FrostWire Street (Paris, France)

In case you’re curious, the real sign belongs to “Rue Soufflot” near the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, France.
Photo composition sent by an anonymous user in Paris.

Send your fake FrostWire Signage pictures to contact@frostwire.com if this gives you any ideas.

FrostWire 5 BETA Testers wanted – BitTorrent So Easy

Sign up for the beta test

FrostWire 5 (BETA) is a new generation of our file sharing software that does away with the old and broken to adjust to the requests of the user community throughout the years. We need your feedback to make sure the final release will meet all the goals we’re trying to accomplish with this next generation of P2P software.

With FrostWire 5 you can:

  • Get search results without fakes or spam.
  • Get much faster search results with plenty of seeders.
  • Download partial files out of torrents.
  • Playback audio files without any issues (now powered by mplayer)
  • Create and seed torrents.
  • Send files to friends using magnet links (direct integration with Facebook coming soon)
  • Enjoy a new look with new “Substance” skins (more skins available with final release)
  • FrostWire 5 is a safer, faster, cleaner and lighter P2P client. It will feature a few surprises that we hope will reshape the landscape of legal file sharing, free content discovery and a massive expansion of Creative Commons content to the world.

    FrostWire for Android 0.5.1, now with 3G/4G support

    Download FrostWire for Android

    The top request by the FrostWire for Android community was being able to use the application outside a WiFi network, wel the first version with 3G/4G support is finally available.

    This new release brings a few new Features like “Send File To Chat”, you will also notice subtle but useful changes to the User Interface and User Experience.

    After FrostWire 0.5.x, we’ll be dropping support for older Androids still running 1.6. According to our stats only 4% of the network was running 1.6 and this 4% was holding back the rest from some great ideas we had in the beginning on how to use multitouch, gestures and other features of Android +2.1. Other than that we believe Androids running newer versions of the operating system will handle the p2p networking technology a lot better.

    Many more to come during the 0.5.x series, please report all bugs, crashes and give us your feedback on how to make the application better.

    This slideshow requires JavaScript.

    Here’s the full changelog for 0.5.1:

    FrostWire 0.5.0:
    – New Feature: 3G/4G support. Use FrostWire outside your Wi-Fi network.
    – New Feature: Send file(s) to chat. Long press on a file or select many, then send to the chatroom.
    – UI-love: Updated look of Screen Headers. Tabs and Headers have new gradient looks and look well across all devices.
    Better looking buttons on Transfers screen.
    – UI-fix: Updated “Love FrostWire” section. No more donations until we integrate payment system.
    Please rate us 5 stars on the Android Market if you like the app instead.
    – UX-upgrade: Distances to peers now shown in both miles and kilometers (by popular demand)
    – UX-upgrade: Peer Browsing is more frugal in screen real-state. Good for small screens.
    – Drops support for Android 1.6 to favor health of the network with faster/better peers.
    – Bug-fix: Fixes several reported (NPE) crashes.

    Warning
    Make sure you know your carrier rules regarding the use of P2P applications since you might be breaching your carrier contract by using this app in some countries. Also make sure you don’t leave FrostWire for Android running for a long time if you have a limited data transfer plan since you might exceed your plan limits.

    FrostWire condemns Piracy

    Since the FrostWire project started the FrostWire Team and community have worked hard to show the potential of p2p file-sharing as a legitimate and convenient mechanism of content delivery that can level the playing field for content creators all over the world who are willing to share some of their content for free.

    We designed and built FrostWire for Android thinking of how the world should be, before FrostWire for Android the most social device by nature (your phone) was crippled when it came to connecting with people near you, it was a great device for remote interaction (email, phone, web browsing, tweeting, blogging) but not for close range interaction. Now you can connect and share one of the most precious assets in your mobile device with those around you, your files.

    P2P filesharing will evolve as a content distribution model, we think there’s been plenty of schooling about illegal downloading over the world, we want to school the world on what legal file sharing is, specially in regards to music when you have over 8 million bands and singers in sites like myspace willing to share their music and be discovered, p2p is perfect for them.

