Napigator: An Alternative for Napster

When Napster appeared doomed to extinction due to a court-ordered shutdown this week, throngs of fans of the infamous MP3 file-sharing program frantically jammed its servers, doing their thing in a kind of last-minute, desperate digital swapping spree. Countless others flocked to rival music-trading programs such as Gnutella.

Even as Napster escaped having its wires pulled via a last-minute stay of the injunction, the world of online music fandom must be feeling more than a little jittery. Don't sweat it, Napster fans. When it comes to the Web, it seems there's always a hack around soul-crushing attempts by the Man and Luddites alike to make Webheads pay for their surfing.

Welcome to a little program called Napigator, which will let you download to your heart's content, no matter what happens to Napster. Napigator is a tiny download that acts as a front-end launcher for Napster, and it essentially gives you control over what server you download from.

In this case, the servers are independents that have no affiliation with Napster whatsoever, are faster than Napster's servers, and, because they are-- so far-- not parties to any lawsuits, theoretically free of legal interference.

If you've ever used a launch program for computer games such as Gamespy, Napigator follows the same lines. All the independently run Napster servers (on networks such as OpenNap) show up with their Napster-style statistics like ping time and number of users. You just click on the server you want to join and Napster connects to it. Since Napigator's a separate program, you can bring it up at any time to toggle between servers. This is particularly handy when you're looking for really obscure stuff and can't find it on one server. The switching process is painless and usually much, much faster than logging on to one of Napster's central servers (and a lot more effective than an unplugged, official Napster server).

Napigator claims 30,000 users now; the number will only boom if Napster ever gets unplugged permanently. If word of mouth spreads, the entire Napster community could conceivably migrate to these open servers. Banned college students make up the primary user base for Napigator now, but the list of "banned" users (Napster claims some 20 million subscribers) could explode.

So if you're comfortable with the Napster interface and user experience, and don't want to learn one of the other music file-sharing programs, surf on over here and download Napigator. You'll be glad you did.