...but they can never stop Napster - the idea!

December 9, 2015 9:50 AM

Taxster reviews all of today's hottest P2P programs: KaZaA, Morpheus, Limewire, eDonkey2000, and more!

Note: some information may be out of date.

posted by theodolite (54 comments total)

No love for carefully curated IRC DCC bots? What a garbage this is :( :( :(
posted by boo_radley at 9:54 AM on December 9, 2015 [3 favorites]

Do they have any Linkin Park?
posted by theodolite at 9:59 AM on December 9, 2015 [8 favorites]

No love for Soulseek (or slsk, as the cool kids called it)? The great unkept/unkempt secret of the Napster era.
posted by naju at 10:00 AM on December 9, 2015 [14 favorites]

Or you can listen to it / watch it / download it from YouTube, who are far and away the biggest piraters out there.
posted by markkraft at 10:01 AM on December 9, 2015

Can I download Phish's "Gin and Juice" on any of these?
posted by entropicamericana at 10:05 AM on December 9, 2015 [21 favorites]

1. Didn't/don't some of these programs come bundled with malware? I remember having to clean a cousin's filesharing system in particular a couple of times.
2. When was this written? I ask because two things make me wonder how recently this was compiled. The first is the web design. The second is the lack of any mention of bittorrent.
posted by JHarris at 10:07 AM on December 9, 2015

Ah, I see now, below the fold, "some information may be out of date."
posted by JHarris at 10:08 AM on December 9, 2015

Can I download Phish's "Gin and Juice" on any of these?

They've got that AND "Let's Go Smoke Some Pot" by Phish!
posted by SpiffyRob at 10:10 AM on December 9, 2015 [2 favorites]

While I was in college, someone there wrote up a network search engine in order to pirate media and distributed it across campus. It would just scrape the network for any shared folders, so users were encouraged to share their libraries over the network. It worked pretty well until the RIAA shut it down.

There were also the people who didn't know how to selectively share folders, and ended up sharing their whole hard drives. Amazing what you could find on people's computers.


There was also the guy who had the stated goal of hosting the most porn on the network. Not curated at all, just whatever he could get his hands on. He was very proud of it.
posted by backseatpilot at 10:12 AM on December 9, 2015 [2 favorites]

No love for Soulseek (or slsk, as the cool kids called it)? The great unkept/unkempt secret of the Napster era.

Not sure I was ever cool but I was just salvaging some old files on one of many folders named "slsk" this morning off an old external HD. Unkempt is the right word for it.
posted by shortfuse at 10:18 AM on December 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

Bandwidth, the old saw is no network transfer will be as fast as a station wagon filled with hard drives. And that was before you could fill it with several petabytes.

I just wonder if there's a quiet society of friends that send a (currently) 3TB disk to someone who merges whatever it contains with the local collection and round robins it. a few weeks/cycles and rather more media than one could watch in a year.
posted by sammyo at 10:20 AM on December 9, 2015

Oh but if you happen to need to download a linux distribution or something legal consider "transmission" the open source tool that is very unlikely to have a virus.
posted by sammyo at 10:23 AM on December 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

Limewire on my old Mac was actually pretty darned good. It's kind of weird to read the buggy issues they had with the Win version.
posted by Thorzdad at 10:24 AM on December 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

There were also the people who didn't know how to selectively share folders, and ended up sharing their whole hard drives. Amazing what you could find on people's computers.

There was also the guy who had the stated goal of hosting the most porn on the network.

Did... did we go to the same tiny liberal arts school in upstate New York? My favorite pastime when I was monitoring the CS Lab and had some downtime was to go looking for anyone who had just blindly shared C:\, and swap out the default background image for the Windows desktop with a gentle chiding reminder that this was a terrible idea. Sometimes I'd stumble on a serial offender, and then began the slow inexorable march to goatse.
posted by Mayor West at 10:26 AM on December 9, 2015 [9 favorites]

MetaFilter: And then began the slow inexorable march to goatse.
posted by tonycpsu at 10:37 AM on December 9, 2015 [3 favorites]

Stuck in the Middle by Bob Dylan!
posted by stevil at 10:48 AM on December 9, 2015 [5 favorites]

It was probably Kazaa where I downloaded Skynyrd's "Tuesday's Gone." As I listened to it, about halfway through, a notably off-key woman began singing along. Damn her.
posted by stevil at 10:49 AM on December 9, 2015

I just wonder if there's a quiet society of friends that send a (currently) 3TB disk to someone who merges whatever it contains with the local collection and round robins it. a few weeks/cycles and rather more media than one could watch in a year.

I do about 300gigs a month with two users in my house. The vast majority of it is video streaming/downloading. Very interesting how close your 3TB of media/year is to our household consumption.
posted by mayonnaises at 10:51 AM on December 9, 2015

every musical attempt at humor is attributed to weird al
posted by dismas at 10:54 AM on December 9, 2015 [10 favorites]

One workplace of mine evolved a similar set of shared music directories on the LAN, and it was fairly popular and carefully ignored by anyone who might have to tell us not to do it. Most people participating at first were the music nerds, but it gradually spread throughout the organisation. (I got an email from someone I didn't know in ad sales once, asking where my share had gone and when it might be coming back - I was busy moving stuff around my HD, and had taken it down about ten minutes previously. Same queezy feeling as when someone you don't know very well at work says that they've heard you know where to get some grass, and can you hook them up.)