    We created FrostWire for Android initially for close range file sharing having in mind use cases like:

    • Groups of Friends and family sitting at the dinner table in a restaurant who are usually “texting”, tweeting and being disconnected from what’s in front of them. Now they have another way to interact with the people in front of them, they can exchange pictures, videos of earlier in the day and not be so technologically alienated. No need to have a rain check on that video you recorded of your friends hours earlier in the club, you can exchange the recently recorded memories while you’re having a slice of pizza at 3am on that open Wi-Fi of the pizzeria
    • Conferences and classrooms. Speakers can now share materials with the audience right from the phone, no need to give an URL for later, just grab the presentation, or the video, or the pictures, or the podcast related to the talk from my phone, right now.
    • Parents with smartphones usually have hundreds (if not thousands) of pictures and videos of their kids. You can now easily send in a short amount of time all those pictures and videos to your friends and family, more over, you can now share these files across all the android devices you have at home, think of tablets and tvs.
    • You’re part of an indie band and you want to share a few free tracks with your live audience, whip out your Android and tell the audience to start downloading those demo tracks right now, create buzz around your band after the show is over.
    • You are a shy person, you find yourself in a room full of hundreds of people, there’s an open Wi-Fi network, start FrostWire and see who’s around, the Chat is a great way to break the ice with other shy people around you.
    • Use FrostWire to promote your free Android Apps. FrostWire will only share Apps the user has installed and which are not copy protected (this also gives a level of protection against malware, you can’t just share malicious .apk files unless you have installed them on your own phone/device).
    • Search and Download thousands of Free Apps. You’ll actually see what people has installed on their phones, not some reviews or sketchy numbers on a website.
    • Sending files Wirelessly between your Android devices and PCs. FrostWire is a great way to transfer all the videos and pictures taken with your Smartphone into your computer without any hassle.

    FrostWire Splash Screen Gallery – Vol VI

    FrostWire Splash Screens for 4.21.x

    Credits and more detailed descriptions of these pictures are available on the Flickr Group.

    Submitting your pictures

    If you want your picture to make it to the next FrostWire, join the FrostWire Photo Album Flickr Group and submit your pictures. Here are some tips to get your picture on the FrostWire splash screen:

    • Send us pictures of your FrostWire Stickers or Shirts. Get Free Stickers here, we ship worldwide.
    • The Higher the resolution the better.
    • Horizontal pictures work better for the Splash Screen.
    • Make sure you tell us where in the world you took the picture. If there’s a funny story related to the picture please share that on the description.
    • Tag your pictures. Some suggested “tags” for your pictures are: frostwire, filesharing, p2p, gnutella, bittorrent, frostwire stickers, frostwire.com

    FrostWire Source Package distribution ready – Ubuntu/Debian Sponsors wanted

    Download the source packages

    A new Debian Guideline compliant Source Package is finally ready for Linux repository mantainers to build official FrostWire binaries and finally have FrostWire included as part of your favorite Linux distribution or at least have it available in the repository of your Linux distro.

    With FrostWire 4.21.3 for Linux we have finally achieved complete architecture independence, FrostWire for Linux is a 100% Java GPL application.

    This source package includes every single line of code of every third party library used in FrostWire.

    We will be distributing on every release from now on the following files:

    frostwire_x.y.z.orig.tar.gz (ALL sources, useful for non Debian based linux mantainers)
    frostwire_x.y.z.debian.tar.gz (All Debian specific files required to build the frostwire debian package)
    frostwire_x.y.z.dsc (Debian source control file)

    We are looking for a friendly repository sponsors/maintainers/uploaders that are willing to take the next step of grabbing our source package and building the binaries that could be included in every official package repository of every major Linux distribution.

    Thanks to the #ubuntu-motu folks for their patience and guiding during this process.

    How to build a .deb package on a Debian based distro

    You will need the following packages installed:
    Download the source packages

    ant, libgnome2-dev, libxt-dev, maven2, default-jdk, python, zlib1g, libc6, libgcc1, libacl1-dev, javahelper

    Build like this:

    $ #extract the sources
    $ dpkg-source -x frostwire_x.y.z.dsc
    $ cd frostwire-x.y.z
    #build the package
    $ dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -rsudo

    FrostWire’s source code repository is now Mercurial (Hosted by BitBucket.org)


    The latest source code and development branches of FrostWire have moved from SourceForge.net to BitBucket.org.

    The address of the project’s source code on bitbucket is http://bitbucket.org/frostwire/frostwire.desktop

    For simplicity we just did a new import of the last trunk found in sourceforge.net. This means that the new repository has no history before the initial import. If you need to review hacks done in the past you’ll have to browse the old subversion repository which will remain to exist for as long as sourceforge.net allows.

