Before I launch into how much I support Natsper I'm going to tell you why...oh yes why!

I like to try music which I've never heard of before, I go into a record shop and pick up a random CD in the type of music I want to listen to i.e. (the rock section) I look at who it's by, the tracks and of course the front cover. But as you can imagine spending £15 on something you might hate, is quite a big risk for a student; buy one CD a week £15 x 4 x 12= £720 a year. I could buy a car with that, say 1 in 5 CD I don't like that is £144 wasted.

Now take Napster, free easy to use and has songs which other people have on their computers. You can download music when you want it and listen to it even before its downloaded fully. Much better than looking at a CD wrapped in plastic, with some sweaty virgin clerk ( breathing down your neck "arr ya gonna buy that?"

If napster was taken off. How would we listen to the music when we want on demand for the mere price of phone call (I say mere in the loosest possible way, BT are the 'strangling' America of the communication world). Nowhere, No how.

Some blind techno-phobic capitalist lawyers only review the irrelevant facts put on their extremely small plates, now jeopardize sampling for the masses. If they used it they would know that a large percentage if not all the files offered are from users computers not Napster, also when downloading you often "mysteriously" loose your connection capturing 98% of the file.

OK MP3 isn't perfect even above the usually sampling and bitrates. As an experiment I copied the CDDA tracks off a CD into MP3 then back on to a CDR so I could compare. There are obvious different especially in solo parts (this is due to how MP3 are compressed).

If I like the sound of a band I try and track their CD down at record shops and buy it, so I can listen to the tracks in their recorded quality. An example of this is Rob Zombie heard him on the Matrix but I wanted to hear what else he had to offer. I downloaded "meet the creeper" I liked it and got the CD. I'm glad I did it's great.

written by alieN! 25/9/2000