Napster : Assured it's place in history by being the first app to get its shit together and connect lots of people globaly. Pre 2.5 versions were the best because you could resume. Was really annoying if you were on 56k and it's only true plus point was when the servers were linked.
Audiognome : The name makes me sick still to this day....could of been the #1 file sharing application now resides in the 'where are they now file' due to a bunch of fuckwitts and egos. During it's peak period (0.66 - 0.96) was quite simply the best way to find pretty much any mp3...and it resumed. Oh, and it had the minus operator in the search string....which was absolutely essential for wading through the amount of shit that was floating around of opennap at the time.
WinMX : I've downloaded about 4 mp3s from winMX in the 6 + months i've had it...an absolute nightmare for a 56k user. Could be the lovliest program ever....but that doesn't mean shit if you can't download anything with it.
Morp/kaz/etc : Bargain basement file trading, shit rips, viruses, porn, incomplete files, badly named files....the program itself is quite nice i suppose in a shit sort of way...and it does its job quite well...the search limits and shit like that are a pain in the ass and it's next to useless for finding rare stuff.
Abes MP3 Finder : Ugh i used this too...for like 3 days....ghastly little thing.
Scour : Never got connected...never downloaded anything....
gnutella/bearshare/etc : Once again...may be great...but i wouldn't know...i'm on a 56k...and get disconnected every 2 hours...like i have the time to wait for one of their searches to finish.
Direct Connect : Well my mate managed to download me a copy of reason from there so it gets a plus point for that....thats about the only plus point i can make though.
IRC : Never liked IRC for downloading...probably because i get disconnected every 2 hours and then have to get to the back of the queue again.
FTP : Nothing better than saying 'hey you broadband bastard...go and download me these songs, throw them on your FTP and i'll download them later'
Websites : I've found 1 or 2 half decent pre-release/new-release mp3 sites over the years....thats about all i can say...who wants new stuff anyway? it's all shite...
Audiogalaxy : Now that i've downloaded pretty much everything i'd set out for at the beginning of my mp3 journey...i am now finding myself looking for really really obscure shit to finish my collections of certain artists...audiogalaxy has found stuff for me that no other p2p application ever has....the interface is shit, it's full of spyware, logging onto the server can be a pain at peak hours....but all of that is worth it if you can find one person in hungaria who has the limited edition test pressing double groove b side flexi disc dub remix that you are looking for.
all clients are much of a muchness really...the only real motivating fact for anyones preferance of P2P client is 'can i get the shit i want with it?'
now for some people....well you could fucking ask jeeves 'where do i download the new limp 182 feat brittany aguilera mp3?' and get all the hits you'd ever need. But for me it's not always which client has the most users (although thats always nice)...its which client allows me to filter out as many of these 14 year old bastards as possible to get to the stuff i do want. A combination of cddb and audiogalaxy do the trick for me
