Gnucleus - The New Napster

July 11, 2001 10:45 AM

Gnucleus - The New Napster First I've heard of this, although apparently it's been around for almost a year at least. Is this just a bunch of hype? How is it an improvement over BearShare, Limewire and other Gnutella clients? Any user feedback?
posted by ideola (28 comments total)

Open-source Gnutella client (Gnucleus): Goooooood

Closed-source Gnutella spyware (Bearshare): Baaaaaad
posted by fooljay at 10:56 AM on July 11, 2001

"Last year, the Gnutella file-sharing network was a distant threat and a poor substitute for Napster, mostly because it didn't have enough users, which in turn made it hard to find many popular songs."

Actually, it had plenty of nodes last year, but became painfully slow as more and more were added. Someone mentioned AudioGalaxy in a previous thread. It's great, and I hope the site stays up for some time.
posted by samsara at 10:57 AM on July 11, 2001

Doesn't AudioGalaxy also install some spyware?
posted by briank at 10:58 AM on July 11, 2001

The story's ridiculous: Gnutella's been viable for over half a year, and Gnucleus is hardly what will clinch its success. This is like saying that the new FTP client you wrote is going to revolutionize uploading because it's "open-source." I mean, sure, open-source is good, and BearShare can be annoying sometimes, but this is hardly a big development.

I do like this quote, though: But shutting Napster down was like squeezing on one end of a digital sausage.
posted by tweebiscuit at 11:05 AM on July 11, 2001

I've been using Gnucleus for a while. It's got a lot of stuff but it is still way tooooo slow. I usually leave it downloading for a few hours (cable modems WooHoo), but on a dialup I would assume it to be unusable.
posted by fullerine at 11:07 AM on July 11, 2001

Here's the other thread that included a lot of great links to music file sites and software.

I've tried various Gnutella clients, but they're all pretty mediocre. (Not that Napster was exactly great, but you know..) Gnotella has great features, but is really slow on my machine. LimeWire isn't too slow, but doesn't have as many features. Speed of downloads isn't the problem, the software is just too buggy and uses up a lot of memory.

I would try Gnucleus, but I'm not fond of anything on SourceForge, so I'll stick with the others. Any other suggestions?
posted by valerie at 11:15 AM on July 11, 2001

A lot of people seem to be talking about Morpheus, I prefer gnutella, but I've recommended the program to modem users as it seems to take up less bandwidth.

It's basically similar to gnutella, except it only connects to other Morpheus clients. Sort of reminds me of Scour as it also has messaging.
posted by swipe66 at 11:16 AM on July 11, 2001

AudioGalaxy installs a spyware program called WebHancer that can be removed. Which is good. Although, WebHancer is a nasty virus-like application that hooks into winsock. It's still a good alternative to napster if I'm just looking for mp3s, but the site does get bogged down every so often.
posted by samsara at 11:22 AM on July 11, 2001

shutting Napster down was like squeezing on one end of a digital sausage.

mmmmm.....digital sausage...gahgghgahgahghhggg....

Open-source Gnutella client (Gnucleus): Goooooood

Closed-source Gnutella spyware (Bearshare): Baaaaaad

Where does LimeWire fall in that spectrum? I never cared for BearShare anyway.
posted by jpoulos at 11:28 AM on July 11, 2001

Java based Gnutella client (Limewire): sloooowwww
posted by machaus at 11:33 AM on July 11, 2001

Actually, I've never used Limewire, so I'm not sure.

I do like this quote, though: But shutting Napster down was like squeezing on one end of a digital sausage.

As I wrote this morning: "So now MP3philes are giving the RIAA the other end of the digital sausage."
posted by fooljay at 11:35 AM on July 11, 2001

AudioGalaxy installs a spyware program called WebHancer that can be removed. Which is good.

