New FrostWire 5.7.2 with uTP support

Download FrostWire 5.7.2 for Windows (Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin enabled .torrent)
Download FrostWire 5.7.2 for MacOSX (.torrent)
Download FrostWire 5.7.2 for Debian/Ubuntu (.torrent)

This release is all about performance and stability.

Some users have complained about what happens to their internet connection when using FrostWire heavily, so we’ve finally added uTP support to solve these issues.

FrostWire can now deal with bandwidth congestion issues in a way that won’t compromise your internet experience while you use it.

You can, for example, see how FrostWire will automatically adjust its transfer speeds to cede network resources to other programs in your computer, like your web browser while surfing the web or streaming a movie from Netflix.

If the connection is not being used by any other software FrostWire will automatically use as much bandwidth as it can, and you don’t have to do this manually using the existing throttling controls, and all this while not clogging up your router’s memory.

Another benefit of having added uTP is that some WiFi/DSL/Cable routers won’t have issues with packet data overflow when torrenting with FrostWire, which in some cases can completely drop the internet connection forcing you to restart your router to reconnect to the Internet.

We’ve also taken care of very important user experience details, that should make FrostWire easier to understand for new users, as well as smaller usability bugs and crashes that have been fixed.

Here’s the full list of changes.

frostwire (5.7.2) stable; urgency=high
  * uTP support enabled.
  * Multiple crash fixes.
  * UX: playable single file torrents now can be played from transfer list.
  * UX: Fixes UI Thread freeze when opening Options > Search.
  * UX: Better error reporting when a torrent can't be fetched from a
        magnet connection.
  * Spanish translation update by @dennistobar.
-- FrostWire Team <contact@frostwire.com> Fri, 11 Apr 2014 14:22:10 -0500

Love FrostWire?
Consider donating. 
bitcoin – dogecoin – $1 – $5 – $10 – $25 – paypal

FrostWire integrates Bitcoin donations and Creative Commons licensing into Torrent files.

Bitcoin LItecoin Coins

FrostWire has introduced the possibility for of adding Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin wallet address into metadata of the torrent file format in order to enable optional donations. By eliminating middlemen and transaction costs, microtipping is now fully possible and the recipients can collect 100% of their contributions.

Mainstream centralized digital distribution platforms have been relatively successful at providing big content creators with means of monetization and discovery of their works. In spite of their success however, many self-publishing artists are still struggling with having have to share a significant portion of their revenues with the stores and middlemen, just for being able to bring their works to their fans. The centralized systems also often impose censorship and are ridden with bureaucratic structures that inevitably increase costs, making it impossible for a digital media micro-tipping economy to be born.

The FrostWire team believes that by integrating a free, peer-to-peer payment method, Bitcoin, into the free, peer-to-peer file distribution network, BitTorrent, our community can help bootstrap the largest micro-tipping economy of the Internet.

By enabling over a quarter of a billion BitTorrent users worldwide to support their favorite content creators with tips of any amount, from a fan directly to the artist, for the first time ever we would enable content creators to collect 100% of their revenues, easily and instantly.

This would be the first step towards not only creating an alternative massive monetizable distribution channel, but a decentralized digital media catalog that would make it easier for fans to discover new artists and more beneficial for any content creator to use the power of BitTorrent for a free, uncensored, and direct worldwide distribution.

We also believe that the world cannot experience an evolutionary step in digital media distribution if existing copyright licensing is antiquated and not fit for global reach. We want to help speed up the adoption of alternative licensing models by building the tools that make it convenient for content creators to embrace licensing solutions like Creative Commons.

Content Creators can now select from any of the available Creative Commons licenses available and express in advanced how their content can be used.
Content Creators can now select from any of the available Creative Commons licenses available and express in advanced how their content can be used.

As a first step in making this vision a reality, the FrostWire team has developed a way for the payment & licensing information to be included into the .torrent file. Now all BitTorrent Clients and search engines can read that information and present it to their users.

The newest version of FrostWire (5.7.1 beta) can already process the payment information.

After FrostWire starts downloading a torrent file containing metadata related to a Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin wallet or PayPal donation url it will show “Tipping” buttons anyone can use to voluntarily support their favorite content creators. This version of FrostWire already allows for creation of the enhanced torrent, giving the creators an ability to add their Creative Commons License information into the torrent itself.

When tipping options are available these appear bolded, and one click takes them to the payment page.
When tipping options are available these appear bolded, and one click takes them to the payment page.

Just imagine a BitTorrent bundle in which Bono from U2 shares free songs or a free video documentary to raise awareness and collects Bitcoin donations for the (Red) foundation to further the fight against HIV worldwide. We can’t wait to see all the imaginative use cases this integration can inspire!

