This is an excellent facility. You can call it a second generation Napster or better still the Napster of all trades. You can use this to download audio, video, images, software and documents that other Imesh users want to share with you when they are online.
In this too you have an excellent facility to search out what you want and others want to share. You can select what you want others to download from you and what they should not in the options. You can say search Britney Spears and select Audio. You will get all her songs. If you select All then you will get her videos, pictures and any other thing which any user has and wants to share with you.
Like in Napster you can maintain some contacts or friends from whom you have had a good downloading experience. You can directly see all the files that these people have got and you can download them IF THEY ARE ONLINE AND Imesh IS RUNNING. So you can see it is better than Napster for its versatility. Another Area of excellence in this software is the RESUME facility which is not available in Napster. This means that if you are disconnected at 55% then you can resume it next time and what’s more it does not have to be the same person from whom you initially downloaded. You can resume from anybody.
Napster can download only MP3 format audio files. Whereas Imesh can download all formats like MP3, WMA and Real Jukebox recorded files.
Truly Napster is the master of one art whereas Imesh is the Jack of all trades. Being that though has its disadvantages. They are:
1) Erratic connections. You can be disconnected any time. If you try to use the connect option you get Server is busy try after some time signal which puts us back in the days when we were at the mercy of MTNL. ( Oops we still are!! ). All you can do is shut the program and start it again. On a bad day this happens a couple of times and you have one pissed off person.
2) There is no control over the time it may take to download. I mean there is no parameter by which we can estimate the download time. Napster users will have heard of the PING rate. The smaller the PING rates the lesser amount of time required. There is no facility as such. Only some worms are shown which indicate what type of connection the other person has. Of course the file size is displayed.
3) Napster has an inbuilt audio which plays all the MP3 files. There is no such facility. Your default viewer will be used in all cases.
4) Unlike Napster it does not have chat rooms but only instant chat facility.
All said and done this facility is great for a nuclear family which has a son or daughter in another part of the world. You can share pictures, songs and letters even. All you have to do is be online at the same time.