[WEB4LIB] Napster - Audio Books

[Jerry Kuntz]

Audrey, et al.
      Your success will vary depending on how many users are currently
connected; as well as to which of the dozens of Napster servers you happen
to connect to at any one moment. I'm connected right now, and can't find any
of those authors, either. Nor do I find the Harry Potter tapes that someone
else had noted last week, although I did see them a few days ago. You may
have already observed that if you do a search, then disconnect, then
reconnect and do the same search, your results will often vary.
     A program called Napigator allows you to select napster servers:
http://www.napigator.com/. Napigator claims their server-targeting software
is fine with Napster, but this past weekend I used it and had to
re-subscribe to Napster...don't know if there was a correlation, but there
you go.
    BTW, another program called wrapster http://notoctavian.tripod.com/
allows non-MP3 files to be shared via the napster protocol by mimicing the
MP3 file validation routines.
OpenNap http://opennap.sourceforge.net/ also has a list of other file
sharing protocols at the bottom of their page.
It's going to take a lot of fingers to plug the holes in this dike. With
audio files, where the output device is a speaker/headphone connection, I'm
not sure any technology will be able to preserve copyright. It remains to be
seen whether text readers are being developed with sufficient encryption to
stop unlicensed sharing (or, more importantly to our interests, allow
licensed sharing!).
Jerry Kuntz
Ramapo Catskill Library System
jkuntz at rcls.org
----- Original Message -----
From: Audrey Kelly <AKelly at lva.lib.va.us>
To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at webjunction.org>
Sent: Monday, July 03, 2000 11:58 AM
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Napster - Audio Books


> Hi all,
> How is it that you are finding audio books on Napster?  This is an actual
> reference question - I was unable to find any of the authors suggested by
> Jerry Kuntz. Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong?
>
> Audrey
>
>