If you are or know an artists how would like to create their own Bitcoin empowered torrent, please have them contact us at contact@frostclick.com. Before we roll out this particular feature to the general audience, we would like to test to make sure it’s absolutely perfect and bug free.

We encourage to try it out yourself and tell us what you think. We have created beta installers for different operating systems so that you can test the tipping/payment process yourselves.

Hack it

Technical Documentation on Github

Here is the Source Code.

Download Test Installers

Beta installer for Windows (5.7.1 build 1)

Beta installer for Mac (5.7.1 build 1)

Beta installer for Debian based Linux distros (5.7.1 build 1)

Beta installer for RPM based Linux distros (5.7.1 build 1)

Try the first Bitcoin-tippable .torrents in history:

Sample .torrent frostwire-5.7.1.dmg.torrent (includes all payment options and CC license)

Sample .torrent bitcoin_revolution_by_FriCtrl_CC-BY-SA.mp3.torrent (includes just Bitcoin payment option and CC license)

Try the Payment pages

Payment options page for frostwire-7.8.1.dmg.torrent

Bitcoin only payment/tipping page for bitcoin_revolution_by_FriCtrl_CC-BY-SA.mp3.torrent

If you want to spread the word about this integration, feel free to use the text and all images in your articles. Everything in this blog is under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. FrostWire logos are here.

FrostWire 5.7.0 is out for Windows, Mac and Linux now at FrostWire.com

Download FrostWire 5.7.0 for Windows (torrent)

Download FrostWire 5.7.0 for Mac (torrent)

Download FrostWire 5.7.0 for Ubuntu (torrent)

Download FrostWire 5.7.0 for Red Hat/Cent OS/RPM

Download FrostWire 5.7.0 for any other Linux Distro

Salsa Sara hoops in Wynwood, Miami for the FrostWire Team
Salsa Sara hoops in Wynwood, Miami for the FrostWire Team

What’s new?

  • Updated BitTorrent Engine to the latest code from the Azureus project along with FrostWire’s Team’s tunning and hacks for energy efficiency (as we reuse this same on code on Android)
  • Updated Java Runtime to fix compatibility launch issues Windows XP users were experiencing.
  • IRC Chat replaced for an HTML5 Chat App (Kiwi IRC), bye bye pjirc client.
  • New Torrents.com search engine integration.
  • Several UI bugs, freezes and crashes fixed.

Stay tuned for our Android release…

FrostWire running on an #OLPC Tablet

FrostWire running on the OLPC tablet.

FrostWire is a very powerful research tool, its smart file meta search can find millions of files in the public domain and under Creative Commons licenses, among those, many unvaluable books, instructional videos and lectures in every academic discipline.

The One Laptop Per Child project is an amazing educational initiative that has put technology in the hands of over 2.5 million children worldwide, truly transformative stories have ocurred in the process, many will give you the goosebumps to hear.

More recently the project has recognized the evolution in personal computing technology and the advent of tablet devices, and their new iteration is a tablet, an Android tablet.

FrostWire runs on Android, now OLPC users will be able to use the powerful FrostWire smart file meta search technology and Wi-Fi sharing capabilities to discover, learn and share.

About One Laptop Per Child
One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is a project supported by the Miami-based One Laptop per Child Association (OLPCA) and the Cambridge-based OLPC Foundation (OLPCF), two U.S. non-profit organizations set up to oversee the creation of affordable educational devices for use in the developing world. The project was originally funded by member organizations such as AMD, Chi Mei, eBay, Google, Marvell Technology Group, News Corporation, Nortel, Red Hat, and Quanta.

FrostWire 5.5.6 Changelog (UPDATE 3)

Attention Technical writers, hackers and hardcore FrostWire enthusiasts, here’s the upcoming changelog for FrostWire 5.5.6 as we polish the last details and begin the testing process.

Update 3 (Apr 23 2013 – 10:38pm EST):
Download FrostWire 5.5.6 Release Candidate Installer for Windows

Update 2 (Apr 23rd 2013 – 9:32pm EST):
Download FrostWire 5.5.6 Release Candidate 2 Installer for Mac OSX

During the next hours we’ll be releasing Release Candidate Binaries for those of you who would like to help catch a few bugs in advance. This list is not final as we’re still closing the development cycle for this release.

