Mac OSX 10.8.1: FrostWire is “damaged”??? Not at all, just allow applications downloaded from everywhere.

Users that upgraded to Mac OSX 10.8 or who recently got a new Mac will probably get a nasty message that won’t let them run FrostWire.


If you see that dialog on your Mac, it’s an EVIL LIE. The App is not “damaged”, we’re not sure why Apple would lie in such a way to users instead of just letting them know that this app didn’t come from their “App Store”.

Basically the geniuses at Apple decided to impose a new setting to not let you run software that doesn’t come from their App Store (next thing we know we won’t be able to run software that doesn’t come from the App Store just like on iOS (iPhones/iPads) and people will have to jail break their desktop/laptops…*sigh*)

To solve the issue, on your mac, go to:

System Preferences > Security & Privacy

and tell your Mac to open apps downloaded from everywhere, like you’ve been doing for the last… well since Macs were macs.

Let’s hope Apple won’t start forcing every app out there to be inside their App Store and then impose draconian rules to enter the App Store, this will be the beginning of the end of Mac OSX if it happens, please let users run the software they’ve downloaded on their computers.

Do not download X3 Codec, It’s a Trap!

Some users have reported that there’s a recent trend in fake audio files that say something along the lines of:

“To listen to this file you need the X3 Codec”

First off, you’re already listening to the file with the audio player that you’re using. If you go to the website they tell you, what you’ll end up getting will be a trojan or malicious file.

What to do?

1. Remove the transfer so you don’t seed the malicious file and make sure the files are deleted from your computer.
2. Go to the “Source” (listed in the search result) and report the .torrent as a fake/trojan/malicious file.

The more you guys report malicious files, the easier it is for indexes and search engines to keep everyone safe.

Why there’s no FrostWire for iOS (iPhone, iPod, iPad)

We’d love to be on iOS!

But there are many reasons that impede us creating a port for iOS:

1. Our application is licensed under the GPL, The GPL license is in conflict with the terms of the App Store. Many GPL applications have been pulled out because some organizations denounce them to Apple (just like VLC Player was pulled out)

2. A file sharing application like ours has very little chance of being accepted in the App Store.

3. We’d have to code everything again using Objective-C, this would take a long time to happen, and for the 2 reasons above our little team has preferred to create FrostWire for Android instead (almost the same technology and no issues with the Android market)

We do see the many users that come to our site with iPhones, iPods and iPads, and it sucks we’re hands tied. Maybe we’ll figure out a way to get there.

Easily making available millions of LEGALLY FREE files.

So in 2007 (or was it 2008) we started FrostClick to give it a bit more structure to our mission of leveling the playing field for content creators all over the world.

Meeting hundreds of content creators, downloading and listening to thousands of songs, and a few million legal shares later, our dream of sharing free content on FrostWire has started to take more meaning, and we’re starting to get so much great feedback in regards to our FrostClick/FrostWire project that we know we are on the right path.

In the process, we developed an Android app (which is being re-written for BitTorrent support as I write this), and we learned from scratch as much as we could about BitTorrent to make FrostWire (we think) a BitTorrent client for the rest of us. All of this has built our confidence to embark on a much more ambitious project that we are sure we’ll be able to deliver, but only with your help.

Here we go…

If you put together all the unsigned bands on MySpace, Bandcamp, Jamendo, Free Music Archive (and a huge list of sites we’ve compiled throughout 2011) you end up with millions of singers/bands.

In a world on which media distribution has changed fundamentally thanks to the internet and digital media, culture has quickly changed, as always faster than our legislators. Many content creators of all walks of life are over and over repeating the same thing. We don’t need intermediaries, writers, musicians, film makers, are taking distribution in their hands and handing out content to you for free, so you enjoy it, so you get to know them.
In some cases, they will just give you a taste so you buy the rest, in some cases they will give you the whole thing and leave it up to you to pay, in some cases they even let you sell their content and remix it.

They have realized they gain more by sharing than locking away their content. When you take Big media out of the picture, 50% of distribution costs go away, another 40% fo commission costs go away, therefore sharing makes a hell of a lot of sense, since it’s free promotion. Your content speaks for you, and by being open more business models open up organically to you. Your music can end up in movies, commercials, documentaries; If you become known you’ll make a lot more by wearing a piece of clothing of X brand than selling copies, you can become the channel (if you’re into that).

However, now we face a new challenge, how do we find all of this. Our first step has been to integrate several general purpose bittorrent search engines into FrostWire, and manually researching and listening to your recommendations, which end up every day in the form of 2 or 3 daily posts on FrostClick.com.

Say that there’s only 3 million bands/singers all over the world, and that each one is willing to share under Creative Commons at least 5 songs, that leaves us with at least 15 million songs to discover, that’s about 30 years worth of music we’d have to go through, a humble team like ours just cannot do that, but millions of people could do it in less than a month and help us rate it, review it, share it.

Now add to that all the free content in the form of free software, video games, papers, books, short films, documentaries… the amount of free content available is enormous. Beautiful isn’t it? And to think all these years we’ve been told what to listen to, what to buy, when we could be having so much fun just discovering the magical talents of all of us. Our technological reality now allows for this and we think given our know how in Free Content and Computer Sciences we will show you the way to get to all of this content with jut a few keystrokes.

If you haven’t guessed it by now, yes, we are currently indexing all the free content in the world, and we need your help.

It’s in our plans, that in 2012 you will see another checkbox on the FrostWire search filters that will say “FrostClick”, and which will show you results out of millions of songs, videos, books, and free software we’re currently indexing.

Not only that, we’re also building the next generation of FrostClick.com. We believe tools like crowd-sourcing, machine-learning, social networking, affinity algorithms, we’ll be able to make the discovery process easier for you.

We’ll need to grow our community for these content discovery efforts, we’ll need artists, developers, bloggers, and passionate content creators willing to tell their stories about sharing to make it all happen.

These are our dreams, let’s dream together.

FrostWire goes to China

One of our users traveling through China during this summer has sent us an amazing set of pictures of the free FrostWire Stickers in front of some of the majestic Chinese landmarks.

It’s worth remembering that in 2009 another FrostWire user also sent us pictures from China.

On that note, we’d like to let you know that we are updating the translation of FrostWire’s user interface in chinese, french, dutch, spanish, portuguese, german, italian and other languages, so that not only the FrostWire stickers get to go to China and other countries, but also the software.

Prototype for new FrostWire Sticker

Hi all,

Just wanted to share with you a first prototype of the next generation of FrostWire stickers.

As of FrostWire 5 you have all noticed that the FrostWire logo got a little bit of love on it’s appearance, it’s now a more finished and 3Dish sphere and barbed wire than its previous version and as we’re running out of stickers from our last batch we’re testing out a new FrostWire sticker design.

On the Top the Old sticker, On the bottom the prototype for the new one

We’d like your input on it, our current consensus is:

> Move the “FrostWire.com” a little bit away from the border (more padding)
> Make the “FrostWire.com” text a touch bigger

Let us know what you think of the stickers on the comments section.

Cheers.

Sneak peek at “Alexandria”, FrostWire 5’s new Library

Download the Beta now

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:

Requirements
JDK 1.6.x (or higher, let us know how it works with Java 7)
Apache Ant
Mercurial

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.