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dadder · Jan 1, 2003, 01:25 AM

Alright, this topic has been posted before, but if I know anything about peer to peers, something that was posted a week ago is old news and obsolete.
My question is this: Is there a peer to peer for Mac that is equivelant to PC programs? My father continues to rave about Filetopia and laughs when I show him what we Mac users have at our arsenal. I refuse to be his door mat. Can someone help me 'show up' next time we visit? It's is all in good fun, but is a matter of 'platform pride'.
I've used:
Limewire (buggy)
Acquisition (limited)
Carracho (can't figure this one out)
Where's my Aimster??? Anything else that can reach the networks/servers the PC programs can?

Roxie · Jan 1, 2003, 01:42 AM

Try "Neo" but be prepared to spend a number of hours indexing ahead of time. Once done, however, it's very fast.

dadder · Jan 1, 2003, 01:57 AM

Originally posted by Roxie:
Try "Neo" but be prepared to spend a number of hours indexing ahead of time. Once done, however, it's very fast.

This one looks cool, but I went to the website and it just dawned on me why I haven't tried it yet. When I click to download, it downloads a .php file and my Dreamweaver launches and tries to open it. So then I have no file to work with. Any suggestions or other download sites?

dadder · Jan 1, 2003, 02:06 AM

OK, I just tried monkeying around with it a bit more and tried opening it from within Stuff It Expander and it worked. Thanks so much - I can hardly wait to try it out tomorrow on my day off. Happy New Year!

Isabella · Jan 1, 2003, 06:40 PM

Just one word - Direct Connect - it ROCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

KaZaa can go home now ;-)

But you have to share a folder with at least 5 or maybe 10 Gb of your own files.

Enjoy...

clarkgoble · Jan 1, 2003, 08:49 PM

I just downloaded Direct Connect. It is nice, but basically a chat room where you can download each others files. Unfortunately it is rather poor for looking for music - especially less popular songs. Further most of the files people have are just porn and strange movies. Who cares about that?

There are a few interface quirks as well. THe columns can't be resized, there is no use made of the context menu, and double-clicking is erratic. It reminds me of the old OpenNap networks before people tried being on every network and more or less ground the stuff to a halt. However the nice thing about the old OpenNap networks was going to different chat rooms, hearing about some kind of music and downloading it. I discovered a lot of new genres of music, such as Trip Hop, that way.

xainui · Jan 1, 2003, 10:55 PM

www.zeropaid.com is a good general p2p resource

clarkgoble · Jan 2, 2003, 05:50 AM

I've played around with Direct Connect some more, and it does have promise. There actually were a few "hubs" that had more esoteric Jazz and Blues, for instance.

Here's the problem I found with it. The UI for the Mac version doesn't give you any accurate information regarding your own self. (i.e. slots open, update sharing based upon new files, etc.) It took me a while to even figure out what they *mean* by "slots." Further many hubs are very picky. Not just in how many songs you share. That's not that big a deal and I can respect that. However I was installing some software in the background and the installer closed all my applications. Well that caused two hubs to ban me from being on it.

Likewise while having people and browsing their files seems like a good idea, it quickly runs into the same problem that Limewire and other Gnutella clients have. The people with the songs you want typically are busy. However because Direct Connect can't split queries across multiple clients with the same file, you are out of luck. I typically found that most requests for downloads I made went unanswered for several hours. (I kept it running in the background while I did some work)

Because of this it really doesn't compare for most stuff to Kazaa or some other file sharing clients. I suppose that were you to get in on one of those more "private" (i.e. have 20 gig of movies to share) hubs you'd be better off. I suspect few will be able to do that nor want to use up that much bandwidth. (Many ISPs now have bandwidth caps and extra-billing)

Pretty much to use if you ought to expect that you will have more songs uploaded than you'll likely download. With Kazaa that wasn't a big deal because I notice most people don't D/L the whole song - presumably because of that file splitting.

Peter · Jan 2, 2003, 09:36 AM

Limewire Pro + XNap = any file you want ...

memento · Jan 2, 2003, 03:01 PM

There are really just 2 good decentralized p2p networks:

gnutella and fast track

To access gnutella, you can use limewire, xnap, aquisition, mactella(?) and probably some others

To access fast track (kazaa) you can use neo.

Other good p2p networks are direct connect, carracho and KDX. I list these separately because they all need a centralized server. Learn to use them and you'll be very happy.

I use xnap for music. Set it to connect to 25 or 30 servers. Direct Connect for movies/TV shows. If you can get dcgui to run with xdarwin, it has the features that you feel are missing from the official DC client. (multiple source downloads, searches across all public hubs, etc).

Aimster - what network does that access? I though it was just gnutella ad/or the reverse engineered napster servers. xnap can access both of these.

Don't forget about edonkey2000. It's also available for osx.