By now everyone who has ever used a computer surely knows about Peer to Peer file sharing and the controversy it has stirred up since the days when Napster rocked the music industry. Although it's still illegal and you run the risk of being taken to court if you're caught with substantial copyrighted material, there are still plenty of file sharing networks and clients you can use to obtain free music, video and files like FrostWire.

What is special about aMule?

Using the eDonkey network, aMule stands out from most of its rival P2P clients because it is open source. This frees you from pesky spyware and adware, leaving you able to get on with your downloading in peace. In addition, aMule doesn't rely on one central server like many older clients. By using a multitude of different servers, the network is virtually impossible to shut down and is consequently very secure.

aMule is simple to use. This doesn't mean it lacks depth though, and aMule's features are some of the most advanced to be seen in a P2P client. For example, you can view all kinds of information on machines you're downloading from, call up charts outlining downloading stats and check download status through aMule's advanced progress bar.

What are the results like?

Since aMule uses a large network of servers its search results are pretty vast. There's one major annoyance that can come up with aMule though: it's very slow at downloading files. This is largely because of the way aMule handles download priority, which looks at the number of servers you're connected to, the connection speed and the size of the file.

aMule also relies heavily on a credit scoring system, where people who use the service a lot are rewarded with faster downloads. While some may champion this as being in the true spirit of file sharing, the system makes it frustrating for new users who get penalized with ultra slow downloads.

Still, with its simple interface and loads of features, it's not difficult to see why aMule has become a very popular P2P app.

Download aMule 2.2.6 in Softonic

At first glance, Poisoned may look like your average file sharing application. However, unlike more well known ones such as Limewire, which only allow you to connect to one file sharing network, Poisoned allows you to connect to several seamlessly.

Poisoned is very much a community-driven project and developers are welcome to improve and adapt it as they see fit. Poisoned connects to several networks, including FastTrack (Kazaa, Grokster, iMesh), Gnutella (Limewire, Acquisition), and OpenFT. This is all made possible by what's known as the giFT daemon who are the same people behind the OpenFT network. OpenNapster and eDonkey are other networks which have been recently added.

Poisoned supports multiple source downloads, so your files will download quickly and painlessly. I also like the way that Poisoned offers integration with iTunes by automatically importing music as it downloads. That is, however, if you can get it to download anything of course. Unfortunately, the death of many major file sharing networks means that Poisoned has died with it.

As the developer points out, "Kazaa and Fasttrack are gone. Ares is dying and almost dead now. Gnutella is the only network that seems to work. There is a program called Sandvine right now used by ISPs to terminate unencrypted network traffic from Peer-to-peer applications. Any network not encrypted will basically be rendered useless with most of the network filled with half transfered files." Because Poisoned relies on giFT, it is not encrypted and therefore affected by these problems. The good news is though, that the developer has promised to dump giFT and find another network instead.

When it works, Poisoned is widely praised by users for its ability to connect to several networks. However, the death of many of these networks has effectively sealed the death of Poisoned too, until the developer finds a way around this problem.

Download Poisoned 0.5191 in Softonic

When the Overnet and eDonkey2000 networks were still around, they were probably the best sources to find any sort of video, music, games or photos on the net.

However, as of late 2006, both have been shut down as a result of legal actions. Essentially, as with many other peer to peer networks, they were accused of sharing and distributing illegal material on the internet.

Going to the overnet and eDonkey websites will even bring up a message warning you not to download illegal material.

The application works fine, but suffers from a lot of deficiencies. The interface feels cluttered and confusing, although you can navigate through the different sections via tabs.

If you make any changes in the preferences you'll also have to restart the client to make them take into effect. Furthermore, the eDonkey client uses up a considerable amount of memory, hampering the use of any other applications on your Mac.