Category: Announcements

Scheduled Maintenance this week

~ gubatron ~ 2 Comments

If you experience some issues with any of the FrostWire mirrors, or websites starting tomorrow 9/16/2009 at 02:00am EST it’s due to a planned maintenance.

We’ll try our best to minimize the impact of these important updates.

If by 9/18/2009 you still find any errors or missing services online please report them here.

Services that will be affected by the maintenance:

dl.frostwire.com
static.frostwire.com
forum.frostwire.com
doctor.frostwire.com
Gnutella UDP caches – uhc1.frostwire.com
update.frostwire.com
static.frostwire.com
peercommons chat service


Update: The current peercommons chat server will be going down for several weeks (starting sometime next week when the old server dies) until we find a new exclusive machine with enough bandwidth for it. The sysop has been working on a new configuration from scratch so please be patient, the service won’t die for good, we know how important peercommons is for all of you who have been here since the beginning. It’ll just be down until the time is right, but it’ll be back for sure according to our sysop.

The migration of all other services should be complete, we’re monitoring for any hicups. if you find any issues with any of the services mentioned above (or other frostwire related services) please let us know. Thanks for your patience.

Stay tuned for our next FrostWire release, geared towards spam related issues.

Snow Leopard users should download FrostWire 4.18.3

~ gubatron ~ 1 Comment

A bug on 4.18.2 was causing FrostWire on Snow leopard to not go past the “Starting Connection” state.

Please upgrade to FrostWire 4.18.3 and get Turbocharged in a matter of a few seconds.

Version 4.18.3 (August 2009)
- Fixes connectivity issues on Snow Leopard where FrostWire 
would not attempt to open any connections.
- Bug fix on Connection Doctor. It would continue to run even 
though FrostWire was already connected.


Mac OS X version 10.6 “Snow Leopard” is the seventh major release of Mac OS X, Apple’s desktop and server operating system

FrostWire 4.18.1 Released

~ gubatron ~ 12 Comments

A new version of FrostWire 4.18.1 is finally out for Windows, Mac and Linux.

FrostWire 4.18.1

This release focuses in fixing many of the complains received by the community, mostly related to the connectivity and the media player.

FrostWire 4.18.1 updates the “Connection Doctor” strategy and connects to a new network of UHC servers.

It addresses a severe bug on the media player, it will now work around an “Invalid Frame Header” bug on ome mp3 files, all mp3 files should play now.

Mac users will be happy to find a bug related to opening BitTorrent files completly fixed.

Changelog:

Version 4.18.1 (August 2009)
- Updates on the "Connection Doctor" component, to address connection issues. Connects to new network of UHC servers.
- Updates on secondary (after-search) loading logic. Loads secondary overlay on the spot, more room for FrostClick artist promotions.
- Fixes a bug where some mp3 would not play. Volume, Pause and skip are disabled intentionally during workaround.
- Fixes a bug where the media player would loop non-stop without playing all the songs on a playlist once it found an mp3 it could not play
- Fixes a bug on for Mac OSX where FrostWire would only download torrents opened via Finder if it was already running. Torrents now launch FrostWire and start downloading at once.
- Updates video help link to point to YouTube video of how to install FrostWire on Mac. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hakWq8q8CHQ
- Fixes Windows Uninstaller issue where it would leave behind a Start Menu entry

FrostWire 4.18.2 is scheduled to be released sometime during August 2009, it will be an update geared towards minimizing the amount of spam and fake search results, so stay tuned.

Remember to download only from the official website frostwire.com. FrostWire is absolutely free don’t allow anybody to scam you into paying for it.

Download FrostWire 4.18.1

About FrostWire
FrostWire is a peer-to-peer file sharing program for the Gnutella and BitTorrent protocols. FrostWire is written in Java, and is a fork of LimeWire, another popular Gnutella client. Released under the GNU General Public License, FrostWire is free software.

