RIP audiogalaxy
26 Jun 2002Well, I am a little slow on the uptake, here, but it turns out that audiogalaxy is, in effect, dead.
They have reached a settlement with the RIAA, detailed here. It basically makes any song undownloadable via audiogalaxy without the expressed consent of the artist.
However, on a rather funny note: People are starting to rot13 filenames to bypass the restrictions. Try searching for “ZRgNYYVPN” (“metallica” rot13ed) on audiogalaxy.
I am quite disappointed, though, as audiogalaxy was one of the first instances of P2P sharing that I actually thought was engineered smartly: a web interface for searching and queuing to a small, non-resource-intensive application to do the actual transfers.
Anyone have any suggestions for a suitable (or better?) replacement?
I also found an interesting article on kuro5hin.org written by an ex-employee of audiogalaxy.
Interesting, but no revelations of what is to come (if anything).
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/6/21/171321/675