Popcorn Time brought online piracy to the Streaming Era of entertainment by offering users a Netflix-like service that allows them to stream pirated movies and television shows to their devices without paying a dime, and now Aurous wants to do the same thing with music. If Popcorn Time is the Netflix for Pirates, then Aurous is the Spotify for Pirates, and it even has a design that’s similar to Spotify and other legal streaming services. The content library is fairly limited at the moment, and Aurous doesn’t use BitTorrent yet, but both of those things will be remedied in the near future.
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.
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