Kazaa Lite is kind of spiffy.
FastTrack has a rep for attracting noobs though, and RIAA shares a LOT of crap files on them - enough that I've found, say, bogus Diana Krall (jazz hottie and probably obscure to most people) tracks on them. The rep for no selection is also apt. Even with K++'s autosearch-more, trying to find non-top 40 music is an exercise in futility (my classic example is that I've not been able to find, say, tracks off Miles Davis' "Bitches Brew" album, one of the most influential recordings in the history of jazz. Classical is so completely ignored that it's not even worth discussing).
FastTrack is also useless for movies. There are enough jerks that relabel porno as mainstream stuff, and mainstream stuff of exceedingly low quality that it's right out for that sort of thing.
... and it's tough to find TV shows on FastTrack. There just aren't many of us out there sharing them (I consider the logo and commercial free satellite feed recordings I have of "Buffy" a public service).
Searches are inconsistent - what results you get depend on what supernode you're connected to, and that's something you don't have any control over (though K++ does let you jump to another).
Halfway intelligent FastTrack users turn off the ability to browse your locally shared files. Some turn off sharing completely. This is not wholly a bad thing but it does sort-of violate the spirit of P2P. Doing so might keep you from being sued though.
K++ is good for finding software. Lots of that. Keep your virus scanner handy.
K++ is also - and I'm saying this truthfully - good for porn. I suspect most of the services are. This is an area I'm not able to explore (I do this stuff at work...), but I've seen enough to know that they do alright in that department. Just like the rest of the internet, an overwhelming percentage of the traffic is devoted to the stuff (I've heard 40%).
Also, I noticed an interesting thing last week. My office's cable provider is Comcast. Literally, two Mondays ago I came into work, did some miscellaneous web stuff and got the usual blistering download speeds (700kb/s or so for a Knoppix ISO). I turned on K++ and that data rate dropped to 15kb/s aggregate, for the whole building (we have 10Mbit service). Off, back up to 650kb/s. On, back to 15kb/s. I verified this several more times throughout the last week.
I'm guessing there's a little traffic shaping going on upstream.
Anyway, what's better than K++?
I got turned onto emule for two reasons. One is the idea of an ed2k:// link embedded in a web page. Saves a lot of hassle in searching. The other is that every file shared on Emule displays a checksum. Lots of interesting things online have verifiable checksums, so it's easier to tell whether you're getting the real deal.
Music is still nonexistant on the eDonkey network, but movies, TV Shows and especially ebooks are more common.
The emule client at sourceforge.net has no adware or spyware. It doesn't have many of the privacy features of K++ but it doesn't seem to need them - the eDonkey network is much more forgiving of things like non-unique user IDs, but also seems to depend on upload/download ratios to determine download speeds. This is not a bad thing.
Yes, believe it or not I get paid to know this stuff
Thanks to Groltz for info on emule.
Hope that helps someone.