Then one day, I was walking through the dev and ops department after hours, and just about every screen was running the same software, which they hadn't been the day before. "What's that?" I asked. "Something called Napster..." (The same pattern happened with Doom and SETI@Home.)

And that was that for the shared drives.

OTOH, I know of someone with a >2TB collection of nicely-set-up-for-Kodi art house movies, with a few of their favourite more popular genres of mainstream flicks included. They encourage friends to drop off hard disks for an overnight backup, Another pal, who is most definitely in a position to know, claims that very large music collections from within streaming services, and others from universities with active music/production teaching programs built from recording studio master tapes, are circulated among the appropriate tribal high priests.
posted by Devonian at 11:05 AM on December 9, 2015 [2 favorites]

Every shitty pop-punk cover to Blink 182.
Every video game techno remix to Aphex Twin.
posted by Jimbob at 11:06 AM on December 9, 2015

Soulseek was great, but the true gem was Audiogalaxy (am I remembering the name correctly?)...so much rare, hard-to-find stuff.

Soulseek was like some lovely bastard child of Hotline.
posted by sektah at 11:08 AM on December 9, 2015 [7 favorites]

Those of us who are real OG remember FTP ratio sites and Blex's Page of Good MP3z.
posted by Jimbob at 11:10 AM on December 9, 2015 [4 favorites]

Ugh ratio sites. How was I supposed to get any good music if I could only download by sharing good music I didn't have? If I had cash to buy music I wouldn't be on the FTP download site right?

(pours one out for oth.net)

wait is that site still up? what the hell, internet
posted by caution live frogs at 11:16 AM on December 9, 2015 [2 favorites]

Oh wow, 160x200 Simpsons episodes encoded with the Sorenson codec which we all know is the best
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 11:26 AM on December 9, 2015 [7 favorites]

There was also the guy who had the stated goal of hosting the most porn on the network. Not curated at all, just whatever he could get his hands on. He was very proud of it.

Did we go to the same school? Or was/is that just every school?
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 11:28 AM on December 9, 2015 [5 favorites]

you guys are putting me back on memory lane right now. I remember after Napster got shut down I jumped to Kazaa, and then I discovered the wonders of P2P porn, and I'm pretty sure I downloaded and burned 10+ cds full of... porn, because I didn't wanna fill up my hard drive, which instead I was filling with music (which I also burned a few dozens of "mixtapes").

I used Limewire and eMule as backups when I couldn't find something on Kazaa, amazingly the 3 didn't have much of a cross section for more obscure stuff (like most of ATB's early work, or OST to Final Fantasy games). The music community on Kazaa was sweet though, with people noticing what you download and recommend more stuff from their library. It was how I discovered Alice Deejay, DJ Mystik, and York.

Now that I don't listen to EDM much anymore I'm glad services like Spotify exposes you to a lot more indie artists.
posted by numaner at 11:29 AM on December 9, 2015

I was living on campus in DCU during 1999-2003 - the golden age as it were. We'd have stuff up on Windows shares, but a few people trying to get something off your machine at the same time. One guy wanted to share porn, but didn't want to have people come across it by accident. He put it in a folder called "compiler documentation" because he was confident nobody would ever voluntarily look there.
posted by kersplunk at 11:45 AM on December 9, 2015

Forgive me, but I just realized:

Metafilter: the slow inexorable march to goatse.
posted by Mayor West at 11:45 AM on December 9, 2015

sektah Soulseek was great...

Yes... it was great, wasn't it?

*shifty eyes*

'Cause it's totally not around any more, and certainly not a great source for hard to find foreign releases...

*wipes brow*

Yup.

Though, man, I still miss AudioGalaxy. That was the best.
posted by SansPoint at 11:48 AM on December 9, 2015 [17 favorites]

Then during 2003-2004 I was doing my masters and not living on campus any more. I was living with another guy doing a different masters who'd been given a dedicated machine in a lab. We built one of these and put it on the roof pointing at the university library a mile away which had wide open wifi. We could remote desktop to his lab machine and use it to download films at college bandwidth speeds. We'd fill the hard drive overnight and go in in the morning and burn all the films and clear the drive. By the end of the summer we had a stack of CD-Rs taller than us.
posted by kersplunk at 11:49 AM on December 9, 2015

But yeah I give AudioGalaxy credit for changing my taste in music because it was so easy to find pretty obscure stuff.
posted by kersplunk at 11:51 AM on December 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

There was also the guy who had the stated goal of hosting the most porn on the network. Not curated at all, just whatever he could get his hands on. He was very proud of it.

Um, was it Jared Fogel? (SFW)
posted by Ian A.T. at 11:53 AM on December 9, 2015

Was it just me, or did SoulSeek quickly become all techno?
posted by deadbilly at 12:02 PM on December 9, 2015

I was JUST talking about this and trying to figure out where I found movies between the days of the ftp sites and torrenting. Audiogalaxy and soulseek for music, obviously, but I can't remember where I got those harddrives full of Simpson's episodes!

