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By Colin Stoner 6/18/01 Ease of Use: Lime Wire is a program that runs on Gnutella servers. For those of you that have used Gnutella before, you may have noticed that they aren’t always online with a lot of searchable users or files. However, with the current Napster situation, programs like Lime Wire that search over the Gnutella network will become very useful. Lime Wire as a program is fairly easy to use and very similar to Napster. It has a couple of cool filter options that will allow people on their slow modems not to be able to eat up your faster college or cable/DSL bandwidth. But overall, Lime Wire is a straightforward program to use and caused me no headaches. |
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Layout/Design: 
One thing comes to mind when I see Lime Wire, Macintosh. It looks a lot like a Mac program or OS would, which is a good thing. The layout is similar to that of Napster, where your menu selections are all at the top, but it’s more funky and aerodynamic. The rotating lime, reminiscent of MS Internet Explorer’s ‘e’ is a nice touch as well. Its color scheme is easy on the eyes with a variation of blue tones throughout the program. I had one question though: Shouldn’t Lime Wire be lime green at least?
Speed of Download:
Being I own a cable modem, I would expect a fast download from anyone running on a DSL or faster connection, but one hindrance is included with Lime Wire, a bandwidth limiter. This can be a pain if it gets into the hands of the wrong people (namely leeches that would rather receive than give, thus killing the purpose of P2P sharing). However, the majority of users out there will have no idea how to access this feature, or even know what to do when they get to that menu. This option could be potentially devastating, if everyone in the world was a total dork like myself.
Overall:
Lime Wire does a very good job of taking a program like Gnutella (original program using the Gnutella network), and making a simple Napster-like program for 50 million potentially available customers. Lime Wire does a great job of getting it’s name out there for MP3 search programs that don’t suck.
Colin Stoner is a regular contributer to MP3 Newswire. Colin is also the editor of Experience-Mp3.com.
Other MP3 Reviews:
Review: Morpheus
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Winamp 3 Preview
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the Archos Jukebox MP3 player
We Test Drive the
Rio Volt MP3/CD player
Review: Sonique
1.90 MP3 Player
We Test Drive
the US Robotics SoundLink
We Test Drive
the Creative Nomad Jukebox
