Still plenty of music out there

Every time it looks like Napster is in trouble, 50 million people start looking for an alternative. Naturally, Napster’s massive community of MP3 traders want to find ways to keep the music flowing. There are dozens of peer-to-peer alternatives to Napster for finding, downloading or trading music, but no clear “winner.” They all seem to suffer from one shortcoming or another.

OpenNap
For many people, OpenNap is the clear alternative to Napster. OpenNap is an open source version of Napster that looks and works just like Napster. It was written by a group of open-source programmers who reverse-engineered the Napster protocol. Like Napster, it is “phenomenally good” for trading MP3 files, traders say.

There are twice as many OpenNap servers as Napster servers — about 200 OpenNap servers versus 100 Napster servers — but half as many users, between 200,000 and 600,000 at any one time, according to Clip2, which tracks open peer-to-peer networks.

Like Napster, OpenNap relies on servers that allow users to find, index and search for MP3 files on each other’s hard drives. OpenNap servers run on enterprise-level systems, and are maintained by individuals or companies like Music City.

Music City has the most OpenNap servers — about two dozen, according to Napigator, a service that tracks the number of up-and-running OpenNap and Napster servers. And that’s its weakness — the servers can’t be run by ordinary users on their PCs and could presumably be easily shut down by the courts.

AudioGalaxy Satellite: AudioGalaxy Satellite was described by Britain’s influential NTK newsletter as “the future of MP3 distribution.” Like Napster, it’s an easy-to-use music swapping-system with a major advantage: The system can remember what songs have been offered in the past. If a song isn’t immediately available, it can be queued for download when it does show up.

The system is Web-based. Downloads can be initiated from any Web browser to the user’s home machine. Songs are listed by popularity, which helps weed out bad or incomplete versions, and can be automatically resumed if they are cut off. Trouble is, AudioGalaxy is even more centralized than Napster. NTK predicts that as soon as Napster is out of the way, AudioGalaxy will be next.