| Soulseek |
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Information AboutSoulseek |
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Soulseek is a File-sharing (also called Peer To Peer or ' P2P ') application and Network used mostly to exchange music, although users are able to share a variety of files. It was created by Nir Arbel, a former Napster programmer. Like Napster, it relies on a central Server located in Germany. The original Soulseek userbase was composed mostly of members of the IDM Mailing List, and most of the music first found on Soulseek was underground Electronic Music or music created by the users themselves. To this day, Soulseek remains a source for Avantgarde and underground Independent Music . Some artists without a label or who depend on word of mouth for the spread of their music use file sharing programs such as Soulseek to distribute their work. The user population has grown rapidly since its beginnings. In 2004, it was estimated that there were 1 million registered users. The Soulseek server went through a period of regularly crashing due to CPU overload, however a new server was set up in summer of 2004 and those problems remain a thing of the past. A second 'test' version of the server was also set up and can be connected to using a 'test' version of the client. Many of the original Soulseek users are also music producers, and Soulseek Records (also known as SLSK Records) was formed in 2002. Soulseek hosts user-created chat rooms, of which most are dedicated to musical styles or geographical regions, and it is this that gives the system more of a community feel. Individual 'chat sessions' are also possible directly between two users, and the software features an 'ignore' facility should a user not wish to receive messages from another. The Soulseek client also allows the user to create what is essentially a 'buddy list'. Users on this buddy list can then be given preferential treatment, like being able to jump the queue ahead of 'non-buddies' when requesting files for download. The client also contains a ban feature whereby selected users may be banned from requesting files. This is in response to users who might be leeching files (ie. taking files from others without sharing any files themselves) or who might be causing a nuisance for other reasons. Banning can be a contentious subject, and was the subject of much discussion in the user forums particularly in the early days. Soulseek does not support multi-source downloading or "swarming" like other post-Napster clients, and must fetch a requested file from a single source. Swarming allows a requested file to be sourced from a number of users who have that file, thus pieces of the file may be downloaded concurrently from a number of sources typically giving improved performance. Soulseek has often been criticised for not offering multi-source downloads, however given that the client software has not seen further development for a couple of years (not least because it is relatively stable in its current form), it is unlikely that this feature will appear. Soulseek has a diverse mix of music, including underground and independent artists and unreleased music such as demos and live tracks. Its chat feature also makes Soulseek unique in the post Napster world. While some clients for the largest file-sharing networks today, Gnutella and FastTrack , incorporate chat features, these tend to be 1:1 in nature and thus those networks lack the community feel of Soulseek. While the Soulseek software is free, a donation scheme exists to support the programming effort and cost of maintaining the servers. In return for donations, users are granted the privilege of being able to jump ahead of non-donating users in a queue when downloading files. Although free, the Soulseek Protocol search algorithms are not published, the reason being that the performance of the central servers is sensitive to client searches, and the development of 3rd party clients that do not adhere to certain rules when searching (eg. the number of search results returned) could have a detrimental impact on the Soulseek system. The BitTorrent community experienced just such issues when certain BitTorrent clients were coded to circumvent rules defined within the BitTorrent protocol and thus offer the user certain advantages at the expense of others. SEE ALSO
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