Official website: www.frostwire.com
Free Legal Downloads for FrostWire: www.frostclick.com

New FrostWire 4.18.0

~ gubatron ~ 32 Comments

FrostWire 4.18 Splash screen

FrostWire 4.18.0 is finally out for Windows, Mac and Linux. Among the most important changes are:

  • Fixes Bittorrent Incompatibilities.
  • Mac launcher fixes bug where FrostWire would not allow itself to run on a external disk.
  • Fixes bug on Welcome Screen, now you don’t need to open FrostWire twice to get the latest welcome screen.
  • FrostWire caches the last 2 images shown on the Welcome Screen to save bandwidth from static servers.
  • Tools > Check for Updates. Now FrostWire can check for configuration updates, community messages, new FrostWire releases and welcome screen promotion updates during runtime.
  • The welcome screen can be customized for every language, giving the chance to more content creators to be promoted every week to different audiences that speak their language.
  • The Buttons of the Download Manager have been rearranged to avoid mistakes when trying to resume downloads. The Clear and Cancel Buttons are all the way to the right. Thanks to ‘ssome’ for the suggestion.
  • New Splash Screen.
  • Anti spam filters updated to filter out new keywords used by spammers.
  • New “Buy” icon.
  • The community chat ‘Connect’ button now checks if a nickname has been set and helps the user set a default nickname using an input dialog.
  • When users issue the “/nick” command on the chat, FrostWire will remember the new nickname as the default nickname.

A little more on these updates
Some bugs on the Bittorrent implementation were causing CPU usage to go to 100%, also torrents created with KTorrent presented some incompatibilities that are now fixed. Thanks to FTA for these patches. There’s also some work that exists on the code that will allow FrostWire to let the user download only certain files shared by a torrent. This is useful if you find a torrent with multiple files and you only care about a few of them. Since we need a little more testing for this feature it’s dormant on 4.18.0. FrostWire hackers can play with the code and enable it.

After Unpack200 was introduced for all the FrostWire jars to reduce the installer size we imposed a limitation on the Mac installer that allowed FrostWire to be run (the first time) only from the Applications folder. This limitation is now gone thanks to users that complained when 4.17.2 came out. You can now install FrostWire on your Mac on any folder, including external drives, USB drives, etc.

The integration between FrostClick.com and the FrostWire welcome screen will be far more effective as of 4.18.0. Before 4.18.0 FrostWire users would not see the latest promotion from FrostClick.com downloads until they’d open FrostWire a second time. Now, the minute a promotion is launched from FrostClick, 4.18.0 will be able to display the featured download and independent artists and free content owners will see the benefits of FrostWire/Frostclick free promotions a lot faster. Also, promotions can now be distributed to different languages so FrostWire communities in other countries will also be able to enjoy content in their own language, opening the stage for more artists per month. The images for promotions are now cached on disk, thus giving a much needed bandwidth relief to the Frostclick/FrostWire servers.

A subtle change on the interface has been implemented. Some users complained about the ordering of the buttons on the download manager, it was causing some of the users to get confused and cancel their downloads. Buttons have been re-arranged so that this doesn’t happen. Also the “Buy Item” button has a more visible icon now.

New users not familiar with IRC terminology got lost in the process of setting up a nickname joining the chat community (since they’d skip steps on the setup wizard and not enter a default nickname). Now FrostWire checks if you have set up or not your chat nickname. If you have not, a friendly dialog will let you set your default nickname before Connecting to the Chatroom. No more, Tools > Options … and restarting needed to join the chat for the first time. Also, when you change your nick using the “/nick” irc command, FrostWire will notice the nick change, and save the new nickname as the new default nickname. Next time you open frostwire, you won’t have to issue the “/nick” command again.

Other than these there are a lot of internal updates and new dormant functionality that subversion followers may have noticed in the code base during the winter months. These game changing upgrades are of such importance that we are leaving them for the FrostWire 5.0 series.

Stay tuned for a few 4.18 releases that will deal directly with spam issues, and order your free stickers before they run out, make sure you send us your pictures.

