[thechat] Kazaa

Terry Fowler quackamoe at yahoo.com
Wed Jun 18 14:52:36 CDT 2003


On the long drive home yesterday the commercial 
classical music station played Aaron Copeland's 
"Appalachian Spring" and I decided to see what
Copeland stuff I could download. When I got home
I fired up Kazaa and dl'd several Copeland MP3s.
Then I somehow remembered Brian Eno and snagged
some of his stuff from the 1984 "Dune" and Ambient
I and II and a few I'd never heard of. Then I 
fired up MusicMatch* and started verifying that 
the song titles matched the songs and that the 
files were complete. 

I realized that I'd forgotten how much I like 
Copeland so I fired Kazaa back up and searched on 
Copeland and got "No matches". Huh? An hour earlier 
I got dozens. I noticed in the status bar at the 
bottom of Kazaa that there were 39 users online 
sharing about 10,000 files! This was at 9:45pm PDT 
last night (17 June 03). What's up with that? At 
10:30pm PDT there were over 3 million users online.

Oh, and I finally listened to some of the Spike
Jones stuff I'd dl'd a couple of days earlier. The
Hawaiian War Chant is still DANG funny.

So, now for some details. We got a cable modem a
couple of months ago, courtesy of the Boeing Co.
My son installed Kazaa without my knowledge or 
consent, but we still haven't replaced it with a
better tool. My PC has an AMD K6-2 500mhz CPU and,
uh, lemme do the math: 256MB + 128MB = uh, 300 and
something MB of RAM. Kazaa brings this system to its
knees. A song I really want "Needs More Resources"
so I click on the song, as much as a minute and a 
half goes by and the song gets highlighted. Then I
right click on the highlighted song and after a 
similar interval a popup appears with. . . . Oh, 
never mind about the details. 

1. This thing is an absolute resource hog. Not mention

   the spyware I've heard it contains.
2. My first dl was Beethoven's 7th symphony, only it
   turned out to be something by Mozart.
3. Lots of files are not complete.

I know we've had discussions about which file-sharing
app is best, but it seems the answer keeps changing,
so I'm wondering what I can use that isn't the piece
of invasive bloatware that is Kazaa and where the 
filenames more reliable. (I saw many instances of "The
Flower Duet" attributed to Puccini/Madame Butterfly.)
I know I'm going to get incomplete files, but I hope
maybe there's a better resource with better chances of
getting complete files.

My friend Chuck, the alphageek I've mentioned here
before,
told me about teranews.com. It's a newsgroup service
and
for a US$4.95 set up fee the service is free for under
50MB of bandwidth a day. He adds that there are lots
of
MP3s under alt.binaries.mp3s. I'm going to sign up for
this "one of these days," but with that cable modem
50MB
is just a beginning!

Terry Who's Feeling Unusually Verbose Today and Didn't
Even Mention LotR! D'oh!

* I had installed WinAmp and had a neat LotR skin and
a
  cool Star Trek Nemesis skin and then the Boy
  installed MusicMatch and made it the default. Oh
well.


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