the best money-saving program
Written: Dec 14 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: FREE FREE FREE, wide selection
Cons: technical difficulties, endangered
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| rahilka's Full Review: Napster |
Normally I don't write reviews for anything that already has more than say, 20 reviews - and I think Napster has about 600 reviews already. But considering Napster is the most frequently run program on my hard drive (more than Internet Explorer or Outlook Express), and probably takes up a third of my hard drive - well, I feel I'm obligated to write something.
I love all the money making and money saving programs out there. None of them has ever made/saved me more than a few bucks, but I continue to be optomistic. Napster, however, has saved me more money than all of them combined. Think about it - let's say a song on CD costs $1 (assuming a price of $12 for a CD with 12 songs). If I have 300 songs on Napster - and I'm getting close - that's a savings of 300! And it's all free! Can't beat that...
For those of you who don't know how Napster works, or what it is, here you go - Napster is a file-exchange program for MP3 (music) files. When you're online, using Napster, you can download a song from any other Napster user who's online. To get started, you download the program from the napster website, www.napster.com. Fill out the short registration, connect, and you're ready to go. Click on "search", type in the name of a song or artist that you're looking for, and a list of users with that song on their hard drive will pop on. Click on any of them, and Napster will start downloading the song. It's that easy.
On my 56k modem, it typically takes about 20 minutes to download a song. You can program in a list of songs for Napster to download, one after another, so you don't have to sit there and choose a new song every 20 minutes. Admittedly, problems can arise. If the user you're downloading from logs off - well, there goes your transfer. All that time wasted. Also, transfer errors sometimes happen for no reason at all, or the download speed may slow way down, so that it takes 3 hours to download a song. It can get frustrating - but, hey, it's free....
One of the great things about Napster is the huge selection of songs out there. If it's on a CD somewhere, you'll be able to find it on Napster. Also, because there are users all over the world, you can even find foreign language songs, even in some rather obscure languages. You can find edited and unedited versions of songs, remixes, dance mixes... It's all on Napster.
One piece of advice - get it now. If you've been following the news, Napster, at least as it operates now, is endangered. My personal theory (not my own - I've read it several places) is that Napster will probably continue to operate, but will no longer be free - e.g. users will pay a monthly fee for the right to download songs. I'm not sure what I'll do when it reaches that point, but I'm just trying to fill up my hard drive with all the music I can before that happens, and I recommend you do the same.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID: rahilka
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Reviews written: 12
Trusted by: 2 members
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