Download FrostWire 4.18.0 From The Official Website

FrostWire shares over 1/2 million free legal downloads via BitTorrent

~ gubatron ~ 1 Comment

At the end of November 2008 the FrostWire and FrostClick team set out on a mission to find talented unsigned and indie artists and labels that were willing to share their music under a Creative Commons license or for some form of free distribution agreement.

We’re proud to announce that today March, 31st 2008, we’ve been able to share over 500,000 copies of free music and video. The amount of data shared so far is well over 47 Terabytes, at absolutely no cost to the content creators. Another plus of this content being shared over FrostWire is that all this content now has thousands of seeds in Gnutella as well, where it’s now available to millions of Gnutella users.

  Name Type Completed Downloads
512,056
1 ESPSIX “Collection of House Music” Music 67,190
2 Back ELement, A Major Minority Music 60,553
3 Ray Sytes, Guyanese Pride Music 49,672
4 Farkus, Thought you should know Music 41,184
5 Cartel, Tha Throwback Music 38,944
6 Matt Pond, The Freeep Music 38,447
7 Sean Fournier, Oh My Music 35,374
8 Brad Sucks, Out of It Music 34,758
9 Mike Falzone, Fun With Honesty Music 32,256
10 Audra Hardt, Superficial Superstar Music 30,447
11 K Sparks and DJ Pajozo, Definition Music 25,754
12 Tiara Wiles, This is Tiara Music 19,724
13 Big Buck Bunny High Definition Short Film/3D Animation 19,088
14 Sagaboy, Evolution Music 13,670
15 Georgia Wonder, Hello Stranger Music 4,995 (*)

If you are an artist or content creator willing to share some of your work for free so that others experiment and get to know your work you should take a look at the requirements to be promoted on FrostClick and FrostWire.

(*) Georgia Wonder’s Torrent file was hosted and tracked by The Pirate Bay, therefore we don’t have the number of completed downloads.
We know it was a very popular torrent the week of the promotion because it was among the top 20 seeded music torrents.
This torrent also was also published to the Mininova tracker where it shows another 9,232 completed downloads as of March 31st, 2009.

Related Posts
FrostWire hits the half-million BT mark by p2pnet
How to Promote your Content on Frostclick/FrostWire
FrostWire P2P Client Starts Artist Promotion by TorrentFreak
Saturday in NY: launch party for the Free Music Archive
Interview with Cory Doctorow, Part 1: Copyfight and Creative Commons
Sean Fournier Blog: Contributing to FrostWire’s Milestone

PeerCommons.net is recovering from battle wounds

~ gubatron ~ 4 Comments

To our loyal chat community and FrostClick.com users.

We’re incredibly apologetic that our content and chat services have been inaccessible since last night due to some creative people attacking our servers all night.

We hope you can be a little patient while we bring the services back.

You can expect downtime for the next hours on:

  • chat.peercommons.net (IRC)
  • frostclick.com (Our legal download directory)
  • tracker.frostwire.com (Our legal torrent tracker)

Tiara Wiles “This is Tiara” (alt. torrent location)
If you wanted to get the Tiara Wiles album (our featured torrent of the week), here’s the torrent file with plenty of seeds.

We’ll be moving FrostClick.com and the tracker to machines far from the IRC server so that this won’t happen again.

We are working as fast as we can to get the issues solved.

PS: And to whoever hacked us, thanks for teaching us more about security, guess we were not paranoid enough and we’ve learned our lesson. And we extend a shaking hand to you, we could use the security knowledge in the team.

Update: FrostClick.com is back online. Still working on chat.peercommons.net

Update 7pm: Peercommons.net is back up. And all the services along with it. Thanks for your patience.

Brad Sucks FrostWire’s Welcome Screen this week

~ gubatron ~ Leave a comment


Download Torrent

Brad Sucks new album “Out of It” is the Frostclick Pick of this week for the FrostWire Welcome Screen. Definitively a must for your portable m3p player.