    We’ll still use sourceforge.net as one of our distribution channels, specially for the new Debian Source Packages (dsc, tar.gz) which are almost ready for showtime, hopefully the Ubuntu mantainers will help us get in their package repositories.

    Props to the Bitbucket.org and Sourceforge.net teams for such great free services.

    FrostWire Splash Screen Gallery – Vol IV

    Credits and more detailed descriptions of these pictures are available on the Flickr Group.

    Submitting your pictures

    If you want your picture to make it to the next FrostWire, join the FrostWire Photo Album Flickr Group and submit your pictures. Here are some tips to get your picture on the FrostWire splash screen:

    • Send us pictures of your FrostWire Stickers or Shirts. Get Free Stickers here, we ship worldwide.
    • The Higher the resolution the better.
    • Horizontal pictures work better for the Splash Screen.
    • Make sure you tell us where in the world you took the picture. If there’s a funny story related to the picture please share that on the description.
    • Tag your pictures. Some suggested “tags” for your pictures are: frostwire, filesharing, p2p, gnutella, bittorrent, frostwire stickers, frostwire.com

    Thanks Kellee Maize & InASHTON for your support

    It’s a dream come true to see new artists embrace p2p and thank us for working together.


    InASHTON signed CD and thank you note

    New artists have grown side by side with p2p technology and they understand that p2p is the new radio.

    Kellee Maize promoted her last album via FrostClick/FrostWire and received over 132,000 downloads (and counting)

    InASHTON more recently had a promotion running and has already done over 82,000 downloads.

    Both artists also sell their music via iTunes and by other channels. P2P has not hurt them, it’s helped expose their music to listeners that would’ve never heard them otherwise had they stuck to the “don’t listen to my music model”


    In fact, Kellee Maize was open minded enough to hear our speech about what Creative Commons can do for her and she licensed her album under Creative Commons. She still selling copies on Amazon and iTunes, Her Creative Commons license gives us the permission to share and even Remix her music, all 100% legally, she keeps the rights to sell her music.

    Way to go, our doors are open to promote any future work you are willing to share with the world.

    Thank you from all your FrostWire fans.

    Download the albums with these Torrent Links – 100% LEGAL
    Kellee Maize: Aligned Archetype
    InASHTON: Red

    Websites
    Kellee Maize
    InASHTON

    FrostWire 2010 T-Shirt Design under Creative Commons

    Download Graphic

    After a long break in t-shirt availability, few weeks ago FrostWire has released a new t-shirt design. The t-shirts are currently available in the FrostWire store and come with 10 extra stickers and free worldwide shipping.

    But that’s not the whole story! With the spirit of open source, sharing and collaboration, the FrostWire team wanted everybody to be able to share the image, print their own T-shirt or do whatever else they would like to do with it, so they licensed it under a Creative Commons license.
    Continue reading “FrostWire 2010 T-Shirt Design under Creative Commons”

    Would you donate part of your p2p bandwidth to proxy Google searches to China?

    It’s come to our attention the situation between China and Google recently. A snappy business developer would probably be on standby to setup several web proxy sites to let Chinese users access Google and make money on advertisement. However, Web Proxies can also be hunted down by Chinese authorities and all of that traffic can easily be blocked as well.

    This made us think that this would be an excellent use of the FrostWire P2P network, a network that virtually can’t be shutdown due to it’s decentralized nature.

    FrostWire users outside China have unrestricted access to Google, FrostWire could implement a “P2P Google Search” to proxy keyword searches coming from China to Google servers and back.

    It would be very hard if not impossible to filter this traffic which could come from nameless ip addresses from all over the world. Even if they would ban frostwire.com in China to avoid the installation of our client in China, Chinese users could still download FrostWire from thousands of mirrors and from the p2p network itself.

    If the Chinese government were to completely ban all DNS requests to all Google domains, would you be willing to donate a part of your FrostWire P2P bandwidth to proxy Google Search Requests?

    Hopefully China and Google will be able to resolve their issues and this won’t be necessary, but options will exist to keep offering a free internet to everybody in the planet.

    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 from which it was originally born. Released under the GNU General Public License, FrostWire is free software.

    FrostWire’s BitTorrent engine is powered by Vuze (Azureus) Technology