Brewing on the underground European scene for some time now, Aucan are finally gearing up to make themselves heard. This trio has shared the stage with some of the several notable performers like Placebo, Tricky, Steve Aoki, Antipop, Dinosaur Jr. and so much more. They’ve even played more than 300 gigs in various venues all across Europe.
Mixing ambient dubstep with some generous helping of electronic triphop; Aucan is one of those bands that capture your attention from the moment you take a listen.
Black Rainbow is the third release from the group and features a more refined yet still very catchy hypnotic electronic dub.
Their previous releases include DNA EP (2010) which was a bit more darker compared to their first self-titled release. In Black Rainbow, the boys go deeper into electronica while infusing hip hop and trippy dub into the mix.
Opening track, Blurred (Extended Version,) features the hauntingly sweet voiced singer, Angela Kinczly. As opening track, it can be a bit misleading for fans who expect the rest of the compilation to exude a Sneaker Pimps/Portishead electronic pop after hearing this first cut. The rest of the compilation is actually much heavier and lean more on ambient dub with a rock alternative edge. If anything, the first 2 or 3 songs are the closest you’ll find electronic pop in the record, the rest is pure rocking, bass-thumping goodness.
Cuts like Storm and Embarque take you into a deeper, experimental route. These two songs also stand on opposite sides of the poles. Storm features heavy bass and a synth trippy beat while Embarque, is exclusively composed of melodic acoustic, low key stringed instruments. Both of the songs have their own feel and the clever mix of instruments, various bits as well as beats are quite easy to get lost in.
Although the entire album is a haven of pure triphop, electronica (even melodic) pop, it’s the wonderful and dark corners of the record that seals the deal for me. Away! is among my favorite tracks. When I first heard it, I immediately thought of Asian Dub Foundation during their Fortress Europe rein, only to find out in the liner notes that they indeed have a former member of ADF, Spex MC, help them out with the cut.
Overall, this is one album that’s definitely made its way to my favorites list this year. It has a little something to satisfy different music lovers’ taste, from a pop, hip hop to pure electronica and dub; Black Rainbow is certainly a record that deserves attention. Take a listen.
*UPDATE*: We’ve just found out from users that Fake FrostWire Apps were on the Android market, maybe this is the reason why our app got suspended.
Once again, we’d really love to be able to talk to Google Market to help us solve the situation.
Today we found out our app has been “Suspended!” from the Android market 🙂
We are still able to upload APKs to the Android Market so we suppose that Google has suspended the current version of the app thinking that it’s not compliant with the FTC complaint that’s been all over the news recently.
If you’ve been using the app since before May, you probably noticed the number of files available dropped after the changes we started making around that date and now we hope you understand why the application is not as convenient as it was in the past in regards to easily making your files availables, but this is a very important trade off to safe guard the privacy of the not so tech-saavy users.
We’ll use this hiatus on the Android market to implement major architectural upgrades to our app. We’re currently working on very important things:
1. We are going to release all the code under a GPL license.
2. FrostWire for Android will be a BitTorrent client.
3. FrostWire for Android will have a kick ass media player within.
We hope to be contacted by the Google Android Market at some point, we think that we could somehow “unsuspend” the app from the market since we still have the option to “Upload APK”, we don’t know if they will allow us to update or not, we just hope to receive some form of communication from Google to see if the FTC news were the issue, we wish they had at least a communication channel to solve the situation as soon as we have the next version of the app.
We have been hard at work coding for over a year, releasing over 60 builds of the app trying to provide a file sharing solution for well over 1,170,000 Android devices, based on a lot of community feedback and more recently under the microscope of a Federal Government Agency, to have our App suspended without a single written notice or explanation. We really hope our friends at Google Android Market can get back to us soon.
Update: 10 days later, Elemint’s Brain Food has been downloaded over 77,000 times, and going!. Spread the word
Download Album Following the successful release of Poet Tree featured FrostWire and on FrostClick, Elemint is visiting our pages yet again. This time his work comes in the shape of 13 great hip hop tracks ready to tickle even the most refined of musical senses.
Freshly released Brain Food builds up on artist’s earlier albums by introducing a more diverse (and engaging) array of sounds, all while maintaining his carefully crafted lyrics and dynamic vocals that never disappoint. Listening to the LP guarantees the discovery of ‘playlist ready’ favorites so be sure to grab your very own copy today! Continue reading “Elemint’s Brain Food, free ONLY on FrostWire”→
Thanks to your feedback, we added some new features that will allow you to integrate better with the new FrostWire library as well as with iTunes.
