Music City Morpheus

Who of you used Napster at one point (or at many points) in the past year? I know I sure did! Millions of live albums and bootlegs of my favorite artists just a hop, click and a download away? I indulged almost nightly. Then some whinny billionaire artists, who will remain nameless (cough, cough Dr. Dre hack,cough. ah..ah..ahhh Metallica ahhhh.….choo!! ) wanted to shut them down because they didn’t have the money to buy a Bentley convertible just so they could have one to match their new Reebok’s. Thus, the rest of the world has to suffer without Napster! Thankfully, all is not lost! Within the past few months there have been at least 20 new programs that can be used to download not only music, but applications, movies and games. These services don’t run through company-run servers, the way Napster did; the company simply sets up the software and users connect amongst each other. This results in the lack of shutting anything down! So Dr. Dre, who probably received his doctorate in spending money, can’t do anything about it except watch his profits go from $10 million a year to $9.999 million. I guess you’d be crying to, if it happened to you!

So, in the next few segments, I will be going over a bunch of these new programs, since they are sprouting up faster than music artists are entering rehab. I’ve heard that Napster will come back one of these days, but not in its original state. You’ll have to outlay a monthly “fee” to be able to use it. What’s the fun in that? I’d rather get them for free using one of the “2nd generation” programs.

The first in the series is Music City’s Morpheus (version 1.33) which looks identical to KAZAA, another Napster-wannabe. This is one of the best that I’ve tried. It’s not as popular as the Gnutella-based programs, so you will probably find more stuff (since there are more users!) with those programs. However, Morpheus allows you to be more specific when choosing what you are looking for. For example, let’s say you were looking for a song by the Billy Jim Bob Brothers, but you didn’t know what it was called. If you typed in “Billy Jim Bob Brothers”, within a Gnutella-type, it would bring up videos, pictures, in addition to music by Billy Jim. You don’t have way of telling it which format of media you desire. That’s where Morpheus shines through the hot and sticky Jersey clouds. The opening “Screen” allows the user to choose one of 5 types of media: Video, Audio, Images, Documents, and Software. There is also one for “Everything”, if you don’t know exactly the type of media you are looking for. Once you select the format, it gives you a new screen which is devoted to finding what you are looking for. If you select “Audio”, you can search by “Artist”, “Title”, or “All”. You then choose accordingly, enter your query, and click “Search”. Unfortunately, there is only one line, so you can’t enter an artist and then put in a song title on a different line. You can put both on the same line and search for “All”, which does almost the same thing. Oh yeah, there are also “More Search Options”, which lets you get even more creative and allows you to search by “Category”, “Album”, “Size”, “Rating” and more! Pretty cool, huh?

So, let’s say you go through the searching motions for the Bob Brothers and find a song you want to download. You double-click on it and it becomes a part of your “Traffic”, which is another screen. You then click on the “Traffic” button at the top of the screen to enter that section, which is very similar to Napster’s. The top part has all the files you are downloading while the bottom lists the files people are grabbing from you. The top part should show the Brothers Jim(‘s) latest hit that you clicked on before and, depending on the speed of both your Internet connection and the person’s of whom you are downloading from, it’ll show the speed at which you are receiving the file. This brings me to another very cool aspect of Morpheus that didn’t take place in Napster. If there is more than one person with the identical file, and you download it, a “+” appears to the left of the file name within “Traffic”. This means that you are downloading the file from more than one person. The really cool part about this is that it increases the speed at which you download. Let’s say three people all have the same file you want. Two of the guys have 56K modems and one has DSL. Of course, the DSL guy is going to have the fastest connection and the file should download quickly. But, if the 56K people have decent connections, then that’s another 8K per second you get for downloading the file!

Any downfalls? Right now, it only shows 100 files at once so a very general search may not give you a specific song. Also, the screen that lists the results has a lot of info that requires the user to scroll sideways to read it all. This gets annoying, but users can sort the results through many different criteria. It would have been nice, however, to be able to remove one or more of these columns.

Overall, Morpheus not only survived “The Matrix” but also lived through my harsh testing. It finds the tunes you want, the pictures you need, and just about anything else that tickles your fancy. Don’t fret if Napster is gone; here’s another program that will moisten your music palate with many tasty morsels..errrrrr…MP3’s!