June 19, 2002

 
To be perfectly frank, all of the current alternatives to Audiogalaxy aren't very good. I hate the way that Kazaa, Limewire, Morpheus, and QTrax function - I can think of nothing positive to say about any of those programs. Filetopia is alright, but has a fairly weak selection. SoulSeek is the best I've found thus far, but that's probably just because it's being overrun with Audiogalaxy refugees, and is building up AG's shared library a bit better than the others.

I've been running the same tests on all of them. First, I check to see what comes up when I put in seaches for popular artists that I know very well - Pavement, Sonic Youth, Sleater-Kinney, and The Neptunes. Invariably, the results are a fucking mess, there's no rhyme or reason to the order of results. I hate that.

Second, I've been putting through searches for the more obscure interests that I have, and 90% of the time, there are no results. The databases on these services are of no help to me, not for the things that I most valued Audiogalaxy for.

Until someone makes something that functions in the clean, organized way that AG ran, or at very least the harddrives that made up that database are reunited, it looks like I'm limited to only downloading the very music that the RIAA set out to block me and people like me from accessing.