[thechat] good, no-spyware replacement for Napster?

[Kevin Stevens]

> She downloaded Morpheus, but I heard that one has spyware in it, too,
> although I couldn't find documentation about it. Anyone confirm this?

Morpheus was great, but the new hastily put together version is a shadow of
the former program, but they are calling it a "Preview version" and are open
to user feedback. Your daughter has my sympathies, I really miss my file
sharing. I have experimented with other programs such as Bearshare and
Gnotella but they both kinda suck, the Gnutella network does not seem to
have as many users as the KaZaa one has, and Bearshare refuses to connect at
all.
I tried Audio Galaxy at the weekend and was very disappointed with the
interface, but it does seem to have a huge amount of users. I tried to get a
track by an obscure gabba band that both Napster and Morpheus failed to find
and whose CDs go for a fortune on ebay, and was pleasantly surprised to find
that most of their back catalogue is available on Audio Galaxy :) The
downside is that Audio Galaxy, like Napster, only deals in MP3s. It also
contains the Gator spyware but I managed to remove this and it still works
fine. In their defence they do state that Gator will be installed with the
program because it is freeware and they have to pay for it somehow, which is
fair I suppose.
I think once the bugs are ironed out then Morpheus will once again be the
best program to use. The official line from them is that the old program
suffered from a DoS attack and they had to rush out the new one, but an
article on the Register suggests that they have not paid KaZaa for using
their network.

HTH

Kevin Stevens
kjs at ratking.co.uk