What is AutoNap?

AutoNap is a (hopefully) fully automatizable Napster/OpenNap client which consequently serves one lone purpose: Getting mp3s!

It is purely written in Perl using Lincoln Stein's MP3::Napster Modul. As for yet, it has a simple but pleasant looking console interface using some ANSI colors and thus not needing any (n)curses stuff. See a screenshot.
Additionally, you might want to look at the manpage of AutoNap.pl.

How to install?

Please, pleeeeeease, read the supplied README* files! It happened now several times that I got messages from people who encountered 'fatal error's (so the error message said) just because they did not run through the install procedure, which goes (briefly) like that:

run
perl ./configure.PL
(perhaps!) have a look at install.sh which has been created by configure.PL
run
./install.sh install to actually copy all needed files to their locations

NEVER JUST RUN AutoNap.PL or perl AutoNap.PL. It is not supposed to work. I made the configure script in order to prevent failures that might occur on certain machines due to a lot of platform dependent paramters.
Therefore: USE IT!!

What can it do?

Well, all the basic things needed to get mp3s.
That is:

Connecting to a given server or metaserver (e.g. server.napster.com:8875), AutoNap can automatically determine a server by retrieving napigator's servers.php, it will try them one after another
searching the server's mp3-db
downloading single or multiple songs at one time, streaming to an mp3-player
sharing MP3s (since 0.5.0)
monitoring downloads and deleting selected ones
history of last 10 searches and browses (commands 'last' and 'blast')
from 0.1.2c up AutoNap automatically detects your vertical screen size to adjust scrolling

What will come next?

Since AutoNap can finally share songs as well all major features (as required and proposed) are done so far. I'll now look out for bugs and elliminate as many as I can geta grip on.

The Todo-list goes as follows:

doing the non-interactive ('robot') mode, this will come in 0.2.0, the next major release (done)
making it possible to run AutoNap as daemon, currently it reads from stdin in interactive modei(done)
bugfixes since I know that it is possible to make a bugfree program!
perhaps implementing the IRC-part of napster (channels, messages etc.)

What does it require to run AutoNap?

a recent Perl (>= 5.6)
Chris Nandor's MP3::Info module
Lincoln Stein's MP3::Napster module (either 2.02 or 2.04, 2.03 is no good, see below)
some up-to-date Term modules (may be included in your Perl-distribution, if not => CPAN)

Additionaly the best thing would be access to high-bandwidth remote machine on which AutoNap would be running. But naturally it'll also do on a local machine.
I haven't yet tested AutoNap on any platform apart from a Debian Linux 2.4 box. Yet it should run (at least) in theorie on all platforms that are supported by Bundle::MP3. Some changes to the code might still be necessary though.

Does it bug?

Probably it does, but never crashed my machine so far. ;-)
There has been a problem with MP3::Napster 2.03 of which Lincol Stein is aware so he immediately released 2.04 a few days after 2.03. If you happen to have 2.03 you have three choices:

upgrading to 2.04 (probably the preferred way)
downgrading to 2.02
commenting out line 161 ('' or croak "select()...."; '') of MP3::Napster::IOEvent

How do I make it run?

See README for details on installing and a rough overview and README-running for a brief description of how to control AutoNap interactively and through the config file.

Can I help?

Very much so indeed!
You'd help by just running AutoNap and submitting bugs or new feature proposals. And in case you're a passionate Perl-hacker you're naturally welcome to join in extending the source.
Anyways, if there's anything you'd like to tell me, send and email to me.

Where to get releases?

You find the repository of all so far released versions here.
More interesting will be the project's _technical_ page where you will usually find news regarding the current state of the development. Besides, you wont get tricked by not knowing which is the most current release. Just get the tarball listed under 'AutoNap-Linux'.