Ed Bott: Why I hate Kazaa (and why you should too) Ed Bott is out today with a post titled “Why I hate Kazaa (and why you should to)” where he points to some very interesting internal company documents that are surfacing on Kazaa.
In his post Ed references the fact that in the court documents Sharman’s (who makes Kazaa) CTO Philip Morle himself references the spyware that Kazaa installs on your machine and acknowledges that it can slow a users computer down.
?”We need to be careful with user resources. Most obvious is in the adware we add to their machine upon installation. This software slows down users? machines and can affect other activity such as browsing the Internet (as we have seen with PerfectNav). It is reasonable that we show ads in order to create our free software, but I do not believe it is reasonable to place a user in a position where this free software will also make their machine sluggish. Consider how many people that work for Sharman Networks and its partners that hate installing Kazaa on their machines.?”
Of course we all already know this which is why for those of us that still use Kaaza, we are using Kaaza Lite which strips out much of Kazaa’s pesky little bugs.
Personally I don’t really use even Kaaza Lite anymore. In addition to the spyware/adware the quality of the content on the service just is not predictable. I might get a clean .mp3 track or I might get a bogus dupe file that the RIAA has flooded of a recurring 20-second loop of the song or just static. The metadata is all screwed up typically and it’s just not the way that I want to manage my digital library.
I will make an exception every now and again if I need to go on there to find a rare cover version of a song or a live version or some other type of out of print file that I could not buy even if I wanted to — even then though I keep the app on an entirely different PC than the main ones that I use (my wife’s PC actually, let’s see if she actually reads my blog, I don’t think she does).
Buying a track with DRM appeals even less to me than the screwed up music I get with Kaaza. This is why I still go out and buy my own CDs and rip them myself into crystal clear, properly meta marked, DRM free, high bit rate .mp3 files. In my opinion, this still is the best way to go for the serious music collector.
Matt Goyer also prefers ripping his own CDs over the online services.
Update: It’s nice to see that CNET news read Ed Bott’s blog.