Soulseek is still alive
soulseekqt.net
soulseekqt.net
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.
A ClojureScript rewrite of soulseek.js: https://github.com/jellea/muuuuu
an android client: https://github.com/thylakoid/GoSeek
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.
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.
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.
It would also have paused the video and displayed "buffering" if that were the problem.
> 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?
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!
On Linux, btw, I recommend Nicotine+.
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.
It never went away, it has always been my number one choice for music downloading, whether it's incredibly rare releases, or the most commercial stuff I use for my DJ'ing.
Put simply, there's very little music you can't find on Soulseek, especially when you use the "wish list" function and have the program auto search for you at regular intervals.
What it needs is a layer of trust, but unfortunately that probably means accountability, which is often a no-go for Soulseek users.
Incorrectly named tracks, sure. But not that often, and in any case I use Discogs.com and Musicbrainz Picard to get the titles correct.
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.
Glad this project is still running. Definitely some gems on there.
It's truly an amazing project, and I really hope it will never disappear.