NOTE: Audio Galaxy has since become a victim of the RIAA and has ALL songs blocked from its servers. In the future, I expect a new pay-per-download service being released by the fallen client which probably no-one will use. This has been a sad loss in the file-sharing community...

Audio Galaxy - I'm slightly confused going into writing this review. My friend recommended me to download it awhile ago, and to be honest I haven't really used it much, but this program is promising. It's purposely designed so you can only share MP3 files, and for that reason, it has a good foundation to become an alternative to Napster. On the other hand though, its quite different to Napster. Firstly, its very web-based. You will need to download the program to use AudioGalaxy, however after you have, to search for the files and that, you'll have to use your Internet Browser. This sorta slows down the service. Another thing that slows down the service is the amount of traffic on the site. You see, if there are a lot of MP3 files available, loads of people are gonna want them. Its a sad fact of life.

But anyways, that brings me onto the other positive point of AudioGalaxy - there are a lot of files available. You should be able to happily find quite rare songs on here, if you can't find it anywhere else. Which is cool. And there are a lot of users too. At time of writing this, AudioGalaxy is one of the most popular program being downloaded off the net, second only to Morpheus :).

The actual layout of the program is quite different to Napster, but easy to get to grips with (see screenshot). Because this program is mostly web-based, it is quite user-friendly, so you shouldn't run into any problems. There are no internal players, which is a bit shitty, but it doesn't affect the quality of the program The searches are accurate to your queries, and you should always find the file you are looking for.

The download speeds, I found, were quite slow. This may just be because of the sources I am downloading from, but it maybe because of an overloaded server - to be honest I don't know. But there is the feature of resume-able downloads available, so you should be ok if you get disconnected during your transfer.

Apart from that, there isn't much else to say about this program. I started this review by saying that I was confused when going into writing it, and here's the reason why. As I said, I got this program a while back, and finding files wasn't a problem. However, since then, I searched for a Linkin Park song (you may of noticed that I like them a lot :), and to my dismay, I got the results saying that most of the files were unavailable to download due to them having copyright restrictions (see screenshot - unavailable files are shown with the grey cross). This basically means that most of the files are being blocked out like they were with Napster. And we all know what happened to Napster when they did the same...     

SUMMARY: Its a shame. This was a great program and there were plenty of rare MP3 files that you could have got before they started blocking things out. But, you can fool this blocking system and get the files anyway - you just have to be a little cunning (eg. spell the name of the file slightly wrong, or only type in half of the artists name (just "Linkin", instead of "Linkin Park"). It worked for me :). Anyways, try it out, there's maybe use in this program to get those much needed MP3s.

Pros : Lots of MP3 files available - Large user base - Resumable downloads - Web based interface does look organised and quite decent.

Cons : Blocked files (ARGH!) - Can be slow when busy - Different interface - Web based interface can make searching and browsing slow - Another program that contains Spyware

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