Unless you use the Linux satellite program, which doesn't. And so, is better.
posted by holgate at 11:43 AM on July 11, 2001

And I like AudioGalaxy because it's especially suited to retrieving obscure and live tracks, since all users' files are indexed, whether online or not.
posted by holgate at 11:45 AM on July 11, 2001

I cast my vote for Gnotella. No spyware, does all I need it to do.
posted by Hackworth at 12:10 PM on July 11, 2001

Kazaa is the bomb. Music, movies, pictures and software on a "distributed, self-organising network" with no central sever. Hot machines on fat pipes become "supernodes" whatever that means. Right now there's 188 Terabytes of data from 428 Thousand simultanious users.. not bad...shhhhhh
posted by metasak at 12:20 PM on July 11, 2001

WinMX has been just as good, if not better than Napster for me.
posted by Mark at 12:47 PM on July 11, 2001

This just popped into my world.
posted by mmm at 12:56 PM on July 11, 2001

Personally, I'de like to see more bad press about gnutella. Make the newbies and jackhole AOLusers think they won't figure it out so it isn't ruined by leeches and later the RIAA stazi
posted by Zebulun at 12:57 PM on July 11, 2001

In general, I have found Limewire to be a resource hog. Startup is slow due to the fact it's written in Java using Swing. It crashes quite a bit on my G4 450, and then proceeds to hose my net connection for all applications. Restarting is the only way to get it back.
The high memory usage isn't so much of a problem when I'm at work on a dual 933Mhz Win2k machine. However, slower machines might have some issues.
This is not to say that Limewire is a poor program. The slow startup and memory issues are inherent in Java. The problems on the Mac side probably have more to do with the Macintosh Java Runtime implementation than with the program itself. I think it has the best GUI of any filesharing application.
The problems with the speed of downloads and connections is another thing entirely. This has more to do with the Gnutella protocol. I like some of Limewire's additions to the standard Gnutella feature set (disallowing freeloading,etc.) If you are interested, they have some interesting documents about improving the Gnutella network on their site.
posted by ry at 1:06 PM on July 11, 2001

It's getting to the point where I can't find half the stuff I want to download anyway, so I just skim the good unknown bands from sites like http://epitonic.com
(disclaimer: no vested interest in above site)
posted by mecran01 at 2:36 PM on July 11, 2001

Metasak. You speak the truth ,a href="http://www.kazaa.com">Kazaa rules the ocean waves (it's actually the same thing as MusicCity's morpheus, just from a different company). Most excellent.
posted by nedrichards at 3:54 PM on July 11, 2001

Metasak. You speak the truth Kazaa rules the ocean waves (it's actually the same thing as MusicCity's morpheus, just from a different company). Most excellent.
posted by nedrichards at 3:54 PM on July 11, 2001

Since several people have wondered why this is worth a news article:

Gnucleus is to the other Gnutella clients as Gnutella itself is to Napster. Napster was great, but it was owned by a company that could be sued; once the record companies figured that out, of course they sued, and away went Napster. Gnutella is not owned or managed by a parent company, but its client applications are (so far as I know). The record companies could, in theory, force the Gnutella-client makers to stop distributing their software. It would be more work to shut down a half-dozen Gnutella clients than it was to shut down a single Napster network, and they'd have to deal with new Gnutella-clients popping up for a while as people re-implemented the protocol, but it could be done.

Gnucleus makes this impossible. Since Gnucleus has been released under the GPL, no company or organization can ever buy the right to force people to stop copying or developing it. The record companies would have to shut down every single Gnucleus user before they could permanently pulll the genie back into the bottle.

Gnucleus is significant because it eliminates more possible points of failure. It's one step closer to the celestial jukebox, the always-on cloud of free digital music out in the ether waiting to be played, that we've all been waiting for since 1995 or so. This doesn't mean the war is over, of course, but it means it will be that much more expensive for the record companies to fight.

-Mars
posted by Mars Saxman at 4:08 PM on July 11, 2001

Mars, thanks for clearing that up. This seems to be the crux of the whole thing -- if the music industry can shut down the works, then sooner or later it will. My question concerns your comment that Gnucleus is "one step closer to the celestial jukebox." If Gnucleus can't be shut down, then haven't we arrived, so to speak? Is Gnucleus the last nail on the music industry coffin? If so, how long before recording companies & music distributors start folding? The only place I'll be able to hear new music is in a smoky honky-tonk, or maybe on the street corner watching Wierd Bob smacking a coke can with a spoon.

