Given how hard it is to buy music legally online and how frustrating the barriers on streaming services can be, it's no surprise that new clients keep appearing with the goal of becoming the next Popcorn Time for music. Today it's Aurous's turn, and if we can look past its limited catalog and technical details, we find a very striking and interesting client.
That searching for music doesn't become a torture is a relatively simple wish to satisfy if we consider services like YouTube and the free edition of Spotify, but if the user decides to look beyond that border, they will discover that essentially they have no direct option. Limited payment methods, geographic restrictions, incomplete catalogs, lack of support for lossless formats, and a long etcetera make online music a chaotic labyrinth. Worst of all, record labels don't seem to have any interest in fixing the situation, and they settle for reporting things like the increase in vinyl record sales.
Thus we arrive at the user's last option, which is to turn to file-sharing networks. Record labels won't hesitate to call that user a "pirate," but the concept of an "underserved customer" is gaining more and more strength.
Make way for Aurous, a new client inspired by Popcorn Time technology that seeks to turn the process of listening to music into a decentralized structure that doesn't depend on any server. Even if the Aurous page disappears tomorrow (and I imagine that with greater media coverage it will enter the radar of the hawks), downloaded clients should keep working without problems. Aurous has the ability to detect our local catalog and share it automatically, a decision that would certainly help expand its (limited) variety of tracks.
Aurous is taking its first steps, and this is reflected both in the version number and in the client's behavior. It has versions for Windows, OS X (requires an external Java module), and Linux (32 and 64 bits), but lack of stability is order of the day. The first time I ran it on my test machine it worked without a hitch; however, when closing and trying to open its process again, it never came back. A good idea... that needs work and patience.
