your net:// It's free, sounds great, but takes forever

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

"Hey boys! Hey girls! Superstar DJs, here we go!"

I nod my head compulsively to the beat of the Chemical Brothers, ignoring occasional sidelong glances from my taxi driver.

The quality of the music emanating from the tiny Sony MP3 player in my shirt pocket belies its minuscule dimensions. It is not much bigger than an oversized cigarette lighter, but at full volume, and with the bass boosted to the maximum two notches, the Memory Stick Walkman blows the dreariness of a rainy Auckland morning away.

The Sony is playing one of about a dozen of my favourite tracks from other people's computers all around the world via the Napster website, all provided willingly and at zero cost to myself.

Transferring them to a Memory Stick, a plastic-encased chip roughly the size of a piece of chewing-gum, I have created an album that reflects my personal choice of music for today. Tomorrow, I could easily load a completely different set of songs.

Once the Memory Stick has been plugged into the Sony player, I can select any track at the flick of a button.

But there are drawbacks.

The unfortunate reality is that many New Zealand-based MP3 enthusiasts using ordinary dial-up connections are likely to spend as much time watching files download as they do listening to music.

Theoretically, the download speed achievable on a dial-up connection using an ordinary modem is about 4-5Kb per second, which should mean an average-sized MP3 file at 3Mb downloads in about 10 minutes.

In practice, using Napster, I regard a download speed of just 1Kb per second as good, and I have lost count of the times I've watched despairingly as the transfer rate has dipped to less than a tenth of that, below 100 bytes a second.

A single song may therefore take several hours or even all night to complete its transfer.

At any time this process may be stopped if the person at the other end decides to cancel the transfer, or there is some mysterious fault on the network, or you are disconnected by your internet provider for "excessive" use.

And there is a legal problem too.

On a good night there can be up to a million songs, or about 4000 gigabytes (4 terabytes), of digital music up for grabs through Napster.

All right, you might justify downloading a track that you haven't heard in years on the grounds that you once bought the CD but lost it when you moved house, but this argument would probably not stand up in a court of law.

Also, Napster usually makes your MP3 collection available to others automatically. You can be downloading away when suddenly you notice with a thrill that someone is downloading from you.

It is actually quite flattering until you realise that in that instant you may have unwittingly graduated from the relatively minor offence of being in possession of illegally copied music to becoming a supplier.

The record company lawyers will probably demand 20 years to life.