The most hilarious part of the ftp sites was chatting with the dudes who ran them when I got disconnected after uploading and before downloading. I know I got at LEAST one heavily photoshopped pic of a teenage goth dude once he found out I was a teenage goth lady just trying to get my Skinny Puppy album I was owed, I really wish I kept that stuff.
posted by jeweled accumulation at 12:07 PM on December 9, 2015 [2 favorites]

I just answered my own question: nope.
posted by deadbilly at 12:08 PM on December 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

The best thing about Audiogalaxy was the ability to join interest groups that would then automagically send music to your computer. Excellent way to have your ears opened to new stuff you'd never have hunted down yourself. Hello Japanese garage bands!*

(*A friend told me)
posted by merocet at 12:28 PM on December 9, 2015 [2 favorites]

The problem with soulseek used to be people trying to queue hundreds of files with an impressively low connection. I remember having to ban more than one user that was CONSTANTLY trying to leech about 5 or 6 albums at once, despite having sub-5kb/s speeds and being warned not to do it.

Audiogalaxy was the first one I've used. It was pretty good, too.
posted by lmfsilva at 12:38 PM on December 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

Metafilter: at LEAST one heavily photoshopped pic of a teenage goth dude.
posted by mr. digits at 12:48 PM on December 9, 2015

Your KaZaA Library
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 12:55 PM on December 9, 2015 [2 favorites]

No love for Soulseek (or slsk, as the cool kids called it)?

What we call it now is SHHHH don't let the squares find out
posted by FatherDagon at 1:37 PM on December 9, 2015 [2 favorites]

Oh man, the Sigur Ros hub on DC++. So many mp3s. So many....
posted by kuanes at 2:13 PM on December 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

Ugh ratio sites. How was I supposed to get any good music if I could only download by sharing good music I didn't have? If I had cash to buy music I wouldn't be on the FTP download site right?

IIRC, most FTP sites didn't care what you uploaded, as long as it wasn't there already. My go-to upload was Black Hole Sun, which was really short and for some reason right on my desktop. Sorry, everyone.

(pours one out for oth.net)

An FTP search engine! How could it get any better?!
posted by Sibrax at 4:03 PM on December 9, 2015

caution live frogs: "(pours one out for oth.net)"

It was a banner day for me when my dorm-room ftp ratio site got listed on oth.

Of course, I also had my connection disabled by campus IT for having too many open TCP connections to my IP...
posted by namewithoutwords at 4:15 PM on December 9, 2015

Other than bit torrent, do any of these apps still work? Or are kids these days all about netflix and apple or other legal music subscription services?
posted by banished at 4:49 PM on December 9, 2015

Audiogalaxy wasn't just a hybrid web/P2P mp3 sharing app, It was a god-dammed arbiter of taste.
posted by sourwookie at 6:15 PM on December 9, 2015

I don't remember liking audiogalaxy as much as soulseek/slsk (which still exists?) but as someone above suggested, soulseek was more skewed towards the obscurest of electronica/idm but had that awful but now nostalgic Linux-like OSX client. The fun part of soulseek and hotline was the thrill of the hunt; finding that one server or user with a massively unique collection and a blazing fast, likely college connection.

One of my most memorable discoveries which I lost to hard drive crash was a homemade EP of star wars sampling hip hop instrumentals.
posted by ejoey at 7:06 PM on December 9, 2015

Soulseek is a must if you're interested in getting obscure Dutch or French (prog) rock mostly not available on torrent sites. This may not be of interest to everyone of course.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:53 PM on December 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

I've recently rediscovered Soulseek through the GoSeek Android app which is pretty basic but does the job.
posted by brilliantmistake at 5:03 AM on December 10, 2015

Can I download Phish's "Gin and Juice" on any of these?

Naw dude that was String Cheese.
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 5:26 AM on December 10, 2015

Soulseek is a must if you're interested in getting obscure Dutch or French (prog) rock mostly not available on torrent sites. This may not be of interest to everyone of course.

I've long thought slsk's motto should be "For when your tastes are just... too cool."

and yes i've used it specifically for weird French prog rock before too
posted by FatherDagon at 6:22 AM on December 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

Did anyone ever do that whole "pay $5 to soulseek for a month and get queue priority" thing? God it was like torrenting, it was so fast.
posted by oceanjesse at 7:54 AM on December 10, 2015

My brother paid for two months to get Pink Floyd / Syd Barrett bootleg collections. It wasn't for speed as much as so we wouldn't be permanently stuck in a 200 item queue, as the few that had it seemed to have.
posted by lmfsilva at 8:34 AM on December 10, 2015

ultraviolet catastrophe: "Can I download Phish's 'Gin and Juice' on any of these?

Naw dude that was String Cheese."

The Gourds got screwed on that song didn't they?

(It's Track 1 on "Shinebox" for anyone who never figured out who really performed it...)
posted by caution live frogs at 3:06 PM on December 15, 2015