LimeWire

LimeWire is a Peer-to-Peer sharing app that connects to the Gnutella network. It allows you to download files from other users and share your own to the world.

It can also use the BitTorrent standard to download certain files. LimeWire is widely used for downloading MP3 music from the Internet.

For starters, a good application for downloading music is all about the search results. That is what they say anyway. I wouldn't know. LimeWire does find most of the popular songs playing right now and classics too. I can't figure out the way searching works. Some times you search for a very popular song name or artist and you only get results with 6 P2P users seeding those songs, and some times they go up to 20. LimeWire might only connect to a certain number of clients by default. Still, all the searches I carried out returned a number of people who had those files that was sufficient for me to download at good speeds.

LimeWire has SEVERAL pop-up warnings about how downloading copyrighted material is illegal. And it also asks you repeatedly to purchase the Pro version, which is kind of annoying. For a P2P app, LimeWire has good privacy settings. The most important ones are automatically configured for you via a start-up wizard.

The application has a very nice interface. Every search can be accessed through tabs and you can carry out several searches at once. The search results show good information about the songs and you can set several filters.

All in all, you need to be specific for LimeWire to return good search results. The nice interface and the good privacy settings make it good for downloading music that you own. Also, it automatically adds downloaded songs to iTunes, which you just have got to love.