FrostWire’s “Buy” button more effective each day

~ gubatron ~ Leave a comment

A couple of week’s ago the music industry was a different place. If you did a search on FrostWire for “Metallica”, and you clicked on the “Buy” button, you’d only find versions by other bands of Metallica’s songs available for purchase.

If you try it now, you can legally purchase the entire rooster of Metallica’s songs via the FrostWire’s Buy button after you do a search for Metallica. Songs cost between $0.89 and $0.99 and they come in high quality MP3 format, no DRM!!!!

This is because finally the big record labels decided to drop DRM (you can now play the music you buy on any device, it’s not protected against copying/playing in anyway) and put their music for sale on the AmazonMp3 music store, which is the system FrostWire uses to help artists sell their music and you the user to find the best quality music 100% legally.

Finally the Music Industry started opening their eyes.

Sony BMG Plans to Drop DRM

~ gubatron ~ 2 Comments

We are starting the year with one of the best news for the FrostWire Community. At the end of 2007, Warner Music Group announced that they’d be selling DRM-free songs, we didn’t know that Sony BMG would act so fast upon this, we’re glad this happened.

According to BusinessWeek:

Sony BMG would become the last of the top four music labels to drop DRM, following Warner Music Group (WMG), which in late December said it would sell DRM-free songs through Amazon.com’s (AMZN) digital music store. EMI and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group announced their plans for DRM-free downloads earlier in 2007.

Why is this great news for the FrostWire community?

The acceptance of DRM as a failure by the big 4 helps legitimize FrostWire, since FrostWire features a “Buy” button which enables all FrostWire users to purchase DRM-Free music from the Amazon.com’s digital music store. The effectiveness of the buy button to find legal downloads on amazon depends on the availability of music, now that the major labels are offering their content in a DRM-free fashion you will be able to find pretty much any main-stream song with FrostWire’s “Buy” button.

Best of all, songs are priced under $1, and as we said DRM-Free, which means you can play the song you bought anywhere. I wonder what Steve Jobs must be thinking now.

FrostWire on Mashable and #4 most popular download of the year on Download.com

~ gubatron ~ Leave a comment

Cheers to the Mashable.com team for writing this note about us.

Also FrostWire makes it as the #4 of the Top Downloads of the year at CNET, LimeWire made it as #1

FrostWire startup error fix – (frostwire_theme.skin null pointer error fix)

~ gubatron ~ 2 Comments

Update: A new FrostWire 4.13.4 installer for windows is now available to help fix this problem, you can just download it again and the problem will be gone. If you don’t want to download it again follow these instructions for a simple fix.

If your new frostwire is crashing, due to :

"Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException:
resource: frostwire_theme.skin doesn't exist."

Just Download and save this file:
http://www.frostwire.com/beta/skins/frostwire_theme.skin

For Windows XP, save it at:

C:\\Documents and Settings\\<name>\\Application Data\\FrostWire\\Themes\\

For Windows Vista, save it at:

C:\\Users\\<name>\\AppData\\Roaming\\FrostWire\\themes\\

(where “<name>” is your user name in windows)

This should solve the problem.

This problem affects only users who never had FrostWire installed on their machine, or users that may have removed their FrostWire Preferences folder.

Thanks to CodeMoose for posting this fix.

Sneak peak at 4.13.4 (Mac/Linux)

~ gubatron ~ 3 Comments

Curious Mac and Linux users get to take 4.13.4 for a spin before everyone else.
Might be uploading the Linux installers during the next hours.

Mac OSX DMG (No more zips for Mac users)
MD5 -> 6690b1d08109059a508961fb057c9176

Ubuntu/Debian package
MD5 -> 276c319df17869a18f3e11fb3ecddc55

TGZ
MD5 -> e8bfaa395bcd8ab188166cc142c4dd83

RPM
MD5 -> fdd7ef316e05fb1c63f0914b5259dc76

Take it for a ride. Windows version coming soon, We expect to have it ready for tomorrow

CHANGELOG – Mowi po polsku ?

version 4.13.4 (November-December 2007)

  • Connection Bootstrapping problems should be gone. TurboCharged connection is achieved on average under 5 seconds after launch.
  • “Buy” button on the search result panel.
  • Polish Translation Included. Finally got around Encoding issues of the Java ResourceBundle class. More translations with their correct characters coming in the future. (thanks Paulinka for the translation)
  • New FrostWire Icon on the Icon Tray for Windows XP (thanks to sw1tch)
  • The Bugmanager window still said “LimeWire” (it was very well hidden in the code). Thanks to Marcelina Knitter for reporting.
  • Fixes on Update Notification Mechanism.
  • Fixes on Chat Banner Loading Mechanism, banner reloading interval from server is now configurable. Banners can now be delivered per FrostWire version. Faster startup and savings on bandwidth.
  • Cleaning of IRC Stack traces.

