There’s now a Popcorn Time-like service for illegal music streaming

Last month, news of an upcoming piece of music software began to cause waves in the media. Cleverly marketed as the Popcorn Time for music, Aurous promised to use the BitTorrent network to stream pirated music to the masses, for free. This weekend the first version of the software made it’s debut and on first sight it looks great. The user-interface reminds one of other streaming apps such as Spotify and is free of advertisements. However, after playing with the application for a little while the excitement quickly begins to fade. The first thing that stands out is the limited content library. Many artists and tracks are absent, for example. In addition, the app doesn’t allow users to sort per album, artist, or create playlists. On the technical side there’s an unpleasant surprise as well. For now, Aurous doesn’t use BitTorrent at all, instead it pulls MP3s from external services such as Pleer and VK. Perhaps these issues will eventually be resolved in the future, but overall Aurous fails to impress. The same is true for another player that launched previously, TorrentTunes. The application, which also has a web based player, does use the BitTorrent network and allows people to stream music.