Unbooting Yourself From Napster

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You may have gotten booted from Napster for sharing songs by any number of artists who provided userlists to Napster, Inc. This includes Metallica, Dr. Dre, Ray Orbison, etc. This page will get you back online, although given Napster's pretty much abandoned state, you might want to consider switching to a network that actually lets you trade files.

The Solution: Uninstall Napster, run de-ban, reinstall Napster, and create a new login. (If you had trouble downloading de-ban, right-click on the link and chose "save target as..", save the file to your desktop, minimize your browser, and double-click the file's icon.)

You will not lose your MP3s - they are not deleted when you uninstall Napster. They will remain in your default Napster music directory. (Start→Find→Files and search for "*.mp3" to see where they went!) You may want to move the files for which you got banned to an unshared directory; it's possible you'll stay banned if you continue to share these files. (Another alternative is renaming the files to include intentional spelling mistakes.)

De-ban comes courtesy Diego of Naphoria. They can be reached using IRC, server irc.ctcp.net:6667, channel #naphoria. Many, many props for this simple solution.

For the extremely paranoid
De-ban is not a virus or a trojan horse -- it's not even a program. It's two registry entries. Here's how to see what it is yourself, because you don't need to believe me. Download de-ban. Right click on de-ban.reg and select "Edit" - Notepad will pop up and display the text of de-ban.reg. (For the super-paranoid: Notepad cannot run programs or scripts.) You will see four lines of text that ask your registry to replace two entries. The first entry overwrites Napster's "secret ID" that they stored on your computer to identify you as an infringer. The second entry erases your Napster username. Now that you see all of what this tiny file does, double-click it to perform these two actions. A .REG file is not a program or a script and cannot accomplish any other function than changing the two registry entries you saw.

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Old versions of napster

Longing for the good old days when you had another, older version of Napster? Try these. You will have to use Napigator to connect to an OpenNap server, though, as the new Napster 2b10 protocol is incompatible with the old clients and the official Napster servers will just ignore you.

• 2.0 beta 1 (may not be genuine)
• 2.0 beta 2
• 2.0 beta 3
• 2.0 beta 4
• 2.0 beta 5
• 2.0 beta 5a
• 2.0 beta 7
• 2.0 beta 8
• 2.0 beta 9
• 2.0 beta 9.6
• 2.0 beta 10 (includes file-sharing prevention mechanisms)

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Alternatives

There are alternatives to Napster, too. Some of them use open standards, so there's more than one client for the network (in the same way that you can use more than one browser to browse the web). So for the gnutella network, there's LimeWire, BearShare, ToadNode, Gnotella, and Newtella. For Freenet, there's also the espra client. For Kazaa, there's Morpheus. There's iMesh, too, and Audio Galaxy has become quite popular in recent days. Mac users have been quite happy with HotLine for trading for years now. Then there's weird stuff like Yaga, Carracho, eDonkey 2000 (don't ask), and a bevy of others to check out.