A website that was giving the recording industry nightmares. The recording
industry has shut it down. It may reopen with safeguards to ensure it does not
exchange copyrighted music. It allows people to swap collections of music in MP3
compressed digital format. The Napster site provides a giant index to everyone's
collections. You select the music you want and it downloads directly from a
person who has it and who is currently on line. All kinds of stuff is in there,
including the obscure stuff from your youth you would never find in a record
store. Even Mike Nichols' and Elaine May's comedy sketches are in there.
I have seen portable MP3 music players for sale for about
, that are like solid state CD's you can download with 30 minutes worth of music.
There are also portable players for
MP3 format CDs, e.g. 8-12 hours of music on one CD for
.
Napster is in legal trouble as you might expect because most of the material
being shared is copyrighted. However, it also provides an inexpensive forum for
new groups to become known.
Napster's search engine is not too bright. You must get the spelling of the
artist and title precisely correct. In case people have filed songs under
incorrect spellings, check those too. Napster will give you dozens of duplicates
rather than automatically choosing the fastest source or most desirable
compression ratio. Songs are not filed by the original CD serial number/track or
the official song title burned into the original CD, so it is hit and miss just
what names songs are filed under. It can pay to disconnect and re-search at a
later time. You may get on a different server with a different collection of
other people. You can't search the collections of people who are not currently
on line.
When you pick a source, choose a T1 or Cable (green dot). These people are
unlikely to disconnect part way through your download. People with 56K modems (yellow
dot) are quite likely to hang up at any minute. There are some people who will
deliberately disconnect you. They want to collect but are unwilling to share.
People are usually not fully aware of you downloading from their machine, though
they could check if they wanted to. Napster is currently not smart enough to
know how to resume the download from a different source of the same file after a
disconnect. The technology is pretty flaky. You have a high chance of the
transfer aborting part way through particulaly if you have a modem connection.
MP3 files are about twelve times as compact as normal audio CDs. Songs can be
encoded in roughly a megabyte per minute of play time. This means you can put
ten times as many songs on a CD if you use MP3 format. They won't play in an
ordinary CD player, however. A typical song is 3 to 6 megabytes. A typical hard
disk is 8 gigabytes, i.e. 8000 megabytes, room enough for about 2000 songs or
130 hours. You can back them up to CD. Each CD holds 600 MB, room for about 150
songs or 10 hours in MP3 format. To convert traditional audio CDs to MP3 format
use a program called Simple. The latest version is buggy, so the experts tell be
to use this older
version for now. It lets you interconvert CD, wav and
MP3 formats. The process of creating MP3 format files is called "ripping".
How do you create a jukebox to play a long list of MP3 songs you have collected
from Napster? There are three main choices:
-
Real Audio Jukebox:
, also a free version. Its main function is downloading songs into portable MP3
players. It requires a 300 MHz or higher speed CPU to work. It automatically
tries to play any CD you put in your CD drive. This can interfere with data
autorun. Real Audio products tend to be presumptuous, installing themselves
without permission, and using up great hunks of CPU time even when you are not
using them, and shoving ads down your throat at every opportunity. This company
started out great and has become more obnoxious with every passing year.
-
Winamp: Free
plug-in. popular with the young crowd because you can decorate it with custom "skins"
to change the look. It can play many different formats including mp3, voc, wav,
midi, mp2 and cda. It will do loops and random shuffling. It has a built in
equaliser so you can fine tune the sound. It has a builtin browser which is set
up with some popular online cd stores, so when you play a song, it looks the id3
tag up on the internet and tells you where you can buy cds that have that song.
You can cook up playlists and save them by name. Winamp will also convert to wav
files for creating standard CDs.
-
Napster: Free.
Napster itself has a built in juke box. Under the library tab, you can play mp3s
by double clicking on them, or you can highlight a group of them, right click
and say add to play list, then when you tell the first song in the playlist to
play, it will go through all of them. It also has a loop and random functions.
You can also create traditional audio CDs from your MP3 collections. You must
first convert to wav format, then burn a CD with Roxio (neé
Adaptec) Easy CD Creator. The CD burning software will accept tracks direct from
various audio CDs or wav files, but not MP3 files
directly.
There should also be playlists you can exchange with others. You would feed the
playlist to Napster and it would automatically collect all the songs in the
playlist for you. It would also be nice if a failed search were put on hold for
a week. If the song appeared, you would get an email telling you to get online
quickly.
