Soulseek is still alive

http://www.soulseekqt.net/news/

by subbz • 12 years ago

73 59 12 years ago

ilitirit• 12 years ago

I still use this. It's useful for stuff like live mixes that disappeared off the face off the internet. There's usually someone out there that has a copy in their mp3 collection.

norswap2• 12 years ago

So are eMule, Kazaa, Limewire (as Frostwire), Gnutella, Freenet, ...

shinratdr• 12 years ago

Frostwire no longer supports Gnutella and is now just a BitTorrent client, so it shares little with LimeWire anymore.

caractacus4• 12 years ago

eMule is suffering greatly and has been for the last few years from the lack of decent central servers. Kad keeps ticking along but this is a network in significant decline.

Kazaa? Not been around for years. Visit their homepage: "We thank you for your interest in Kazaa. However we no longer offer a music service."

Older versions of Limewire still connect to Gnutella but the network is unusable. Full of viruses and malware and very little decent content. One thing the LimeWire devs did manage was to keep the network fairly free of spam.

Frostwire - as someone else mentioned - is now a bittorrent client only and if you want a bittorrent client, you're better off with uTorrent or something else.

Gnutella - see above.

Freenet? Seriously? Yes, it's still there. Yes you may still be able to download a few things on there but it has the same issues it always did. Slow. Poor availability. You have to denote a portion of your own hard drive to store who knows what (but possibly encrypted kiddie porn).

So how do people get music now if they're not using legitimate methods? BitTorrent. MP3 download sites. Stream or rip off YouTube. But over the last two years, the legitimate options have become - for the first time ever - better than the piracy experience. There's stuff on Spotify I've never found on a single piracy site bar Oink and VK and the first of those is dead (though What.cd is a good successor) and the second Russian which means it just doesn't get considered by those in the West.

norswap2• 12 years ago

Sure, those are in poor shape. Is soulseek any better? (This is an honest question I don't know the answer of, not a rethorical device.)

kaivi• 12 years ago

Here is a short tutorial on these: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYrDeC2Hb2I

agumonkey2• 12 years ago

Very very happy to hear this since there was some very very dedicated music lovers with lengthy collections of rare material.

fwr2• 12 years ago

Alive and thriving - there's no better source for lesser known music. It has replaced private music trackers for me completely, since the selection is great and community is much less elitist.

VeejayRampay• 12 years ago

I second that. The community is some of the nicest people around. No douchebags pinching their upload or sharing two files to pretend. Just nice people with varied taste, lots of choice. The software itself looks and feels dated at times, but it really works well, especially for more "niche" music.

st0p• 12 years ago

Whenever I'm looking for something that I can't find through other channels, I fall back to soulseek and it never fails me.

cheeze• 12 years ago

Better source than what.cd? I find that hard to believe.

pcf5• 12 years ago

There are just more people, plus the process of sharing tracks is easier than on what.cd (no need to create torrents and write info), so you will always find more stuff on Soulseek.

fwr2• 12 years ago

Absolutely. I have accounts on both what and waffles and use them once every few months only to avoid get banned for inactivity.

chrisdevereux• 12 years ago

Slightly OT, but I hadn't heard of what.cd until now. Anyone mind sending me an invite? (email's in my profile)

teye• 12 years ago

Wcd's quality (most recordings are posted in multiple formats including FLAC and 320 & v0 mp3) is assured -- the community is serious and self-policing about encoding. Is the same true of Soulseek?

lucasnemeth• 12 years ago

Yes, second that. It's still the best place to find contemporary classical music, for example.

ppadron• 12 years ago

Unfortunately the same thing can't be said about AudioGalaxy.

pit2• 12 years ago

Oh, man. Of course, AudioGalaxy was the greatest. The ability to queue songs up from anywhere and have them waiting for you when you got home! To this day, I think all song files should be in the format "artist - album.mp3"

pit2• 12 years ago

Oh, man. Of course, Audiogalaxy was the greatest. The ability to queue songs up from anywhere and have them waiting for you when you got home! To this day, I think all song files should be in the format "artist - album.mp3"

otisfunkmeyer2• 12 years ago

NO WAY! Artist - Song.mp3 !!! My entire collection is set up like this :)

face_melt• 12 years ago

It still surprises me when I hear this, but then again, I've been a user since the early days. I think the main reason that it's survived is the user community. There are vast treasure troves of (usually) high quality music a query away. I still hit up the chat rooms occasionally for listening suggestions.

