Never heard of soulseek, used to torrent stuff back in the day, now not so much. Am I missing out?
It followed in the footsteps of Napster and limewire as a P2P client, primarily for sharing music. Unlike its predecessors, it survived basically unchanged for the last decades, basically just flying under the radar.
I still recommend it, though I think Nicotine+ is a better client (its a different frontend for the same network). It's not necessarily better than torrenting, just different. It also has chatrooms which I used to quite enjoy as a youngster back in the early 2000s.
Thanks for the recommendation!
Where did the name Nicotine come from?
I was in a geeky mood and was browsing http://www.bash.org’s QDB. I stumbled across this quote:
<etc> so tempting to release a product called ‘nicotine’ and wait for the patches. <etc> then i would have a reason to only apply one patch a day. otherwise, i’m going against medical advise.
So I thought what the hell and bluntly stole etc’s idea.
Well that solves that mystery, which I've idly wondered about but not enough to look it up. Thanks!
Nicotine+ is a better client because it's more actively developed. The official Soulseek client hasn't had an update in 3 years.
it's kind of like torrenting but there's a search engine, individual transactions are one-to-one, you can browse all the files a user shares, and I don't think ISPs know about it.
Sounds exactly like Usenet, or any of the GNUtella network stuff back in the day (bearshare, limewire, etc.)
It's an old P2P app focused on music, it's been like 20 years since I last used it but at the time you could find pretty much anything no matter how obscure.
You used to be able to find just about any music on soulseek. I used to use it a lot 20 years ago, I assume from the name popping to still that you still can.
Just wondering, other than the obvious free tier audio quality (high is server side) what is the general consensus on using a modded client for premium features? I just don't have the option of network related stuff like torrenting or direct download + self hosting, as in my current situation I'm not my own admin. It's worked pretty well in my experience though I plan on subscribing to tidal soon for higher audio quality. Modded clients also seem more ethical to me as usage still count towards an artist's stream count (and thus paycheck, popularity, etc). It feels good as I ended up being a top listener for a newer artist I like as she was coming to popularity, and my streams + sharing spotify links to friends contributed a lot to their growth.
I get it, I take partial credit for the Bourne Ultimatum winning a best editing Oscar due to my emailing the agents of academy members letting them know it was solely the work of editing that kept audiences from puking in the theaters.
I personally use xManager because I don't download every single piece of music I listen to (no matter how hard I try) so I would recommend it, but I would regularly backup likes / playlists because of the risk of a ban
