Napster and Macster

Well, the last few weeks have seen a huge number of stories about Napster and its Mac counterpart, Macster. For those who may not know, Napster is (at least for now) a PC program which lets you search for and download MP3 audio files.

If you're wondering what all the fuss is about, think about being able to find and download pretty much every song you can think of. For free. Best of all, no one knows but you, and therein lies the rub.

Doing that, of course, would technically be illegal; a form of piracy. But then again, so is dubbing a friend's music cassette that was bought at a store, or copying onto videotape a pay-per-view cable movie. As you can imagine, the issue is fraught with moral, possibly even legal implications for the end-user.

Napster, and its Macintosh counterpoint, Macster, are extremely popular and easy to use. I will give you a demonstration of just how cool this technology is. (And yes, I use Macster all the time. Sure, I download MP3s to listen to, even the ones which may be illegal copies. Also remember that as of this writing, NO ONE has EVER been charged with trafficking in MP3 music. This is a very new technology, you know...)

Let's take a song, and see how easy it is for someone to download. We will first look for a popular song on the radio today, and then one which you hardly ever hear anymore.

First, let's look for the new Brittney Spears song, "Oops, I Did It Again." (See, I really DO know what's popular with the kids today!)

Launching Macster, I enter in my search criteria, and voilá! A bunch of listings, all ready for me to download. Now I simply decide where I want to download the song from (by looking at their line speeds; the faster, the better). In seconds (in this case, about sixty seconds), I've the song in MP3 format sitting on my hard drive.

That was an easy one because its current and very popular. Now let's try an older one. Let's look for "The Logical Song" from Supertramp.

As you can see, that title was just as easy. Essentially, it is all out there, everything you could ever want, and more. And the more people who use the software, the more you will see and be able to download.

I will leave it up to you whether or not you should use this software. I will leave it up to you to decide if this is piracy in the worst way, or simply the future of digital music commerce.

Tim Robertson
publisher@mymac.com