Lopster, a GTK+ file sharing client using the OpenNap protocol (which was built after the original Napster (which has nothing to do with today's Napster) protocol)
You could download songs in 320kbps mp3 quality, you actually owned the tracks.
You could discover home-made remixes of completely unknown artists, which could happen to be truly amazing, and which then got lost forever after the downfall of the OpenNap servers.
You had an insta-search feature where you typed something in a search box, and the track list actually filtered immediately.
I miss all of this and I would pay so much money (even monthly) if something like that came up again.
Yes, it was illegal, and you have streaming services like Deezer and Spotify today, but try searching for Adele. There's no point if you have to have 2-3 sources to listen to your favourite music. The movie industry is repeating the same fragmentation faults of the music industry. There's still no legal way to stream or download your favourite music and movies.
You have music communities like Soundcloud, but artists need to pay money to make their work public (laughably unaffordable if you're, say, in Romania) and the sheer amount of work went forever extinct, just like what happened to Grooveshark.
You could search your library, and the library would filter your results instantly by the letter you've just typed. This is impossible with today's SPA platforms. Not a single competitor does sub strig filtering, and by the time your AJAX request hits the server, you're already 20ms over the time the results would have been shown in Lopster.
There was a golden time when those Napszter clones were alive, anyone remembering WinMX? I'm delighted Soulseek survived until today, i'll see what's left from the legacy.
You could download songs in 320kbps mp3 quality, you actually owned the tracks.
You could discover home-made remixes of completely unknown artists, which could happen to be truly amazing, and which then got lost forever after the downfall of the OpenNap servers.
You had an insta-search feature where you typed something in a search box, and the track list actually filtered immediately.
I miss all of this and I would pay so much money (even monthly) if something like that came up again.
Yes, it was illegal, and you have streaming services like Deezer and Spotify today, but try searching for Adele. There's no point if you have to have 2-3 sources to listen to your favourite music. The movie industry is repeating the same fragmentation faults of the music industry. There's still no legal way to stream or download your favourite music and movies.
You have music communities like Soundcloud, but artists need to pay money to make their work public (laughably unaffordable if you're, say, in Romania) and the sheer amount of work went forever extinct, just like what happened to Grooveshark.
You could search your library, and the library would filter your results instantly by the letter you've just typed. This is impossible with today's SPA platforms. Not a single competitor does sub strig filtering, and by the time your AJAX request hits the server, you're already 20ms over the time the results would have been shown in Lopster.
There was a golden time when those Napszter clones were alive, anyone remembering WinMX? I'm delighted Soulseek survived until today, i'll see what's left from the legacy.