shareaza 1.4 is out
 

http://www.shareaza.com/download/

enhancements:

this is as good as a gnutella-based program is ever gonna get imo.. it certainly beats slow spywarey limewire, buggy incompatible bearshare and overly basic gnucleus/morpheus and xolox.

that said, it's still not especially good.

technically, shareaza has many interesting features but when you try to actually use it for what it was designed for - that's downloading files rather than just looking pretty, it fails just as all other gnutella clients do. even on the insanely popular madonna files i always use for a test (20+ sources each generally) shareaza finds it very difficult to find anyone willing to actually let it download anything. which is all the more annoying considering that any gnutella client i use always has its upload slots filled straight away.

gnutella is what happens when filesharing becomes ip-to-ip instead of peer-to-peer. very few people care about anyone else on the network. they're just out for what they can get.

i know gnutella is very clever and it seems mean to criticise it (it's extremely doubtful that i could do better), but there are just so many protocols out there which scale better, are more personal and actually do what they are supposed to be doing, allowing p2p search and file transfers.

gnutella just isn't ready for day-to-day use (even die-hard xolox fans can't be using it for everything). until more people share and there is some sort of identity system in place, i'll stick with fasttrack, manolito (blubster) and opennap.

thanks for reading my rant - i expect (or at least hope) to be contradicted on the whole thing and hopefully given a more reliable way to use gnutella. well, i can dream...

Re: shareaza 1.4 is out
 

I share on gnutella every once in a while but I never use it as a way to get files; I just distribute with gnutella.

For a while I had Xolox running in systray 24/7 and it worked... ok. I had to keep MemTurbo running as well and there were still a lot of crashes.

I'd still like a gnutella client that can run 24/7 in the systray and not crash but I haven't experienced one yet.

Welcome to the dark side of P2P
 

Human nature & P2P more than make up for strange bedfellows.

Anonimity (read: impunity), copyrighted material for free, & the wait for someone in the minority of suckers that share to leech, leech happily away...

It won't be the RIIA lawsuits, nor the ISP's cease & desist letters that will prevent free P2P from reaching critical mass any time soon.

It'll be this almost embedded human characteristic, the same that broke some of my friends back and most of mine.

Some of them tired of not being able to leech as easily as before, others tired of being leeched to death.

I, for one, uninstalled all but one program, and stopped leaving my comp on all night for others to upload.

This means 14000 less files of NOT mainstream, mostly hard to find prog music, rotated in chunks of 800-1000, to avoid choking on the other side.

Audio Galaxy (god, I'm gonna miss this one) had the best approach: 10 in, 10 out.

You still could cheat, but that required at least a partially able brain, which we all know, easily prevented a good chunk of the P2P population from doing so.

So, if someone catch me over-reading too much into the utopic side of P2P, please, but I mean PLEASE !!! send me a beautifully framed "MINORITY SUCKER" sticker.

It will be dutifully acknowledged.

:dir: :doh:

I agree, Alphabeater. Shareaza looks great and appears simple, but it seems to have real problems downloading anything. Everything is queued or unavailable. Also, it seems to put all kinds of garbage files (e.g. files that you've searched for that look like partially downloaded mp3 files but contain nothing) and weird folders in your output directory. Gnucleus seems to do a lot better as a gnutella client as far as successful downloads and less overall hassle are concerned. Morpheus seems ok, but it is just Gnucleus plus ads. :)

Unfortunately it doesn't matter that Shareaza is an excellent proggie because the Gnutella network just drags it down. The number of ppl on Gnutella has diminished severely lately; by some estimates it's below 160,000.

Like I said before..
 

Not enough people using it: difficulty finding sources. Not enough people sharing: difficulty finding sources.

Leech factor is low (4 me anyways) probably because there's not enough peeps using it :D. Have never had connection problems with it either.

I like the program and have had several successful, fast dl's from it. So it has it's place in my p2p arsenal.

Oh well, diff'nt strokes for diff'nt folks I reckon.

;(

Slyck has published an excellent Shareaza Guide for the latest 1.4.1 version which you can download from here.

- tg ;)