    • Don’t get scammed, FrostWire is Free

    ~ gubatron ~ 2 Comments

    FrostWire only accepts voluntary donations via Paypal at http://www.frostwire.com/donate, we do not charge people for any subscription fees of any kind, or for support, don’t let anybody scam you.

    PLEASE DO NOT EVER PAY A DIME FOR FrostWire. Below we show you some screenshots of sites that scam people into paying monthly, yearly, or lifetime “memberships” to nowhere. FROSTWIRE IS FREE

    There isn’t any service to pay for, you’re basically sharing your files with other people, that’s all, there is no service behind organizing the content in anyway, you just search other people’s computers, therefore, you don’t need to pay anybody for memberships.


    DO NOT FALL FOR SITES LIKE THIS, YOU CAN USE FROSTWIRE FOR FREE ALL YOU WANT

    These sites even put video demos, with a model showing you how to search, download and burn.

    They even go and distribute OUR own FrostWire and put links to our servers and then charge people monthly fees.

    Please do not download FrostWire from other websites, only download FrostWire from the official site http://www.frostwire.com

    There’s no such thing as subscriptions or monthly fees, or one lifetime fee, etc. Since we don’t provide a download service, FrostWire is just a client of the Gnutella Network which is a FREE network.

    FrostWire.com doesn’t sell FrostWire, however it accepts voluntary donations from its users.

    If you are a victim already, look for an invoice, you will see it doesn’t come from FrostWire.com. First try to contact the company that charged you (not frostwire.com) and ask THEM (not us) for a refund, if you don’t succeed, then talk to your credit card company to open an investigation

    DOWNLOAD ONLY FROM FROSTWIRE.COM

    What to do to get my money back?

    • Talk to the company that charged you, ask them for a full refund. The ONLY official distributors of FrostWire are http://www.frostwire.com and http://www.download.com
    • If a company other than FrostWire LLC charged you and they refuse to give you a refund, go to your credit card company or bank and demand an investigation for credit card fraud is started so you can get your refund

    Hopefully if we get enough investigations against these fraudulent companies they won’t be accepted to charge credit cards again.

    So far we know that companies doing this are the following, and we are NOT ASSOCIATED WITH ANY OF THEM in any way:

    • http://freefrostwiredownload.com <- FRAUD of the worst kind!!!
    • MP3 Music HQ.Com
    • Number One Music Inc with their site Free-FrostWire.com
    • click-new-download.com (which shows a cheap copy of the LimeWire.com website to appear legitimate)

    DO NOT FALL FOR THESE FRAUD SITES PLEASE. IF ITS TOO LATE ASK FOR A REFUND OR GO TO YOUR BANK OR CREDIT CARD COMPANY.

    FrostWire is reviewed by CNET

    ~ gubatron ~ 1 Comment

    On November 20th 2007, FrostWire gets a very positive review by CNET’s download.com, and makes it to the home page of download.com as the Killer Download of the Day

    Click here to read

    Their review makes us very happy, at the same time, it pushes us to include new killer features that LimeWire may not be able to have in the near future, however if you follow LimeWire’s code base, it seems they’re working hard to release a web based Music Store that will be included on an embedded browser inside their client, probably in the fashion of the online iTunes store, but probably powered by P2P (we hope, if they stick to their p2p philosophy and hopefully without DRM so that files can be shared or bought, at least this worked beautifully for Radiohead).

    It’d probably be a smart move by the LimeWire store to include the possibility to buy their music from outside their site (with commissions on sales of course), that way, other music sites could trigger purchases based on search, as well as other p2p clients such as FrostWire.

    FrostWire is #15 on Download.com!!!

    ~ gubatron ~ 1 Comment

    For the 3rd week in a row we’re on the Top 20 of download.com and going up.
    Last week on position #19, now we went up to #15!!!

    Thanks so much for downloading, we’re working hard on the next version, coming out very soon.