Nap is a console napster client written by Kevin Sullivan. It runs on Linux, OpenBSD, and other systems. Current releases of nap, such as 1.5.4, are very stable. They can run for weeks at a time without crashing or user intervention.

Brief History

Nap, writtin by Kevin Sullivan sometime in 1999, was one of the first napster clients besides Shawn Fanning’s original Windows client. It was also the first client that ran on linux. Kevin learned much about the inner workings of the napster protocol by collaborating with Jordan Ritter, who was one of the co-founders of Napster and its Chief Server Architect at the time.

I (Peter Selinger) took over the development of nap in February 2001. First I (Peter Selinger) posted patches, but soon the patches became so long that I (Peter Selinger) started making releases. A lot of features were added, and some existing ones redesigned, to make nap more stable, user-friendly, and reliable. However, the original “look and feel” has been preserved. Probably nap is one of the most robust napster clients for linux today. It has been packaged for a variety of popular platforms, and it is now shipped with some distributions of Debian Linux and OpenBSD.

Since June 2001, Napster Inc. has modified their servers to use a new client authentification scheme, and nap users can no longer connect to Napster Inc.’s servers. Thus, nap is configured to connect to the OpenNap servers by default. The OpenNap system is a network of napster servers that are independently owned (not run by Napster, the company). When starting up, nap will automatically download a list of servers from www.gotnap.com, and it will connect to the first available one.

[ http://nap.sourceforge.net ]

Configuring nap:

If your nap client gives you error message about not getting a server list you connect to server’s manually by typing in nap -r -s <server ip 1> -s <server ip 2> -s <server ip 3 and so on>

-r means reconnect until you get connection (sometimes channels gets full). You can can a list of available server here: http://gotnap.com/servers.txt To read a very detailed howto about nap, help yourself here:
http://nap.sourceforge.net/userguide.html