Something is very wrong with downloading music off gnuetella recently. There's been an increasing number of people, myself included, who have tried to download songs only to get one corrupted mp3 after another.

I looked into it and this is what I found:

The hosts "38.118.163.203" and "66.54.74.77" and most likely others are hosts for a large number of songs. They have numerous copies of the same song (varying by bitrate, slight alterations in song title, etc.) but ALL of these copies are corrupt. These hosts are extremely fast (we're talking commercial t-line or better) and the browse function of their library has been disabled.

This is VERY bad for those of us who like to download music and this is why:

If 1 person with a slow connection is sharing a corrupt song, then chances are, very few people will download the corrupt version. However, if a host with huge bandwith is sharing the corrupt song, then everyone trying to download it may get a piece of the corrupt song, thereby corrupting the entire song file.

This could very well be an isolated incident but I find it suspicious that songs from big label artists seem to be corrupted the most. It wouldn't suprised me at all if music companies attempted to corrupt songs on Gnutella to combat piracy.

-Just my paranoid perspective,

beat.