July 17, 2001

6:57 AM

Stick a fork in Napster, it's done. If court orders and kowtowing to industry mouthpieces weren't enough, a planned switch to a proprietary new music format looks to be the death blow.
posted by harmful (10 comments total)

Yes, Napster is dead. I uninstalled it after the last "upgrade" that filtered out even non-copyrighted tunes. But come the fall the music industry will wish they had been nicer to Napster. The genie can't be put back in the bottle.
posted by tranquileye at 7:02 AM on July 17, 2001

Napster has been a zombie for months. My new favorite is LimeWire.
posted by ljromanoff at 7:12 AM on July 17, 2001

Napster has been dead for quite some time. Most people have known this for a while and moved on to other file sharing programs.
posted by fresh-n-minty at 8:24 AM on July 17, 2001

Kazaa is still my favorite for all-around media. AudioGalaxy's Satellite interface is poorly designed and slow, but I've been able to find some obscure music I haven't been able to find elsewhere.
posted by waxpancake at 8:29 AM on July 17, 2001

If you're playing with file-sharing clients, it's worth running Ad-Aware, as they tend to come bundled with nasty little spyware apps.
posted by holgate at 8:42 AM on July 17, 2001

Except for Gnucleus, which is open-source...
posted by fooljay at 9:38 AM on July 17, 2001

<mode="dead-horse-beater">
Hmm, it'll convert mp3s to the .nap format before letting them be shared. As if proprietary formats weren't bad enough, we're going from one kind of lossy compression to another. So anything you get in the .nap format which didn't originate there (read: which wasn't approved by ConGlomO Media) will be automagically degraded. Way to promote the sharing of independent artists by turning their music into garbage.
posted by darukaru at 10:01 AM on July 17, 2001

audiogalaxy!
posted by preguicoso at 1:41 PM on July 17, 2001

Didn't we have a very similar conversation last week about Napster alternatives?
posted by briank at 1:44 PM on July 17, 2001

yeah we did. I still use napster every day though, just not via their network.
posted by DiplomaticImmunity at 2:08 PM on July 17, 2001