Music Download Software: Ares Vista For The Win

Music download software has seen an exponential rise in popularity over the last few years. People have found that building up and sharing an extensive catalog of their favorite music tracks is an easy and thoroughly enjoyable hobby. And who can blame them? The price of music CDs is rising, and the phenomenally overpriced online music stores like iTunes don’t seem too eager to reduce prices either. All this for something that many people – including some of the artists, we may add – feel should be completely free in the first place.

Music download software has come a long way in the seven years since it arrived on the home scene. Ares Galaxy was one of the first applications that allowed people to share their music files over the hugely popular Gnutella network. Ares Galaxy was a mixed blessing: in many respects it lacked in many vital areas, but at the same time the original designers made the software freeware, meaning others could take it, improve on the design, and re-release it as their own.

Music download software needs to be easy to use for everyone. This is where Ares Galaxy failed miserably. The software was designed by technical wizards for technical wizards, and if you weren’t part of the clique then you were going to struggle to use it. Almost as soon as Ares Galaxy became freeware, the ‘improved’ versions started appearing, and the rationale behind many was to improve on the ease of use and product support. As is the way with these things, many of these ‘improvements’ were actually several steps back. Some, though, were shining examples of how Ares Galaxy should have been designed.

Music download software has moved quickly since then: the opening up of the market meant more competition and increasingly better products. Newer software has sought to deal with newer challenges, and the choice for file sharers improves as poorer quality efforts sink, whilst the true winners swim.

Software such as Ares Vista, Ares Ultimate and Ares Ultra have each succeed in setting the bar sky high when it comes to solving the particular problems for which each were designed. In particular Ares Vista’s recent re-launch has seen it being re-engineered to take on board years of user input. The peoples’ file sharing software? Quite possibly, yes. Ares and its many variations have got a long, happy, time ahead of them.

Posted on 12 October 2009 by Lee in General