There's a new p2p program available called
COMBack Music Agent with some interesting ideas behind it. In a nutshell it is an intelligent album collection tool designed to scan multiple p2p networks, looking for the album tracks you have asked for and downloading them as they are found. The presently supported networks are OpenNap and Gnutella - the vendor promises also FastTrack (Morpheus+Kazaa+Grokster) 'soon' but I wouldn't hold my breath for that. Anyway, the idea of more intelligent and autonomous content collection (the 'agent') is interesting: it might be a great timesaver in the sometimes arduous job of hunting down complete albums. The program uses
Freedb.org's database to get the track info for albums; it can also read the web pages of
www.allmusic.com to get the same info.
The free version of the program is limited to collect only one album at a time, the full-blown version costs 9.99 USD.
One obvious shortcoming of the program is its apparent ignorance of the desired bitrates which may make it unusable for a quality-conscious collector. Anyway, if any of you has time and motivation to give it a test run I would appreciate hearing your comments. I don't know anything about the company or people behind it but the vendor says there is no spyware in it.
- tg
