Morpheus Preview Edition - "It's the version that everyone was waiting for - Morpheus 2.0! Oh...wait...what's this? Preview Edition? What's happened to the old Morpheus that I used to know and love? And what's going on with this complete change in the program? Give me answers or I'll be forced go on a killing spree..." If that sounds like you, then don't fret - I've created an article answering all these questions as to what has happened to the old Morpheus, and what the deal is with this Preview Edition.  [ LINK ]

Ok, read it all? Now lets get on with reviewing the new "Preview Edition" of Morpheus that Music City has so gracefully handed to us amid all the chaos that has been going on in the world of file-sharing.

At first glance, you will notice that the Morpheus Preview Edition is pretty much nothing like the old client. There are 2 sets of tabs, one below the other (see screenshot). This does make the navigation rather confusing, I mean, why put the Transfers and Shared Folders on both sets of tabs? I don't like the fact that they've also added tabs on there that include "Shop" and "Web" - it's just needless clutter that makes navigation around even harder.

As soon as you open the program, Morpheus P.E. attempts to connect you to the Gnutella network. Connection can take a while, and, of course, you do have to wait to get connected before you can search, but it doesn't take too long. What is nice is the fact that there is an advanced tab in which you can check which "nodes" you happened to be connected to. The thing about the servers that Morpheus now connects you to is that its pretty random. Whereas before you connected to the FastTrack network and were always guaranteed at least 450,000 users, now you are connected to around 4 random servers and, looking at the ones I'm connected to now, only 369 users. And that sucks.

The search facility is no way near as good as it was before. It's now pretty standard where you have the simple box and can refine your searches by type by entering your own file extension that you want to view (see screenshot) The refine search option is quite a good alternative to the search by file type - but once again, no substitute to the search facilities on the previous version of Morpheus and KaZaA. There is also no information of the bitrate of the MP3s in the search results or anything either. However, there are advanced search features like searching files with a specific file size or only displaying results from fast servers. And you can perform multiple searches too, which is always handy.

I don't think Morpheus does support multi-source downloading. What happens is, when you try to download a file which more then one node has, the client attempts to connect them and whichever responds first, that's the source that it will attempt to download it from. So, not true multi-source downloading, hence the speeds you receive won't be as good as the speeds on KaZaA (see screenshot). And that's a shame as we all know how important multi-source downloading is in increasing speeds of downloads.

There isn't really much else I can say about this program. The situation that Morpheus found themselves in when they realised they were no longer part of the FaskTrack (or StreamCast) network hit them hard, and they realised that the only way they were going to retain the millions and millions of users they had was to quickly release a client (which they pretty much stole from Gnucleus - go to the link at the top for more on this) for the time being until they've sorted out Morpheus 2.0. But now, no-one can really be looking forward to this new release as Morpheus is now no longer part of the network that made it so great to use and get files from.

SUMMARY: This new version of the client is nothing more then an attempt by Music City to retain as many of the users they had when they were part of the FaskTrack network. And, in actual fact, they probably have succeeded. At the time of writing, the Morpheus Preview Edition is the second most downloaded file-sharing program on the net (only behind KaZaA). But, as for the client, its very average. Navigation around the program is pretty cumbersome, and the search facilities and download speeds aren't that good. If you want to use Morpheus the way it was, and not this version, then I recommend you use KaZaA or Grokster. This program isn't the best Gnutella client available, and therefore, I say look elsewhere.

Pros : Quite a few files available - Multiple Searches - Resumable Downloads - No spyware (Apparently ;)

Cons : This isn't the Morpheus we used to know and love - Dodgy Navigation - Downloads can be slow - There are better Gnutella Clients out there

[ READ COMMENTS ABOUT THIS PROGRAM ]