“For those of us who like to move our music collections from our
audio cd onto the computer, there are not many better ways to do
this than mp3. In an earlier article I told you about Grip, the
great ripper & encoder frontend. There is another way to get
your songs in mp3 format, the Napster network. The Napster Network
is a great online community for the exchange of mp3 files.
There are a lot of Linux Napster clients coming out at the
moment. I will here take a look at some of them, and how far they
have come in development.“
“Gnapster is probably the one of the three which is the most
mature and has seen development for the longest time. It is at
version 1.3.6 and the high version number is defended with lots of
little details. It is the only one of the clients that lets you use
the right mouse button to do such things such as start and stop
downloads, etc. The difference in usability and practicality of not
having to first select a song, and then move the mouse to a menu
button to start a download is indescribable….”
“Gtk-napster is the latest addition of these three. According to
the developer’s home page, this is his first C application. Gtk
Napster is currently set to version 0.201. One would think that
with such a low version that the application is next to useless,
but it is surprisingly competitive with the other two Napster
clients. It has more features than GNOME-Napster, though all
actions are initiated through buttons, so I am missing a right
click fastmenu like the one in Gnapster. Gtk-napster features
filtering of Line-speed, Bitrate and Frequency, but sadly enough
Gtk-napster don’t seem to manage to hang on to these between
sessions….”