I own a Macintosh, and I’ve been told that that makes me a loser. I believed it until last summer, when I finally discovered Napster’s clone for people like me. It’s called Macster, and I’ve loved life since.

But let’s backtrack. Even before Napster, I rarely paid for music. Instead, I borrowed friends’ cassettes and CDs and copied songs onto blank tapes. I saved money and only listened to the songs I wanted in the order that I wanted them.

However, my taste in music (most genres of pop from about 1953 to the present) limited my discovery of new songs because I relied on the radio. When I heard a song I wanted, I usually struggled to identify it, and then I had to find someone who owned it.

Carrying a printed copy of my musical want list and showing everyone, I found popular titles right away, but endlessly pursued lesser known songs. After three years, for example, I still hadn’t found ELO’s “Fire on High.”
My want list had grown to over 100 songs by the time I could use Napster on my own. It took just a few weeks to find all of them, including “Fire on High,” and my decade-long musical scavenger hunt ended abruptly. I abandoned the radio, which, by this point, played songs I either owned or didn’t like, and used Napster as my new source of discovery.
I began by searching for groups whose music I liked, downloading the songs I didn’t know. I found some good stuff, but my unorganized process still limited what I found.

I needed a plan, and I quickly established one after a friend led me to the website (www.wcbsfm.com) of a popular oldies station in New York City. Among their links, they offered three lists: “Top 500 Songs of All Time,”
“Top 1001 Songs of the Century,” and “101 Top Doo Wop Songs of All-Time.”
Jackpot.

There were roughly 1,300 different songs — many appeared on two or even all three lists — which
I copied and pasted and saved before sifting through them and deleting everything I recognized. You could say I was excited to find over 800 “great” songs I had never heard of.
Using Napster, I spent months downloading and listening to all of them. I learned and had fun and ended up with 208 incredible songs that had previously slipped through the cracks of my musical collection.

The oldies station’s website was the largest of five Napster-related projects I’ve completed in my successful attempt to unearth great music. I used www.amazon.com and the same download-and-listen process to find and bulldoze through every Billboard CD from 1950 through 1995 plus various compilations of doo wop, one-hit wonders, soft rock, psychedelic rock, instrumental rock, and surf music. Elsewhere on the Internet, I found a list of every Beatles song and plowed through those.

Dance music calls for a slightly different and ongoing process because it’s less mainstream.

On Napster, I type “DJ” as my artist search and “dance” or “techno” or “rave” or “trance” as my title search. By not looking for a particular song or artist, I get a lengthy list of random songs, and the feast begins. I’ve listened to hundreds and fallen in love with dozens.

I have my own growing list called “sucky songs,” which now has 1,817 entries. I keep track of, and briefly critique, every song I’ve downloaded that I don’t like so I won’t accidentally download it again.

Napster has nearly doubled my musical wealth. Despite the recent court ruling against Napster, the future looks bright. So they’ve been forced to block tens of thousands of copyrighted songs from being downloaded. It hardly affects me because the stuff I look for is no longer popular and slips through Napster’s filtering system.

In addition, this filter only blocks songs according to their titles; it only blocks artists’ music according to their names. Once you own the song in MP3 format, you can name it whatever you want, and Napster users have been intentionally misspelling their files to avoid the ban.

Let’s say you search for “Come as You Are” by Nirvana. You may not find it right away, but don’t give up. I recently found Nirvana available on Napster under all of the following names: Nirvan, Niravana, Nirvania, Nirvanna, Nirvava, Nirvaina, irvana, irvanaN, Nivana, Nevana, zNirvana, Narvina, Narvana, Nirviana, Nervana, and Nirvona.

I found the song listed 26 different ways including: Come just as you are, Come as you as are, Come As as you Are, Come As We Are, Come as are you, Come as u r, Comeasyouare, Come As You Ares, Come, Come as, Come as yo, Come as tou are, Come as ypu are, Come As 7ou Are, Come As You Ae, Came As You Are, and come as u were.
Good music is still out there — the challenge is to find it.