What do you do if you don't know the artist or song title, just snatches of
lyrics? Try these sites:
| Website |
Notes |
| AltonMedia |
Pop music, misheard lyrics |
| Gigabeat |
gigaspirals help you find similar songs. |
| Gracenote |
Large database to search by song title, album title or artist, but not by
lyrics. |
| LyricFind |
Search by phrase or scattered words. |
| International Lyrics
Server |
Large database to search by song title, album title or artist, but
ironically not by lyrics. |
| LyricsSearch |
Shows only ten hits at a time. Slower than others, but better matches. |
| LyricsWorld |
Web search engine to MP3s. Lyrics only. |
| Ohhla |
Hip Hop lyrics |
| SongFile |
Also lets you find sheet music. |
| Summer |
Top 40s 1930 to 1999 organised by year. |
| UBL |
Ultimatate Band List. Links to band websites. |
| Webcrawler |
Search with artist's name plus lyrics. |
One final warning, the exchanging of copyrighted materials for commercial
purposes is illegal, and doing it for non-commercial purposes is a legal grey
area. You might get a nasty letter from one of the RIAA
(Recording Industry Association of America) lawyers,
or, ironically, from Napster itself.
Generalising Napster
A unified, distibuted, general purpose, Napster-like, file delivery scheme for
sending anything, files, software, pornography, updates, deltas, web pages,
email, newsgroup postings, music, video ... would scale incredibly well and work
astoundingly fast even with the flakiest home computers if:
-
Files were digitally signed so you can be sure they have not been tampered with.
Most traffic would also need to be encrypted.
-
You need some reasonable but not necessarily perfect scheme to help you find
places where the file you want is cached. Napster did this fairly well. Napster's
clever design ensured that the most popular files were also the most widely
available in cache to be served. Its problem was it did not have unique names or
unique id numbers for files which left it up to humans to scan lists looking for
a suitable place to download. That could be fully automated.
-
You need some sort of central, very well controlled, scheme to tell you what the
id of the most up to date version of any file is. Napster had nothing like this.
-
You also need a well controlled notification system for letting people know that
certain files (e.g. emails) exist ready to be picked up off the general Internet
with the given laundry ticket. You never send files, just laundry tickets
to pick them up. Napster had nothing like this either. Email and newsgroups
suffer from lack of reliable notification. You are forever losing messages. Even
Fedex or the post office can track a parcel for you, and guarantee delivery with
a signed receipt. Analogous features should be routine for electronic delivery
of files and email.
-
Your download software should be able to try several sources simultaneously
and home in the most successful, speediest ones. It makes sense to share the
burden of any given download over many sources. This way even slow sources can
still contribute to the general workload. It is so foolish to wait hours for a
file to download because the source is slower than the target. The whole process
could be speeded up using multiple sources.
-
You should never have to start over just because some source was flaky. We need SAX-like
protocols that don't waste even so much as a byte that they manage to glean
before a disconnect. They just keep picking up where they left off with same or
other servers.
-
You want to get serious about compression, and never transmit anything unless
you have squeezed the heck out of it.
Further you should only send changes. The inept existing MIME-encoded email
messages do the very opposite of compression, engorging them into Monsieur
Creosote impersonations.
-
Eventually you will want background predictive caching so that the messages and
files wanted are already nearby where they will be wanted. We have seen that
Napster was able to do very well without any such cleverness.
-
We need more audience participation. You should have the ability to play DJ,
compose voice intros to your favourite songs and pass them along. You should be
able to write critiques and discumentaries of songs comparing versions etc, and
register these centrally where everyone can find them. You should be able to
create playlists and share them just as you would individual pieces. You should
be able to submit artwork for individual songs and groups of songs, and
synchronised background visuals.
Napster In Legal Hot Water
It turned out I was right when I predicted Napster's days were limited. If
Napster were to prevail, it would depend on music CD buyers without computers
subsidising those that do. It is ridiculous to expect artists to create new CDs
when they can only sell one copy, which is what will happen as Napster clones
become ever more popular. I have devised a student
project to create a new Napster that also handles the distribution of
commercial music.
Last updated 2004-06-28 by Roedy
Green ©1996-2004 Canadian Mind Products
Napster
