Shareaza – Even More Free Than Before
Shareaza has long been respected as a high-end multi-network file-sharing client with “no strings attached” in a world where many competing applications display banner ads, beg for money or offer “paid versions”, or worse yet dump a load of unwanted stuff on your PC.
Shareaza has avoided doing these things so far, and today I’m taking a step that will ensure it never falls into those traps in the future.
Shareaza version 2.0 is being released with some cool new features, better performance, and a sleek new theme – but the biggest and most important change is that it’s now offered under the GPL, an open source license.
Developing Shareaza as a closed source product has been a lot of fun – it made some important technical improvements, broke some new ground with an original P2P network, “upped the ante” with many of its competitors and probably contributed to the growing trend away from “heavy spyware bundling”.
After all of this, I now feel like the best way to maximize the value of Shareaza to everyone is to really make it available to everyone – not just as an executable download, but in source form as well. I’ve incorporated a lot of good ideas people have sent in over the years, but I’ve also had to skip a lot of good ideas because they didn’t fit in with the direction Shareaza was going at the time. As an open source product, anyone is free to implement their own ideas and try their own directions – and I think that’s a good thing.
Of course I still have some strong views on which direction Shareaza should be going, and what kind of features I want to add – but now that can be part of a bigger picture, rather than the only picture.
The Shareaza 2.0 codebase is currently available for immediate download below, but its final home will likely be at SourceForge.net. The end-user installer is also available below.
And finally for those who aren’t interested in the whole open source thing, there are also some cool new features and important performance improvements:
* A new, very comprehensive “remote web access” feature allows full remote control of Shareaza’s searches, downloads, uploads and networks from any web browser.
* Helpful new “firewalled” warning message and link to router configuration tips
* Performance improvements on all supported networks
* Some sleek new “2.0” graphics.
Further infomation from the forums, posted by the developer:
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There are a lot of little fixes and improvements scattered around the app, and I can’t remember all of them. Perhaps someone else will be able to.
Just a few things that come to mind:
- There were a bunch of issues with BitTorrent couplings that would cause odd behaviour. Shareaza would try to download when the other client was choking it, which could cause issues.
- Support for “compact” BitTorrent tracker interactions, which save tracker bandwidth by exchanging less info.
- There was a “userhash mismatch” issue with eDonkey2000 downloads/uploads which caused some odd behaviour.
- Firewall detection sucked, its much better now.
- Some of the G2 searching behaviour could get unhealthy, there are better automatic checks there now to avoid “superbroad” queries.
- There is a more efficient “query key caching” scheme now implemented
- A weird bug I discovered just the other day that caused Shareaza to become sluggish and frequently freeze up for half a second or so when doing a search and fairly active downloads and/or uploads at once. This was a conflict between two modules (search stuff and transfer stuff).
Two of the bigger changes that I’m proud of in this release are:
- Virtual files (ID3-less hashing) is enabled. Shareaza introduced support for this a fairly long time ago, but it has been turned off. This release finally turns it on. I hear some other clients are planning to do likewise. Basically this allows an audio file to be downloaded from many sources even if those sources have different metadata (as they have edited tags, etc).
- The “Shareaza Remote Access” feature simply rules. This has been a popular request for a while, so I figured it was worth implementing comprehensively rather than as a quick hack. Basically you enable this in Shareaza Settings, set up a password, and then you can connect to your Shareaza from any web browser (e.g. from work, from school, etc), and pretty much manage everything. You can do searches, manage downloads, uploads, connect/disconnect from all the networks Shareaza supports, download magnets, etc. It’s almost as powerful as actually being in front of the PC.
I also put in a button which links to my new social / community / chat / P2P radio streaming project Mercora. Basically the entire “buddylist” concept which keeps coming up around here. I felt this deserved its own project rather than trying to put everything into Shareaza.
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Release | Source Code
