Forget KaZaA!! (or: I discovered Soulseek)

... [Edited ... oh, and before responding read Craven's post below first] ...

OK, so those of you who know me a little bit, know that I'm a bit of a music freak, with, at that, a penchant for the more obscure bits of rather divergent genres. And y'all woulda guessed that, in my circumstances, I've been making, eh, optimal use of first Napster, then KaZaA, these last few years. Or KaZaALite, to be precise, cause I dont like all that spyware **** that the official KaZaA unloads on you. I tried a few other P2P programs, BearShare, LimeWire, but wasnt too impressed - I could only find a fraction of what I found through KaZaA. Which makes sense, cause the more users, the more music. Is what I thought. Until just a few days ago, I discovered a new one.

The name is Soulseek. It works mostly the same as KaZaA, few extras. Apart from searching by track/artist, you can add something to your wishlist, and then you get an automatic notification once a user comes online that has it. Its also got a "things i like" function, that, once you've entered a bunch of stuff you like, provides you with tips about things other users have that you might like too. Where a track gets remotely queued in Kazaa when there's too many uploads going on from that user, here you can get a "place in line" and only need to wait. Its got chatrooms per genre, with a tilt towards the more obscure (japanese music, psytrance, polska hip-hop, early reggea, happy hardcore). But who gives a toss about chatrooms - it's the music! And man, I feel like a kid who's got to sneak into a candystore! I have this list of tracks and artists that I'm still looking to find, eh, more info on, but I never ever got more than a "search finished without any result" on 'em with KaZaA - and just typing in a random first one or two, I get literally dozens of matches here for each of them!

Soulseek seems to have a lot fewer users, actually, but they all seem to have thousands, often over a dozen thousand tracks (in KaZaA, I was a heavy user with 1,300 mp3s). It probably helps that the program makes it possible to download entire folders as well as single tracks. How it works is you can share multiple (sub)folders. And just like at Kazaa you've got this "find more from same user" function that noone ever seems to use, here you can rightclick another user's name to browse his files. And if those files happen to be in neat artist-specific folders or something (and they sometimes are, cause these are the kind of people that would have 10,000 mp3s , you just download the entire folder. The users whose folders you'll wanna be browsing are easier to find too, cause the chatrooms have userlists as well, so you can rightclick from there too - and the rooms are by genre, so there you go. And people use it - first day I left myself online, I found a bunch of users each uploading a whole range of tracks of mine. That probably explains why its so easy to find obscure or rare music ... cause 13,000-mp3 sharers are I guess more likely to share some obscure DJ's turntable experiments as well as some major pop diva's ditties than the 130-mp3 sharers on KaZaA, huh?

Anyway - I was enthusiastic, thought I should let you know. Few pointers. Its all illegal I guess, all P2P is, isn't it? (I know **** about any of that). Also, DON'T download anything from http://www.slsk.org. They've let the domain lapse and some German bought it up - if you click download, you'll download some dialer, not the P2P software. (You can tell it's a dud cause the forum, faq etc don't work either). The one you need is at http://www.slsknet.org. Share the love ;-)