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I, personally, felt that Audiogalaxy was the hallmark program from this era. It was the most surefire way to get the songs you were looking for and discover ple
by scoggs 9y ago
I, personally, felt that Audiogalaxy was the hallmark program from this era. It was the most surefire way to get the songs you were looking for and discover plenty more in the process.
You'd set the music folder you wanted to share (there was no opting out) and so long as you had the program open your files were available for download by other users. The program operated like an always on satellite torrent program with very low impact. You'd find a file to download and the file would come in many chunks from any available user who had the file on their client side. Downloads were fast and in the event you lost connection or closed Audiogalaxy the download would resume immediately on reload.
From my POV Audiogalaxy was extremely threatening to Copyright holders in a way that prior p2p programs weren't. Your comment about software being especially 'disruptive' and ruffling all of the right feathers is what reminded me of Audiogalaxy.
There was no indication of who you were receiving files from. There were no usernames or features outside of download and upload. In terms of creating a piece of software that picked a mission and executed it I'll always look at Audiogalaxy and think it achieved precisely what it set out to do, entirely.
- sotojuan 9y agoSoulseek is still alive with the same system. The program does not make you share anything but users can disable sharing files with users who don't share files. At least in 2012-14 Soulseek was very popular with extremely niche and obscure music fans (stuff not even on What.cd!). Not sure how it is now.
- twelvechairs 9y agoYes strange that soulseek seems to have been the one that has lasted longest. Probably its just flown under the radar and hence not been targeted legally or otherwise like Napster Kazaa Limewire Edonkey etc . I dont think its in any particular way more technologically advanced. In any case today YouTube is now surely the biggest repository of illegally shared music by some distance yet seems accepted in general by the recording industry.
- dabockster 9y ago> yet seems accepted in general by the recording industry YouTube (Google) pays the recording royalties out of their own pocket for those videos to keep user engagement on the site. If YouTube actually banned this sort of content, everyone would have left the site a long time ago. (IIRC, some gamers moved to Twitch after ContentID flagged their channels on YouTube.)
- pennaMan 9y agoUnderground electronic music lovers heavily use soulseek to this day.
- lobster_johnson 9y agoWhile Audiogalaxy was great at doing P2P, the magical feature that differentiated it from the competition was that all known files were always indexed and available for download. This was not true about, say, Kazaa or Soulseek; when someone closed their client, their files would disappear from searches. This meant that you could search out a whole bunch of files you wanted, and queue them up for downloading, and whenever the sharers came back online the downloads would start and go through. These days, BitTorrent operates the same way.