Now when a transfer has finished, if it contains any audio files, 2 new options are available on right click:
FrostWire will no longer by default automatically send audio files to iTunes, now you get to do it only if you want, many users were complaining about the default process which was creating duplicate listings inside iTunes, This way you have more control.
You can also send files to iTunes from the Library.
Also, there’s that second option there to add to playlist, straight from your finished download. You’ll be able to add to a new playlist or to append the new audio files to an existing playlist.
There’s a lot more fixes we did for this beta release, here is the full changelog:
frostwire (5.2.2) stable; urgency=high
* Library tables are now cached in memory, searches are done in the cache
speeding up the experience considerably for users with several thousand
files.
* Create or add audio files to a playlist right from the Transfer manager.
* iTunes importing after audio transfers finish turned off by default.
* Completed transfers that contain at least one audio file can be sent
to iTunes from the Transfer manager.
* Audio status component recognizes an Audio Stream, from an Audio file
from an internet stream url. Clicking on it will take you to the
Android Tab if it's an android stream or to the Library otherwise.
* Fixes issues with download mediator refresh.
* Fixes out of memory error.
* Real time UI feedback as audio files are being imported into playlist.
* F5, Cmd+R or Ctrl+R will refresh the current Library table.
-- FrostWire Team Mon, 10 Oct 2011 18:03:10 -0500
frostwire (5.2.1) stable; urgency=high
* Play/Pause player buttons now share the same button depending on state.
* Mac OSX threading bug when importing .m3u playlist to new playlist fixed.
* Pressing space bar pauses/resumes currently played audio.
* Playlist files can be sorted correctly by track number when available.
* FLAC playback support.
* When a playlist has finished importing files, it’s shown to the user.
* Transfer manager remembers the position of its JSplitPane.
* Transfer manager sorts downloads by default based on their creation date.
* Transfer manager has new column “Started On” showing the date the transfer
first started.
* Drag and drop issues on playlist component for Mac OSX fixed.
* Partial download dialog table can adjust column widths, a horizontal
scrollbar will appear if the sum of the columns is wider than the dialog.
* When playing an audio file, if it gets deleted FROM DISK from inside
FrostWire, the audio file will stop playing.
* Files can be dragged to the “Starred” playlist and they will be marked
as starred. If files are dragged from Disk, creating a new playlist
will be offered, and all the elements on the playlist will be starred.
* Files can be deleted from the “Starred” playlist. This will cause the
files to be unstarred on every other playlist where they belong.
* The tables on the library remember the last position of their scrollbars
during the session.
* Double clicking on a playlist name starts editing the playlist name.
* Fixes bug where downloading an individual file in a torrent wouldn’t
be marked in the search results as downloading.
* Fixes a memory leak when importing ID3 tags into a playlist.
* Fixes bug where the duration of an MP3 file wasn’t calculated correctly
by MPlayer, duration is now being calculated with Java library.
* Fixes bug where it would import torrent skipped files to iTunes.
Testing out new waters in their latest EP, Â London native John Purcell from Azoora, has teamed up with the sweet voiced Montreal siren, Graciellita, for this new compilation.
Apart, is the 7th EP released under the band’s name. The record incorporates the resident electronic, trip hop sound of Azoora with the angelic voiced singer’s lovely and fresh vocals.
The next release of FrostWire 5 will feature a completely new Library Tab, one rewritten from scratch to suit your media management needs.
Before and After(click on the image to enlarge)
It features a full blown audio player, with convenient playlist management at every drag and drop or right click you ever need to organize and enjoy your media.
This new Library (code named “Alexandria”) is still under development and test binaries will be distributed in a few days (or hours) to the beta testing group.
However, remember FrostWire is open source and you can build and run it yourself. Here’s how:
If you want to hack FrostWire and send patches you will need a Bitbucket account.
Get the code
With you favorite Mercurial client, clone the official repository
hg clone https://bitbucket.org/frostwire/frostwire.desktop cd frostwire.desktop
Switch to the alexandria branch hg update fw5-alexandria
Build it! ant
Run it
On Windows: cd gui run.bat
On Mac or Linux: ./run
Hack it!
If you want to be part of the development team, the process is very straight forward.
1. Fork the project in BitBucket using your account.
2. Clone your fork locally.
3. Create a branch for your hack/bug-fix/enhancement
4. Code, commit and push to YOUR fork.
5. Send us a Pull request of your branch.
We will check your patch, be clean and explain as much as you can what you did. Do not repeat code and look at the current code to follow our current style.
We heard the confusion and the complains on how FrostWire 5 search results work and we decided to take it up a notch (out of many many to come)
The next series of FrostWire 5.1.x improves the way files are found on the BitTorrent network.
