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P2P Software for the Mac?
NeptalTim asks: "I've recently started using the Mac as my primary computer again after a hiatus of several years. All 'switch' jokes aside, I'm liking it very much, except for the decided lack of good P2P software. I always used Kazaa on Windows, but the best app I've found for the Mac is Limewire, which is a tad slow to say the least. What do Slashdot readers in the Mac community use for P2P?" I've been using iSwipe for a short amount of time and have found it useful. It's no WinMX, but it works. What other P2P programs have you found that you like?
Acquisition is great! Supports all the new gnutella updates such as ultrapeers. Much faster than Limewire, much nicer looking, and I've had better results with it as well.
Neo is a shadow client to Kazaa. It unfortunately doesn't actually log you into Kazaa, but rather is used to query ranges of IP's looking for Kazaa clients. It then sends searches to these clients directly, rather than to the nodes. Still, it can be very useful.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. - Anais Nin
There is an interesting sourcefourge project called Neo that is a kazaa shadow client. From the homepage:
What exactly is Neo? Neo is a Cocoa shadow client for the Kazaa network, written exclusively for MacOS X. Neo is not a real Kazaa client, and never will be; the company in charge of the FastTrack (Kazaa) network won't allow third parties access to their encrypted protocol. So what is a shadow client then? Instead of connecting to the nextwork, Neo scans through IP ranges looking for Kazaa hosts, indexes their file list, and stores them locally on your hard drive. Then, when you search for files, only the files that you have indexed on your hard drive will be searched.
I've used it a couple of times and it seems to work well once you download a sufficiently large number of host from the master list.
Check the results of the article there.
Furthurnet is probably my favorite that runs on OS X. Bands that allow taping (and they're more numerous than you'd think. Phish, The Dead, and The Black Crowes are there, but so is everything from Louis Armstrong to the Beasties) are traded freely on this app, and I've grabbed more than 35 gigs of tunes. Most serious traders use Shorten format (.shn), which is a lossless compression format that brings that patch from the soundboard right down onto your Mac's hard drive, no questions asked. You can translate these into aiff or wav files pretty easily, and burn CDs right from iTunes.
:^D
Furthurnet's UI and search protocol (borrowed originally from Gnutella, I believe) could use a little spiffing up, but it's a GPL'd, ad-free application that works great once you're used to it. I haven't gotten online yet and failed to find at least one show within a few minutes of searching for whatever artist strikes my fancy (though admittedly Doc Watson is about as esoteric as I get).
Course if you're just looking for warez, I haven't helped at all, but if you want some great tunes for free via your new-found love of the Mac, you can't get any better than Furthurnet.
"PS" If Limewire is running too slowly, it might be a "Java problem". Make sure your app has an Aqua look & feel to take advantage of Apple's JVM's hardware accelerated GUI widgets. Having a video card that supports Quartz Extreme would help a bit as well.
"PPSS" In what little spare time I find I have (when I'm not writing this post), I've been trying to port Furthurnet to Mac OS 9-. Had some luck, but nothing to release just yet. So if you're not using OS X, upgrade.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
I've found LimeWire to be way too unstable--it can't handle too many files, and it's slow. However, it does manage to connect to other peers better than other software that I've sampled.
Acquisition is a neat idea, but it doesn't work too well. Not much of an interface, either.
MacPhex is cool, and I like its interface. It crashes on me whenever I try to change the port that it listens on, and it hasn't been able to hold a connection well.
iSwipe is okay if you're searching, but I wasn't able to download some songs from OpenNap when I tried--I don't think it has a very good grasp of the protocol. It also limits you to sharing only 100 files on Gnutella.
I do like Drumbeat X, although that's OpenNap-only, and you have to pay for it. It's kind of slow (only when you're sharing many files), but it works well.
It seems like this one has been out on the windows side of the computing world for quite some time. The OSX client is pretty new, but it is really nice. You connect to a chat room or hub and can then search download from the other participants in that room. There are not to many mac rooms at the moment, but media content is plattform agnostic anyway. Get it at www.neo-modus.com
And I know that you shouldn't steal music. Up until now I never did. But I happen to own an iPod and it really pisses me off, when I can't put the music from a legally obtained cd on it just because some record companies think that they are funny. Copy protection won't stop me from stealing music - it will me get started.
Hank! White!
Like WinMX but Mac OS X..
Written in Java, and Fast, But not the most stable.
You can find it here:
http://xnap.sourceforge.net/
Silence Bossy Meat Creatures!
People are discussing this over at Ars Technica, here.
There is no shortage of P2P file sharing clients for the Mac. In fact one of the first clients was Mac only for some time (Hotline). This is a short OS X only list.
Gnutella Clients: MacPhex, Mactella, Limewire, Fern, Acquisition (one of my favorites). iSwipe
Kazaa client: Neo (not a full client but it works)
Napster/OpenNap clients: XNap, also iSwipe
Hotline Clients: Frogblast, HotCocoa, Pitbull Pro, Zombie, FineLine, Heidrun, iSwipe(again), Ripcord.
Others:
KDX (a new and really very nice Mac/Win compatible P2P server/client. Great if you can ignore the immaturity of it's developers.
Carracho: A Mac only P2P client/server. Works very well.
Direct Connect: DirectConnect, Java DirectConnect
There are a ton of other options that I'm not listing but to be honest I could be here for a lot longer and "It's a Wonderful Life" is on....so Happy Holidays and happy downloading.
=^Genesis^=
"Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
Mod parent up. Mldonkey is a client for the eDonkey network, which is really good. There are also compiled OS X binaries available. It's not as good as the windows client eMule, though (hoping for a Mac OS port soon!).
Lalala