Napster; The P2p Model Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3500 words

Napster; The P2p Model - Essay Example Peer to peer software was developed by an American Teenager, Shawn Fanning, through his system for music sharing called Napster. This allows users to swap music directly from one computer to another without the need to go through a central server.(Annonymous, 2000). The system became so popular that Napster had 20 million users in 2000, with the number ever growing. The process of downloading music off the Net was initially a cumbersome process because music files contained too much of data – up to 172 kilobytes of information per second (Westrup 2000). A single AIFF sound file used on audio CDs takes up 8.75 megabytes of storage space for each minute of music, so that even with a 56K high speed modem, an individual song would take at least an hour to be downloaded.(Woodworth, 2004). During the process of making a digital recording, sound waves are changed into the digital format. Since sound travels through the air in waves, it must first be transferred to a transducer in order to convert the sound waves into voltage variations. This further moves to an analog to digitial convertor. The analog voltage is converted into digital bits, each of which is assigned a number with a particular binary value, which are then recompiled within the storage facility of a computer.(Anderton, 1985).