Audiogalaxy is just what its name suggests - an immense volume of audio files. It is part of a class of applications (such as Napster, Gnucleus and Morpheus to name a few) used for sharing files (mostly mp3 audio files) over the Internet.
Here’s how you use it (in a nutshell) - go to the audiogalaxy web site and setup an account. Then download the file agent (satellite) to your computer and install it. Now, to download a song, just go to audiogalaxy and enter the song’s name in the search box. When the search is complete you’ll see all available matches. There could be more than one song with the same name, plus, each song is available in different levels of encoding/quality - just click on the one you want, and the satellite will download the song to your machine as soon as it is available. I’ve left out quite a few details, but this is a review, not a tutorial.
Of course, any review of audiogalaxy is incomplete without a comparison to Napster! I’d say that they both have some features that rock, which are absent in the other. Specifically, Napster had a feature by which you could browse through a person’s mp3 collection, which is absent in audiogalaxy. This was probably it’s greatest strength - imagine how much fun it is when you come across a person who has a HUGE collection, and has taste similar to yours - you could spend a day downloading songs from that person. But audiogalaxy’s best feature (not present in Napster or any other file sharing application) is that you can set it up on your home PC, and then start to download songs on that same PC even if you are working on a PC somewhere else in the world. This is a really cool feature since you might remember a song out of the blue when you are far away from your home machine - all you need to do is go to the audiogalaxy site, specify your username, and search for your song - from your username, audiogalaxy knows on which computer to download your song.
The best part about using audiogalaxy is that it can find you the rarest of rare songs! In addition to this, it shows you the encoding level of the songs so you can make an educated decision about which one to download. This is really important because the quality of the song varies greatly with encoding level. Without getting too technical you can follow these following guidelines for encoding levels: 128kbit is decent quality, while 192kbit is nearly CD quality.
Further, the satellite doesn’t slow your system down, and if you have a slow net connection, it has a setting to prevent clogging it. All said, audiogalaxy is a great application for building your mp3 collection, but you probably want to think twice before downloading songs from a dial-up connection.
Useful links:
http://www.audiogalaxy.com
The Audiogalaxy site
http://www.download.com
They have a tutorial on using audiogalaxy (and much, much more)