New Shareaza v2.4.0 - 9 Months After With 900 Changes

October 13, 2008 by sharky

The audacious Shareaza fiasco that saw their domain rudely hijacked and the popular file sharing client replaced with a fake ‘pay’ (aka. "legal") Shareaza v4 is likely still fresh in many of our minds. Fortunately, the original developers did not cease work on the GNU-licensed real Shareaza, as they introduce a much-improved new version v2.4.0.0 this month. After more than 9 months of dedication, the team is proud to announce the first major upgrade to Shareaza since the debacle. This latest Shareaza comes loaded with 900 very impressive cumulative updates & changes, including Vista support, integrated IRC chat, TorrentWizard, new skins, and even a TCP/UDP connection test.

For those unfamiliar, Shareaza is a multi-network peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing client supporting Gnutella2, Gnutella, eDonkey2000 (eMule/eD2k), HTTP, FTP and BitTorrent protocols.

Shareaza For Torrenting?

While BitTorrent is still the "coolest kid on the block" in the P2P circuit, Shareaza is still an excellent multi-protocol P2P app in its own right. While under no circumstances would we advocate its use for private trackers, we found it a very suitable substitute BT client for public torrents. In our tests, DL speeds were very similar to those of µTorrent when simultaneously downloading the exact same torrent to both:

For those who are tight on bandwidth, Shareaza actually uploads (seeds) at a much slower rate than other BT clients, without sacrificing any download speed. While this isn’t necessarily a good thing for BitTorrent as a whole, users who are capped by their ISP may find it appropriate for comsuming less monthly bandwidth.

Scene-Releases On Shareaza?

Decentralized peer-to-peer networks such as Gnutella have always been heavily criticized for bogus and fake files riddled amongst the search results. And rightly so. Shareaza comes as no exception; there’s still a decent amount of junk. But there’s also some good versions, too - you just need to know how to search for them properly.

For example, if you search for "Dark Knight" you’ll generate a fair bit of crap in the results. But if you know who (what ‘release group’) put it out, you can narrow down the searching to show more relevant data. We already know that "mVs" was the group who released the latest DVDSCR version of Dark Knight, so by adding mvs to the query, more relevancy will prevail. As with many P2P clients, files with the highest number of hosts will rise to the top of the search - and we were easily able to view a "good" version. We downloaded and tested the top result, and we can verify that it is, indeed, a good working copy identical to its proper BitTorrent kin.

eD2k Links

Aside from adding known good *.torrents to Shareaza, perhaps the best way to ensure good working files is to use appropriate eD2k links. While we’ll admit that in-program Shareaza "eDonkey searching" is often suspect (and even downright dangerous), eD2k links found in reliable indexing sites will most likely provide a verifiable good version, no matter what you seek. A good indexer will have a link for the most recent releases, comparable to a torrent indexer. Here’s a sample of a few that stand out:

Remember, download Shareaza only from their official home at Sourceforge: http://shareaza.sourceforge.net



Archived by FSFmirror

Categories: