I was thinking today about how much I hate the RIAA (tough to find tunage as of late, every day it seems like they fuck over a new .torrent site), and then I realized it’s been close to 5 years since the original Napster was shut down by court order.  Five years ago, you could simply download a free application and get pretty much any music of any genre (or pretty much any type of file period, whatever floats your boat man) for free, just queue it up overnight and voila, fresh content whenever you wanted it.  Those guys were friggin’ brilliant man.  I don’t entirely disagree with why Napster was shut down, they did indeed break some copyright laws, but those days were great.  The folder I use for any music I’ve dl’d from the net is still called ‘Napster Files’, I never really got around to changing the name…all of my downloaded tunes ultimately end up somewhere in that folder after I get around to sorting them out.  I guess that's my hommage to those guys.

Then “true” p2p hit the scene, ala Kazaa, iMesh, Xolox, etc…but eventually even those faded out of existence, or were riddled with so much spyware that no one who knew any better wanted to get near them.  Kazaa-lite came next for me, but even that slowly faded until one day about 6 months ago I realized I couldn’t even connect to their network anymore.  I gave K++ a spin for a bit, but the pickin’s were mighty slim, download times were slow, and the app itself was pretty much worthless.  My library remained pretty stagnant for a while after that until I finally jumped on the whole .torrent thingie just a couple of months ago.  I don’t know why it took me so long to finally get around to poking around the .torrent scene, perhaps I figured it was just another p2p fad (and if the RIAA has it’s way, it very well could be, for music at least) but so far it’s been great.  Where I’m seriously lacking is some good .torrent sites to snag stuff from.  I recently stumbled across isohunt, I’ve had some pretty good luck finding obscure electronica that I can’t find anywhere else there.  Where are some more good music .torrent sites?  Also, what is the “killer” .torrent client du jour?  I’m currently using BitComet (I dig it for the most part, though the built in browser is dismal at best); if there’s another client out there with some sort of killer feature, clue me in man.

The Napster guys really did invent this entire realm of the net, and for that I am eternally grateful…so wherever you guys are, thanks.

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