In short 2 things have happened:
1. FrostWire now finds single files that match your searches.
2. FrostWire learns as you use it to deliver instant single file search results (under 100ms on average, but you’ll see a lot of search results appearing under 5ms)
Getting a little more into details:
FrostWire performs a Smart Search upon the most relevant torrent search results that come from BitTorrent search engines, meaning it remembers every file contained by every torrent it scans increasing greatly the chance to find what you are looking for, super fast.
As FrostWire fetches search results from the search engines, it uses these results to crawl the Azureus DHT to learn
about the contents indexed by these torrents. FrostWire will not use the bandwidth of the search engines in this process,
it will only use the torrent info hash to perform DHT queries, meaning, .torrent files are fetched only from the DHT, not from search engine’s web servers, it’s searching powers will not depend from a central entity.
So…
The more you use FrostWire the more it learns about the contents available on the BitTorrent network.
The more you use FrostWire the faster search results will be.
We believe now FrostWire is one of the most powerful information discovery tools ever created, on it’s path to becoming a distributed file search engine. In fact, we’re now fully confident that getting rid of gnutella was the right choice since you will see that the effectiveness of 5.1.x when it comes to search makes Gnutella irrelevant, specially to find and seed rare content. This is the FrostWIre we always dreamed of building and there’s so much more coming.
Other than performance and numerous user experience upgrades that you will probably notice we’ve added a new little search engine by popular demand, TPB.
In the near future we’ll be adding tools to export the Smart Search database, and to import and merge Smart Search databases from other computers.
CHANGELOG
frostwire (5.1.5) stable; urgency=high
* Bug fix on setup wizard for some window configurations where controls
would not appear unless the user resized the window.
* Bug fix on keyword search filter, wrong keyboard event was being used.
* UX adjustement in the way transfers are sorted when the application is
launched.
* UX upgrade where Search Field on the Library now reacts to the DELETE key.
* UX upgrade where the FrostWire left hand side components are laid out
correctly after the user resizes the window from much smaller dimensions.
-- FrostWire Team Fri, 16 Sep 2011 18:1:34 -0500
frostwire (5.1.4) stable; urgency=high
* Bug fix where it would not index torrents when the
file type filter was in use.
* Bug fix when downloading a secondary file from the second torrent
download would not start and would appear as seeding.
* Cleans all empty folders created by a partial download once the download
is removed from the transfer manager.
* Fixes issue with transfer manager resetting the order of columns.
-- FrostWire Team Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:57:38 -0500
frostwire (5.1.3) stable; urgency=high
* Search results now arrive under 200ms, aka, Instant Search.
* New FrostWire "Smart Torrent" search. FrostWire will search inside
top matching torrents for individual files matching the current query.
* Core upgrade, if a .torrent fails to download from its HTTP location
FrostWire will download it from the DHT if it can find it there.
* Functionality to see the size of the Search DB and to reset it.
* UX upgrade, ability to hide/show seeding torrents on transfer manager.
* UX upgrade, Phone & Tablets desktop explorer asks before deleting files.
* UX upgrade, New file "Extension" column on search results.
* UX upgrade, Search tabs now have animated indicator to let user know
a search is still going on.
* UX upgrade, New filter by file type. Filter controls re-arranged.
* UX fix, search results can now be sorted by file type.
* TPB has been added to the list of search engines.
* Mininova is back.
4. New looks and better media support by the music player
Most of these updates and changes were the product of community feedback, long debates and hard decisions made to help shape the future of our file sharing community.
Let’s review each one of these in detail.
Faster, cleaner search results
The number one complaint from our user base was spam. Without much development muscle in our community after LimeWire was shutdown, all of our updates and heuristics were unable to upkeep with the never ending battle against spam. Power users were able to fine-tune their FrostWires with what we had provided, but the mainstream users were falling constant victims of spam and fake search results.
With the landscape of file sharing shifting to BitTorrent we saw the opportunity build up on it’s strengths and to make the BitTorrent experience a lot easier and simpler, one that your mom can handle.
We dropped Gnutella search and replaced it with the curated indexes of major HTTP BitTorrent Search Engines (and we’ll keep adding more with each release). The results are instant search results, and no spam or fakes.
As always, a portion of users might still have to go through a bit of a learning curve transitioning to a BitTorrent only application. First-time BitTorrent users might not initially realize that most torrents contain more than one file, for example, or know that you can selectively download files from a single torrent. We’ve included all sorts of tools to let users filter search results and filter the content inside torrents as well.
