dacs.doc electric

YOU WOULDN'T THINK that a 648k program would cause the entire music industry to fear for their wallets. Nor would you expect colleges to have to ban this program, for fear that students wouldn't be able to do real work while others where using this program. Well, all of this is true. Napster, a program written to share music files, has done all of this-and more.

Napster is a program that enables you to share music (MP3 files) with people all over the world. It also allows you to chat with others while you're downloading or uploading files, or play the music you've downloaded using the built-in player. This is all the program does, but it does it extremely well.

The MP3 format is a way of compressing music. It is extremely efficient: A whole CD of music, which normally takes up more than 600 megabytes of space, can be compressed to less than 30 megabytes. A single MP3 song can be squished to three or four megabytes in size, which can be easily sent by e-mail. The best part is that an MP3 file sounds almost exactly like the original song on CD. I can't tell the difference.

Napster was created to help a friend find MP3 files on the Internet. Before Napster it was extremely difficult to do this: If the song is not free, in other words, if it's sold in stores, it's illegal to copy it (other than for your own personal use, such as making a tape of a CD you own). It's stealing if the artist and the music company don't get their money.

The old way of finding MP3 files involved a lot of searching. The Recording Industry Association, who represents the artists and record companies, is constantly taking the illegal files down. Lycos and a few of the other search engines started cataloging MP3 files, but many of their links were bad. It was incredibly hard to find a song you were looking for, that is, until Napster came along.

With Napster, you can quickly find virtually any song you're looking for and then download it to your computer. When you start the program, it connects you to the Napster server. From there, you can search for the song you're looking for by artist or title.

As an example, I searched for Dave Brubeck, the famous jazz musician. In the search box, I typed in "Brubeck." Almost immediately it found 67 files. I could download a song just by clicking on it. A great feature of Napster is that it tells you how fast the computer where the file originated is, so you can pick the fastest connection to get your song quickly.

So, how does Napster get around the issues of transferring music files illegally? It doesn't. The company never stores any of the MP3 files on its servers, so it isn't breaking the law. But this didn't stop the Recording Industry Association from suing them. We'll have to wait to see if the courts will stop Napster.

Napster relies on people sharing files. When you log on to Napster you'll be able to search for songs. Napster also uploads a list of all of your music files to the Napster server. While you're downloading files, your computer is acting like a server, letting other people download music from your computer. This is an incredibly powerful concept. When I logged on tonight there were 690,031 songs available, more than 2,715 gigabytes of music!

The reason universities are blocking Napster (they shut off the way it connects) is that it uses up all of the bandwidth, so people trying to do real work can't connect to the Internet. Brown University had to shut off access to Napster when students in the freshman dorm couldn't send or receive e-mail: Too many students had left their machines running as Napster servers.

Napster is a free program-you don't have to pay anything or even feel guilty about not paying a shareware fee. I'm not quite sure how the company is going to make money, but it sure knows how to get some attention. If you're interested in trying Napster, visit their Web site at http://www.napster.com.