Brad Sucks according to wikipedia
Brad Turcotte (born November 14, 1976), a member of the one man band Brad Sucks, was among the first musicians to take full advantage of the Free Culture movement for advertising and distribution. He has very successfully used micropatronage to profit from his work without restricting the freedom to share and modify it.

Turcotte opened his website in 2002 with the intention of producing “open source music”. His self-produced single, Brad Sucks One, included the audio source files used to create the finished files, and later he posted these source files to his website along with the MP3s.

Turcotte waives all rights to his songs essentially making them public domain.

You’re in for a treat, Brad Sucks Rocks. If you’re into Twitter, you can follow him.

Thanks to the FrostClick team once again for putting together an awesome torrent, it even includes lyrics to all the songs, and a short voice message from Brad Sucks himself to all the FrostWire users.

Black ELement free album blasts on FrostWire

~ gubatron ~ Leave a comment

Download Torrent
Follow Black ELement on Twitter

I’m truly excited to have the opportunity to introduce Black ELement and its free album A Major Minority to the FrostWire community.

I first had the chance to listen to this album last year and it went straight to my iPod because of Black ELement’s innate energetic talent to rap and to make really good hip hop. It truly stands out from the hundreds of wanna-be-rappers we’ve had to listen to in order to make our FrostWire featured picks every month.

Continue reading “Black ELement free album blasts on FrostWire” →

ESPSIX makes us dance this week on FrostWire

~ gubatron ~ Leave a comment

ESPSIX is an awesome DJ/Composer from Czech Republic that shares his music under Creative Commons. After the FrostClick team showed it to us it was a no brainer to feature ESPSIX on FrostWire, it’s an absolute must to have it on your iPod and we recommend that you download it and share it with your friends with FrostWire.

Update:(Feb/19th/2009)
ESPSIX has broken all FrostWire download records so far, in only 10 days the album has been shared by over 50,000 people, transferring over 4 Terabytes of data on the BitTorrent network alone.

Here’s a special message from ESPSIX himself:

Hi there!
I’m Espsix – a DJ and composer from Czech Republic. I generally create varieties of house music like Discohouse, Funkyhouse, Clubhouse, Electrohouse, but also experiment with nujazz or nufunk. One of my newest nujazz/funk tracks is also included in this Espsix collection.

One of my newest discohouse tracks – “Discore” – is for now only available with this torrent download exclusively from Frostwire.

I started composing about 3 years ago on a simple DJ Software running on Linux. Now I am using FL Studio utilizing free and/or creative commons beats. I am not your typical DJ either – I don’t perform in clubs – I am more of a composer creating house music and giving it away to whomever wants to hear it.

All my music is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, which means it is totally free for you to listen to, share with friends and remix. If create any derivative works, remember to share under the same license and give me credit. If you would like to use it commercially, you have to contact me to licensing details (and no, it is not free if you intend to make money on it!).

You can find more about this Creative Commons license at
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

Did you like this album? You can learn more about Espsix, make a donation, write a review & discover similar albums (and more!) on Jamendo.com – a great site with great free and legal music.

Visit my Jamendo Page at http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/ESPSIX
or my MySpace Page at http://myspace.com/espsix.

Enjoy!

New FrostWire Website Finally Up

~ gubatron ~ 1 Comment

Today a new version of the website is up. The team has been working on this site since November 08 and finally it’s out.

FrostWIre's new Website

The forum has not been skinned to the new look of the site, and it’s been moved to it’s own space on the web server, independent from the site. Our apologies to the forum users and moderators if things are a bit rocky after the upgrades, we’ll hear all your complains and will work to help you get the forum just the way you need it.

We expect a few things to fail here and there, as every website, it’s always a work in progress and we expect your feedback.

Please report whatever problems you expect WITH THE WEBSITE on this post. Suggestions are welcome.

We hope you like it 🙂
FrostWire Team