Shareaza

June 19, 2004 8:19 PM

Shareaza-- What's wrong with it? There must be a catch. I read about it a week ago, finally got around to researching it tonight, and couldn't find anything insidious about it. So I installed it. I just downloaded a file at over 600 k/s. Did I sign my soul over to the devil in the fine print of the EULA?

I'm not sharing anything likely to get me noticed, I ran spybot and ad-aware and they both came back negative and I'm finding lots of stuff I want at great speeds. Again, what's the catch? I'm too cynical to think that anything works that well right out the gate.
posted by Mayor Curley to computers & internet (8 comments total)

No catch. It's a good open-source P2P app, riding on the ED2K and Gnutella networks.
posted by Jairus at 8:40 PM on June 19, 2004

Catch is: it ain't workin' that great for ME ;)

Looks like a nice client and searches are certainly damn fast. But I'm getting 4k/sec on a file that's listed with 900+ sources.
posted by scarabic at 8:45 PM on June 19, 2004

That's the glory of the ED2K network. It'll take you a week to download anything, but you can find anything that's ever been released anywhere.
posted by Jairus at 8:57 PM on June 19, 2004

It's got something to do with the upload bandwidth you offer it, I think. Because I'm still getting insane speeds. But I've been also been serving up 150k/second.

I thought that it must have been misreporting the speeds, but the growth of the directory it's dumping to seems to jibe. Maybe I'll wake up tomorrow and this will all have been a dream.

Jairus-- I love emule for that reason. Does the credit system work the same way here? (meaning-- will this be just as effective as emule for getting ed2k stuff)? Because getting the less-obscure stuff faster through the other networks while still having an effective donkey client would be AMAZING!
posted by Mayor Curley at 9:04 PM on June 19, 2004

Yeah, that's my understanding as to how it works. I'm not sure about the upload bandwidth, in regards to the Gnutella/G2 networks, but it doesn't matter too much for ED2K, due to the nature of queuing. I spent a month on ED2K downloading You Don't Know Jack 3, many moons ago. All the while, uploading at 30k/s.

Shareaza's one of my Holy Quadrinity of P2P apps. Shareaza, Soulseek, Direct Connect, and Azureus/ABC BitTorrent.
posted by Jairus at 9:12 PM on June 19, 2004

Shareaza feels like it gobbles up all of my system resources. PC runs hella sluggishly whenever Shareaza's on. Anyone else notice this?
posted by armoured-ant at 3:34 AM on June 20, 2004

the reviews on download.com are here. they're at 74% approval rating, which always a good sign.

i've never used it, although it seems to be legit.
posted by triv at 8:50 AM on June 20, 2004

Shareaza is a bunch of networks, not just ED2K. It has original Gnutella on it (what it was first written to connect to). Then, Mike Stokes (the Australian guy who single-handidly programs the thing - how, I don't know), introduced what he called 'Gnutella 2' (and made a lot of enemies in the process - Vinnie Falco of Bearshare threatened to physically assault him over that if he ever met him) - basically, Gnutella with supernodes and the fab Shareaza UI. Later versions brought in EDonkey support, and then Bittorrent support.

As far as I know, you're still better off running eDonkey if you want something from eDonkey, and a Bittorrent client if you want a torrent, though. Haven't used the recent Shareaza, but I hear that it isn't as good with the multi-network support. It really does look wonderful (wins the gui awards for any p2p client) but the tech could still use some tweaking.

It is absolutely legit, though. Source code available from the Shareaza web site with the most recent release.
posted by humuhumu at 2:06 PM on June 20, 2004