If you're not into scouring trackers or music blogs for more "obscure" tastes, or even if you used the program before it was ported to the QT framework, I would recommend you check it out!

mahouse2• 12 years ago

The Qt port suffers from grave quality issues, imo. I still use the old version.

pcf5• 12 years ago

On the Mac it works brilliantly. I don't know about the QT port on PC, but I would assume it has surpassed the old client by now, after all these updates.

hershel• 12 years ago

Is the preservation of rare music is based on what users choose to keep, or is there algorithm keeping stuff in the background ?

KingMob• 12 years ago

It's more the community. Soulseek got a reputation early on for having more obscure/live stuff. It's the place to go download that King Crimson 1969 live set in Bristol...

greenpresident• 12 years ago

Storage is completely decentralized and happens on a per user basis. Content is curated by every user themselves. It's really what makes soulseek so great to me: Once you find a network of people who have a similar taste in music, you can browse their collections or ask them for suggestions.

kubiiii• 12 years ago

This brings back memories. Soulseek was(is) super efficient. I remember directly browsing users HDs and sending message to them to congratulate them on their taste. I'd definitely try it out again.

MichaelTieso• 12 years ago

Big fan of Soulseek here as well. As someone else mentioned, the community is fantastic and the rare track and mixes they have is great.

I find it amazing that the early 2000's boom of Napster, Kazaa, Audiogalaxy, etc are now all gone. I don't know a single person that downloads music illegally but ten years ago that's what everyone did. The rise of iTunes, Songza, Pandora, Last.fm, and so many others is proof of the industry adapting to itself and doing it fantastically well. If only Hollywood would adapt and see it the same way.

eterm• 12 years ago

Of the people I know of who do get music, they treat it more like they treat films. They get albums wholesale through torrents rather than the more haphazard getting of singles that Napster etc involved.

caractacus4• 12 years ago

They're getting there in some places. Netflix is a tad popular in the US, here and there.

Hollywood has two major issues that's aren't faced by the music industry. The first is the theatrical release window: they're tied in to a business model in pretty much every country worldwide where a significant chunk of their revenue comes from a system that relies on limited availability via a single method. This is changing, slowly. The window is shrinking and iTunes is being used to push out online releases prior to the DVD hitting retail. But it's slow and will not go away unless there is some seismic change.

The second issue is international releases. Unlike music, films needs to be dubbed / subbed for releasing in many countries. This means staggered availability for most films worldwide (less so for the massive blockbusters which have resources thrown at them to ensure simultaneous release as much as possible to maximise the return from publicity), staggered retail windows, etc etc. It makes catch-all online release services more difficult to produce.

On top of all that? There are three (verging on two) major record labels worldwide (plus a bunch of indies who often operate quite well together). There are six major film studios in the US, seven if you count Lionsgate, multiple major studios in many individual countries, and persuading all of those to do the same thing at the same time and throw all of their films onto a Netflix-style service in every country worldwide....? I'd rather fight a hundred transformer sized ducks.

egeozcan• 12 years ago

By the way, I think they should really stop dubbing films. Subtitles are much better as they don't require unnatural sentences for syncing with the video and also the authenticity is preserved.

kristofferR2• 12 years ago

Netflix is horrible even if you disregard all the content and licensing issues.

It's so sad it's almost funny, but I actually subscribed to Netflix purely to watch House of Cards Season 2 - and had to download the pirate rips since Netflix was way too resource intensive and dropping frames like crazy with the HD quality stream.

