of people that are connected. If you find someone with a set you want, you get two tracks, get disconnected, and reconnect to Napster, not only can you not resume the file where you left off, you get randomly assigned a server - if it's not the same one as the person who you were downloading off, you can't get your files.

On the other hand, Jane Music or any other dedicated FTP site:

Learn how you can trade live MP3s without "peer to peer".

Note: there is no connection between Metallica not liking Napster, and us not recommending it. You really need to check these cartoons out if you haven't already seen them. Oh, and you suck, Lars.

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