Please fork-us and send your patch-branch via pull-request.

frostwire (5.5.6) stable; urgency=high
* New Feature: Includes search results from archive.org, which indexes millions of public domain and creative commons works from all over the internet.
* New Feature: playlist songs can be re-ordered with drag and drop.
* New Feature: all songs in a playlist can now be exported to a folder.
* Upgrade: Improved Unicode support for Chinese characters.

* Upgrade: mplayer update for unicode character file playback support.
* Upgrade: Search architecture upgrade for much faster search results.
* Upgrade: Considerably faster mp3,mp4 parsing in the library, creating playlists is now faster than ever.
* Upgrade: New more explicit Wi-Fi sharing icons.
* Upgrade: Updated radio station database.
* Upgrade: up to 20% faster listing of files in the Library.
* Upgrade: Video player upgrades for better experience.
* Bug fix: screen-saver no longer kicks in during video playback.
* Bug fix: UPnP Wi-Fi sharing discovery consumes 84% less CPU on
congested local networks. Fixing reported slowdowns and reducing
considerable power consumption for laptop users.
* Bug fix: X11 related error fix.
* Bug fix: Number of files being shared includes the number of torrents
being seeded.
* Bug fix: Library search issues related to unicode characters.
* Bug fix: Multiple null pointer exceptions and crashes fixed.
* Bug fix: Fixed rendering issue related to wrong parsing of bitrate
string data.
* Upgrade: (Developers) ant compilation scripts cleanup.
* Upgrade: (Developers) use of ‘frostwire-commons’ repository to share
common code between FrostWire for Android and Desktop projects.

— FrostWire Team <contact@frostwire.com> Mon, 22 Apr 2013 05:58:00 -0500

Archive.org as a new search engine in FrostWire puts millions of free legal files in your hands.

We’re currently polishing our next release of FrostWire for Android 1.0.6.

Our last release was back in November 2012, since then we’ve received crash reports and lots of complaints that have helped us make the next FrostWire for Android much more robust and compatible for the +2,600 different supported Android devices that run FrostWire on hundreds of thousands of mobile devices every day.

We’ve taken this time to make the search experience considerably faster and we’ve finally been able to integrate our search with another great source of legally free available content, Archive.org.

Archive.org is a non profit organization that crawls and indexes the web’s free content and as of the moment of this writing by having FrostWire connect to its search api you will be able to search through an astonishing number of free and legal works, here’s how they break them down on their home page today:

1,181,452 movies
114,118 live concerts
1,567,041 audio recordings
4,386,872 texts

that’s over 7,246,483 works most of which are tagged with Public Domain and Creative Commons licenses that you’ll be able to download and share with FrostWire.

Most of this content is under the Public Domain and also under Creative Commons licenses.
If FrostWire can detect the license on the content it yields on search results you will see it on screen.

And every year that passes, more works automatically fall into the public domain so you will be able to access more and more information for free absolutely legally, literally from the palm of your hand via FrostWire. We think this goes in line with our mission, and once this update is released the world will be a little better place to be in since all of you will be empowered with free digital works and culture.

Other than that we’ve fixed many crashes, freezes, lowered cpu and memory consumption (which will make your battery last more), we’ve done upgrades on almost all of the application icons, fixed issues for older phones that didn’t have SD cards the way new phones do now, bugs on the audio player and so much more.

Archive.org as a search engine, and a revamp of the search experience is also being added to FrostWire for Desktop so stay tuned for our next desktop release as well (5.5.6)

changelog

FrostWire 1.0.6 - 03/28/2013
 - Faster search results. Search architecture revised and improved.
 - Includes search results from archive.org, which indexes millions
   of public domain and creative commons works from all over the
   internet.
 - FrostWire won't disable screen locking during audio playback.
   It's now up to the user to set longer auto-locking timeouts if
   they want to use FrostWire as an audio player in their vehicles.
 - UI fix, media player screen is correctly updated if a song starts
   while the screen was locked.
 - Updated icons and graphics.
 - Improved mime type detection.
 - Updated UPnP cling libraries for better Wi-Fi sharing discovery.
 - Multiple crashes and freezes fixed.
 - Opens .torrent files from urls and from any file browser.
 - Fixes a crash when sharing files from third party apps like FileKicker
   which pass filepath uris instead of android provider uris.
 - Fixes double audio playback issue with third party media playing apps.
 - Fixes bug where the app would force close and restart on phones without SD cards.

Get FrostWire 1.0 for Android

If you are getting an Android device this holiday season, we’ve spent the last 5 months building a must-have app for it.

Install FrostWire via Google Play.

Download the .apk installer.

Here’s a few things you can do with our completely re-designed and easy to use file sharing client and media player.

Improved search that integrates with the cloud.