My laptop, a 2011 Macbook Air, isn't exactly the fastest computer out there, but it can watch 20Mbps+ 1080p x264 files in VLC and MPlayerX without any issues at all. However, Netflix, due to their stupid Silverlight solution couldn't even play 720P quality without stuttering a lot and losing audio/video sync within a few seconds.

It's pretty sad that Popcorn Time, a torrent streaming desktop app built with Node.js(!), with just a couple of weeks of unpaid open source development has become a solution that is both prettier, faster and higher quality than what Netflix has been able to do on the PC with years of development.

res0nat0r• 12 years ago

Big fan of Soulseek here as well. As someone else mentioned, the community is fantastic and the rare track and mixes they have is great.
I don't know a single person that downloads music illegally but ten years ago that's what everyone did.

Soulseek is all legal music now?

viame• 12 years ago

Oh nice, haven't used this in years but will download right now, bring back some memories :')

binaryatrocity• 12 years ago

I have the fondest memories of SoulSeek. I used to spend hours a day searching for rare tracks/albums (was really into obscure metal back then) and tirelessly organizing my library :D

mahmoudimus• 12 years ago

This is awesome. I was just browsing some of my old files and I found a folder called Soulseek with a ton of old DJ mixes that I couldn't find anywhere except there.

Glad this project is still running. Definitely some gems on there.

JonnieCache• 12 years ago

By all accounts it's still full to the brim with incredibly rare records that you can't get anywhere else.

It has the niche for music that doesn't exist as part of any kind of album: unreleased tracks, demos, dubplates and so forth. I guess that's why its napster-style architecture still works. There's a lot of trading that goes on between individual users.

jpswade• 12 years ago

Last I heard of Soulseek it was virus riddled and tracks were incorrectly named.

What it needs is a layer of trust, but unfortunately that probably means accountability, which is often a no-go for Soulseek users.

pcf5• 12 years ago

Viruses? Never happened to me.

Incorrectly named tracks, sure. But not that often, and in any case I use Discogs.com and Musicbrainz Picard to get the titles correct.

agumonkey2• 12 years ago

At the time I used it, it was far ahead of anything I knew.

platz• 12 years ago

Noo, take this post down - we don't want soulseek to get noticed!

svenkatesh• 12 years ago

Yes! Security by obscurity works! Even though we know about it, there's no chance people whose job it is to know about it, know about it! /s

rdn• 12 years ago

Less likely to be litigated out of existence if the user base doesn't grow.

pcf5• 12 years ago

I'm sharing my collection of 52.000 songs on Soulseek, and it has always been my default choice for downloading music in high quality.

It's truly an amazing project, and I really hope it will never disappear.

mxfh• 12 years ago

A Soulseek WebRTC client: https://github.com/jellea/soulseek.js

A ClojureScript rewrite of soulseek.js: https://github.com/jellea/muuuuu

an android client: https://github.com/thylakoid/GoSeek

otisfunkmeyer2• 12 years ago

This brings back so many good memories I can hardly believe it. It brings a very small but very real tear to my eye.

This would be like waking up one day and realizing audiogalaxy was still there. Soulseek was my favorite music transfer program for a couple years there in the early 2000's and then I forgot all about it. I always loved the community aspect of it.

It reminds me of the very very old EFNet IRC days when I was briefly in one of the first MP3 kr3wz lol. #snes #warez5 stand up!

Today is a good day, today is a very fine day.

jpprime• 12 years ago

Soulseek is the biggest thing I miss about Windows. Is there a decent Mac version somewhere?

dubfan• 12 years ago

The linked site is the home for a Qt port which has a Mac version. I can't vouch for its quality, though I'm pretty happy with the Windows version.

devindotcom2• 12 years ago

Google around a little and check the forums - there are a couple versions, none great but they do get you access. I think I use "SoulSeeX"? I'm primarily on Windows so I can't remember exactly.

devindotcom2• 12 years ago

Sure. I've been using it since the early days and it's still excellent.

gmork• 12 years ago

I've been a user since 2003 :)

sushijain• 12 years ago

Wow..blast from the past. Loved this app

Soulseek is still alive

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