In the old days, Audiogalaxy was one of the early successful P2P mp3 sharing networks. This was 1998 to 2002. It was groundbreaking because it was, AFAIK, the first one which let you resume an interrupted download from peers other than the one you initiated the download with. The fingerprint used for that was the file's hash, I think, so the filename didn't matter thouth ID3 tags did. In a time where lots of people were still on slow dial-up connections, this was huge.
It had a lot of other convenient features (good, specialised search engine, community features, network effects meaning you could find obscure stuff), but the robust fingerprinting and resuming was the big one. I also seem to remember that it had a very odd interface, where you controlled the app through the browser (I'm hazy on the details.)
Of course it was all quite obviously designed to facilitate copyvios and Audiogalaxy was subsequently killed, sold, repurposed and now resold. I had no idea the brand still existed.
I haven't used Audiogalaxy for years. When I used it around 2001 or 2002, I really liked the fact that you can schedule MP3 to be queued. So I would login into AudioGalaxy and tell it that I want a remake from Elvis, I log off. Comeback to it tomorrow and my requested MP3 would be ready to be downloaded. This was heaven when I was using dial-up.
The split client and web interface gui were awesome. I used to leave the client running at home and would use the web interface to queue downloads while at work which would then download to my home pc.
They also had an ftp server search index where you could find even more obscure stuff.
Funnily enough, I was reminiscing about AudioGalaxy over lunch today. Probably my favourite (or at least most fondly remembered) music download service - I used to love being able to queue up a load of music (and there was loads of really rare stuff on there) and then leave the client running while you were out of the house (in the dial up days - couldn't tie up the home phone line for too long otherwise) and see what it had downloaded for you when you got back in - quite often some little gem you'd queued up months ago and forgotten all about, but the one user with it had finally come back online!
The only place I can think of which a comparable selection of rarities (at least for electronic music) is Soulseek, but AG seemed more reliable, and the split client/web concept was brilliant. I'd pay a decent amount for a legal version of it, if they could somehow get record labels to agree that any file (including white labels, bootlegs etc) could be shared and they'd just get a cut of whatever they could match up to a label/artist. Not holding my breath!
Oh yes, I probably got a third of my ~70GB of MP3's via Audiogalaxy back in the day. I loved that you could see what was available even if there weren't any users who had it that were online. You could queue them up and they would download whenever someone who had them signed on. You could find the most obscure stuff and you would eventually get it. Sometimes I'd even do random things like queuing up all the (non-religious) songs with Jesus in the title. Got some really bizarre songs that way...
I never understood why, but on Audiogalaxy I could find more rare items that the ones available on other P2P networks. I am talking about the first Audiogalaxy (circa 2001).
I definitely remember the web browser interface which I thought was way better than Napster or Kazaa or DC was, from what I remember it would understand what an Artist and Album is and you could browse those instead of mostly raw files/folders like most file sharing programs at the time.
I was really sad to see it go, until Spotify came along it was by far my favorite music consuming program.
It had a lot of other convenient features (good, specialised search engine, community features, network effects meaning you could find obscure stuff), but the robust fingerprinting and resuming was the big one. I also seem to remember that it had a very odd interface, where you controlled the app through the browser (I'm hazy on the details.)
Of course it was all quite obviously designed to facilitate copyvios and Audiogalaxy was subsequently killed, sold, repurposed and now resold. I had no idea the brand still existed.