Search results are faster than ever (instant in most cases) and not only you’ll have the most powerful BitTorrent Deep-Smart search[1] featured in previous versions, now FrostWire integrates with popular cloud services where content creators from all over the world share millions of legally available files[2].

The fastest downloads ever on any FrostWire for Android.

Be it on Wi-Fi, 3G or 4G you will experience in most cases downloads that are so fast you won’t even see the progress bar begin to move, by the time the transfer screen is opened the file will already be on your device. Specially when sharing files with other FrostWire devices (PCs too) on the same Wi-Fi network.

Share files between phones, tablets and computers without any networking know-how

You don’t have to use cables or become a computer guru to share files between your phones, tablets or computers. We’ve also been working on FrostWire for desktop so that when you open FrostWire on your phone or computer you will be able to see every device automatically.

Just make files publicly available by opening padlock icons next to the files and every device running FrostWire will be able to download and even stream music or video from each other.

This makes it great for groups of people (work, school, home, party), now you only need to take only one photo and share it with everybody else next time you’re all connected to the same Wi-Fi hotspot.

Sending documents, music, family videos between your mobile, tablet or computer has never been easier or faster, best of all it doesn’t even matter what Operating system you’re running, Windows, Mac, Linux, it doesn’t matter, all you need is FrostWire and a Wi-Fi router. It just works.

World class Gesture Based Music Player

We’ve redesigned our music player for simplicity and convenience. FrostWire’s music player is the world’s first gesture based music player, we built it thinking of drivers in mind, no need to take your eyes off the road if you want to switch songs or pause/resume playback.

On this version we’ve introduced a beautiful new design with a 3D presentation of the album art currently being played. It also has functionality to share or un-share the file you’re currently listening to without having to browse or find the file on your device.

Easier Navigation

We’ve recreated the navigation system on the application, it now has a beautiful animated and responsive slide in menu that will take you anywhere in the app, with room for future functionality, and if you’re playing a song you will be able to see the album art of the song being played.

We’ve also implemented a custom “Back” history handler so that you can backtrack perfectly the screens you’ve navigated as you used the app. You now have random access navigation through the menu, and sequential access navigation through the Android’s back key.

We’ve added new controls to let you instantly filter your own files and see which are being shared on the Wi-Fi network and which aren’t in just one touch.

Install FrostWire on your Android and spread the word, the more the merrier, it’s absolutely free.

Install FrostWire via Google Play.

Download the .apk installer.

[1] FrostWire's Deep-Smart search uses the most popular torrent indexing services to fetch torrent files, then FrostWire opens these files and searches for the individual files indexed by the torrent. As FrostWire searches it remembers the files it's seen in the past to make your next searches instantaneous.

[2] Only on YouTube.com in 2012 it was announced users had shared over 4 million Creative Commons licensed videos. FrostWire also taps on SoundCloud.com, the internet's biggest sound and music community of content creators, bands, singers and DJs that pay to make their music available for free to the SoundCloud community. If you share your content on YouTube or SoundCloud you're automatically available to the millions of FrostWire users on both Desktop and Android. Integration with more popular cloud services to come in the next releases.

When you download and install FrostWire you must agree that you will not use it for the purpose of copyright infringement otherwise the software won't work. FrostWire condemns copyright infringement. Downloading FrostWire does not constitute permission or a license for obtaining or distributing unauthorized files. It is illegal for you to distribute copyrighted files without permission. If you want to know about legal content you can download and distribute legally please visit FrostClick.com, Vodo.net, ClearBits.net, LegitTorrents.info and CreativeCommons.org

FrostWire’s Gesture-based audio player. Keep your eyes on the road #android #bittorrent

If you use your Android device as your car music player and you have nobody next to you it’s always dangerous to take your eyes away from the road to unlock the phone, tilt it the right way and eventually find the “Skip” button to change the song.

We decided to fix this issue by making the FrostWire audio player driver friendly.

When you are playing music on FrostWire it will prevent your Android from locking so it can receive gesture input during playback (the screen will go off but it will still receive input).

Gestures supported
It’s very simple, swipe to the sides to change the song, or swipe down with two fingers to pause/resume playback.

Get it now!
It’s absolutely free, you can get it on Google Play or you download it from our website

Want the music in the video?

Here are the Creative Commons attributions

Kellee Maize “Hasta Abajo”
http://kelleemaize.com
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)

Wordsmith “Eye for the Spotlight”
http://www.wordsmithmusic.com
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)

This video is licensed also under Creative Commons Attribution license.
http://www.frostwire.com

Written and directed by Angel Leon
Shot and Edited by Marcelina Knitter