By the way, fair selection of free MP3s at ZOEK for those interested -- ah, thank goodness for those free-wheeling Dutch.
posted by Bixby23 at 6:59 PM on July 11, 2001

'The only place I'll be able to hear new music is in a smoky honky-tonk, or maybe on the street corner watching Wierd Bob smacking a coke can with a spoon'..

That would be to assume that people only make and distribute their music purely for profit. You aren't getting paid for writing what you just have - but you still do it. And so do i. We're here out of an interest in consuming the plentiful amounts of other peoples output that exist here and everywhere else on the net. Output that people are driven to creating and posting online and, in many cases, even pay subscriptions or bandwidth fees to be able to give us. We ourselves are writing, creating, and sharing out of passion and a will to communicate our thoughts.. Although i find writing a breeze, i am putting a degree of effort in here, and doing it for free. Writing is an artform and other arts are NO different. We aren't here to kill off the publishing industry, we're here because it's a natural and human thing to do. Imagine if words were a distributed monopoly and apply the same logic; would the rise of MeFi-like sites pose a danger to the literary art and mean you'd only be able to read new paragraphs in a couple of rapidly depleting and thoroughly bizarre places? No, it's entirely the opposite. Here your free from the headache of financially motivated pollution and you have instant access to a broad range of diversity in expression written by people with no thoughts for what will be commercially viable whilst expressing their inner-thoughts. There's no middle-men deciding what barrage of crap will be packaged and forcibly pushed our way. And more importantly, my post and your post aren't victims to a system where they get left on a shelf, ignored by the bloated programmed masses in favour of some fake candyfloss crap because people haven't seen our names affiliated with some movie or tv show or paid to be featured on some clear-channel media. It's time to destruct the stale old 20th century mass market mentality that exploded with the likes of Warner Brothers, Elvis, The Beatles, etc and ended up a bloated monster that now sees 5 companies selling 80% of the worlds so called 'music'. THIS is my payment for reading your last post and, although mines not as funny as yours, it is three times as long to make up for it. In fact, you owe me some change!. At the end of the day - We're here to pro-sume and it's damn healthy. The same will be true with the explosive growth in new distribution channels for audio art. So there. ^__^
posted by Kino at 12:47 AM on July 12, 2001

Speaking of Scour, I've found Direct Connect and EDonkey to be fabulous sources of video. I especially like the server dedicated to MST3K episodes on Edonkey. The way the client polls multiple users for the file you want then downloads the different parts from multiple people at the same time enabling you to get things quicker is great. Hotline has been very good to me as there are many huge quality mp3 repositories, however, it often isn't unlike oth.net or a crappy irc channel, with a plethora of garbage ratio and banner sites.
posted by yupislyr at 5:12 AM on July 12, 2001

LimeWire is nigh unusable. It's memory footprint is 26M, which is ridiculous considering how little it does and how poorly it runs. Heinous, heinous, heinous.
posted by plinth at 6:09 AM on July 12, 2001

That would be to assume that people only make and distribute their music purely for profit. You aren't getting paid for writing what you just have - but you still do it. And so do i.

No, it would be assuming that the people who are going to get you worldwide exposure do it only for profit, which is more or less true. Without promotion, every act would be doomed to be a small local act. With listeners all over the world, but never as many of them as, say, U2 has.

This might be okay, though. It has its potential pros and its cons. On the one hand, musicians might never become big stars again. On the other hand, if they do, it might be because they actually appeal to the public, rather than because they have been advertised constantly. With fewer megastars, there are more entertainment dollars to go around, which might allow more small bands to make a comfortable living doing what they love. Dunno how it might shake out. On the downside, the music moguls will of course do their damndest to make sure it comes out favorable to them, and they just might succeed.
posted by kindall at 9:02 AM on July 12, 2001