Scour.com and its partner application, Scour Exchange (SX) (Download now), are another Web site/application duo that does an excellent job of retrieving the music and files you are looking for. A bit different in approach from the other Napster clones reviewed, Scour takes a more "legit" approach to the file-swapping phenomenon.
Scour.com's home page is filled with all kinds of music, movie trailers, and lists of hot downloads from around the Web. Some of them are clearly advertisements, while other parts are pure entertainment. Dig a little deeper though, and the facade of legitimacy quickly disappears. What lies behind is a wealth of downloadable MP3s from around the globe.
The Scour Exchange program is the prettiest to use in our entire roundup: only five buttons on the navigation bar, each very clear, and only one window displaying all the results. On startup of SX, you are greeted with a page very similar to that of the Web site's home page, although with only a few options. To skip these and go straight to the MP3 search, just select Find Media on the left. When the results are displayed, you can sort by song name, transfer speed, file size, or any of the other detailed information presented.
Next to CuteMX, Scour displays the results of your search the fastest, and the user base is big enough to get a fair sampling of what you are looking for. In fact, in our tests, we had slightly better results using Scour Exchange than several other programs, including Gnutella.
Scour's other notable features include its ability to Hotlist other users (and search just their hard drive) as well as resume downloads, just like CuteMX and iMesh. We look forward to a future onslaught of Scour Exchange clients now that they are releasing the transfer protocol, which is the magic behind the program. The upcoming Linux version will be released under an Open Source license that may cause the user base and availability of Scour to explode.
Scour earns high marks for ease of use, speed of searches, and a push toward legitimizing the MP3 file-sharing controversy.