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AUDIOGALAXY
- what is it?
- how the dickens does it work? What's all this "availability" nonsense?
- should I avoid using it at work?
It's a file-sharing service, a la Napster. It's not very conspicuous, but I would use it at work with supreme discretion.
Audiogalaxy is a pretty small program, you get a 'satellite', and you go to the Audiogalaxy site, look up whatever you want to find, click the button, and it ends up in yr satellite queue, you download it from other users who have it on their harddrives. While you have yr satellite connected, other folks download from your music files on yr harddrive. Audiogalaxy is a strictly music-file sharing system, unlike Morpheus or Gnutella in which you can share virtually any file imaginable.
I love Audiogalaxy - it has an immense, diverse library, and a huge number of people connected, so the odds of getting obscure weird stuff is much higher. Even on my relatively slow modem, downloads are pretty fast. You can set up files to download without having to be online. You can link to songs for other people to download. It's great. A lot of major labels obviously block their artists for copyright reasons, but you can work around that by creative searching - ie, you wouldn't look for "Beatles Strawberry Fields Forever" cos it won't be there, but if you look for "Magical Mystery Tour Strawberry Fields Forever" you will. It's great.
Of course, Audiogalaxy is only for PC users...
If you have a Mac, you should go for Limewire. Pretty similar deal.
Oh, about 'availability' - it depends on how many people have something on a harddrive. Some tracks are only on a handful of people's harddrives, so you might have to wait til those people happen to be online.
For example, I'm fairly sure I'm one of maybe at best three or four people who have "Experimental Fashion" by Banjo-V on my harddrive. So that song will be in a very limited availability...
[ 26-02-2002: Message edited by: Flux = Everything Extraordinaire ] |
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