FrostWire 5 combines the search results of all of listed engines in one place so you don’t need to leave your FrostWire window and figure out which torrent search engine to use. When you start a download, FrostWire will show you from which webpage the torrent came from, giving the search engine a deserved page view for each download started from FrostWire 5. We hope this will foster more competitiveness in the BitTorrent indexing community and more even better indexed content. As those search engines see what kind of searches are coming in, we believe that they’ll start adjusting their practices to attract more FrostWire users to download their torrents and both, the torrent indexing community and the torrent content consumer, will benefit from FrostWire 5 fully entering the BitTorrent community.
Send large files and folders
We think one of the biggest, most common and at the same time the simplest problems on the Internet is sending large files between computers. If you often work with large files (and files are getting larger and larger as computing gets better, storage cheaper, cameras have better image resolutions for both video and stills) and you need to send them to your clients, friends, coworkers or family, email just may not be an option.
What’s the alternative?
There are many services where you can upload your files for others to download. The problem is, which service do I use? Many of the free file upload sites are simply too difficult or even close to impossible to use because they are overloaded with deceptively placed ads, pop-ups, timeouts and other file size and bandwidth limitations. They also constantly nag you to purchase paid versions, making it extremely frustrating for free users. There are of course paid and enterprise alternatives that do work, but not everybody wants to or simply can pay for the subscription. The services simply cannot allow free accounts because of the high storage and bandwidth costs.
Because FrostWire works on the distributed BitTorrent network, you can literally grab terabytes of data and make them easily available to friends and family right from your computer at no cost. Best of all, the more people you share this data with, the faster they can download. They will collaborate with each other as they download the pieces and pass portions of the files along to others.
You can have your latest and greatest HD Viral Video, in all it’s quality and glory, sent to millions of computers just by sending out a link that FrostWire will create for you in seconds. The receiving parties will need to use FrostWire, and they will be able to pause/resume the download and help you seed the content for others. Yes, you can distribute a file to millions of people, right from your computer. No need to sign up to any service and no need to pay for anything (maybe excluding your Internet connection!) FrostWire 5 allows you not only send a file, but to send entire folders of content. No more limits on file size, type, video duration or quality! You can start a revolution right from your home computer – the possibilities are unlimited!
The process is super simple. All you gotta do is drag and drop the file or folder you want to send onto the FrostWire window, and FrostWire will, under the hood, create and seed a torrent for you. It will then give you the option to Copy the text with a HTTP link or a Magnet link that you can later send to your friends and family. There’s even a Send to Twitter option in case you have something important to share with the world.
Improved BitTorrent Support
We rewrote our BitTorrent integration with Vuze’s core, a powerful, stable and fast BitTorrent core library, from scratch. We also added many features related to BitTorrent that FrostWire 4 didn’t have.
Some of the new features include easy torrent creation (both decentralized torrents and tracker based torrents), sending large files and folders (which, as we have explained is also done on top of BitTorrent, but the technology aspects have been hidden from the user), being able to filter and download individual files from torrents, easy magnet link creation, DHT support and more.
New Looks & Better Media Support
We removed of the old skinning system and integrated a technology called “Substance” that allows us to paint the FrostWire interface however we want. It also adds a nice animation effects to improve the user experience. FrostWire 5 comes with over 25 new substance skins.
We are in the process of designing a beautiful new skin for both our desktop and android products to give you a more uniform experience across the platforms and are planning some major UX updates to Library Tab, but that’s scheduled to come out in the following releases.
We’ve also given our barbed wire sphere a well deserved make over, we hope you like it too.
The FrostWire 5 installer dropped about 50% of it’s size when compared to FrostWire 4, so we decided to use the space we had lost for something very useful and we tackled another part of the software that was not performing up to our standards – the media player.
Library Tab, but that’s scheduled to come out in the following releases.
We’ve also given our barbed wire sphere a well deserved make over, we hope you like it too.
The FrostWire 5 installer dropped about 50% of it’s size when compared to FrostWire 4, so we decided to use the space we had lost for something very useful and we tackled another part of the software that was not performing up to our standards – the media player.
The old media player was a 100% Java MP3 decoder which wasn’t 100% compatible with all mp3 files. We have decided to bring a project on board that knows how to playback all media well, so now FrostWire comes with a binary build of mplayer that supports the most popular audio codecs flawlessly. For now we’ve decided to leave video playback out of the picture to keep the size of the installer to the bare minimum.
The Future
This release of FrostWire 5 is merely a beginning of many ideas that can and will happen on top of the BitTorrent network. We believe that BitTorrent is a great technology that is being majorly underutilized. In time, we’ll show you what we mean, just stay tuned.
Official FrostWire Blog 