Nicotine+
Nicotine+ is a graphical client for the Soulseek peer-to-peer network.
Nicotine+ aims to be a pleasant, free and open source (FOSS) alternative to the official Soulseek client, providing additional functionality while keeping current with the Soulseek protocol.
Soulseek is a file sharing network for mostly Music but also other files. The most available format for songs are MP3, M4A and FLAC. Almost any song/album is on there so you will have no problem finding what you need. You need to share files yourself otherwise there is a possibility you will get banned. I added a YouTube video tutorial so you can understand it better.
Screenshots:
Downloads are available for:
Soulseek isn’t just for music. It’s where I get most of my TTRPG PDFs
Soulseek is great although it absolutely requires port forwarding to share files. It’s also very much a “desktop” app and I don’t think much investment has been made for it to be a solid, containerized server app. Everything I have explored on that front has been very janky.
Not a server solution but it’s not a desktop app. On androids there’s Seeker that does an excellent job of connecting to the network and downloading what you want.
Wow, I love slsk and have been using it since literally about 2004 (it has absolutely defined my taste in music), but I didn’t know there were any options for clients except for the main one. This is great!
If you’re reading this and you’ve never checked out slsk, consider this your invitation. I have spent hours trying to “stump” it by searching for increasingly-obscure music. Someone always has it on slsk.
EDIT: HOLY JESUS HALLELUJAH IT HAS DARK MODE
Apparently you know your way around there… can you ELI5 what soulseek exactly is? Is this based on torrenting? Is it comparable to what limewire was back in the day?
Stumbled across it and don’t know what makes this so charming for so many people
it’s more like limewire as it does not use the BitTorrent protocol but rather direct P2P connections to other users. In that case it tends to be slower
It’s popular cause it’s probably the most popular P2P non torrent app and there’s a lot of hardcore users sharing over 100k music files including real rarities and mostly public to all. There are some locked file users in search of trades and that’s been hurting the overall community arguably as well as people who ban if you don’t share anything but generally most are willing to share whatever to whoever as long as you don’t download all their shares at once
Soulseek for the most part is useless unless you want very obscure stuff. However the client looks very nice so good work.
How is the Soulseek community these days? I used to use it heavily up to more than a decade ago, when I started streaming for convenience. Is there still a meaningful number of people to browse and download from?
Very strong. Soulseek kinda drifted to mostly high quality music because the protocol isn’t a good option for large files. It would be interesting to see a Soulseek network v3 upgraded with torrent-like features…
Good but we need more people before the traders/locked file users take over. ___
Why are people using P2P?
peer-to-peer, as opposed to?
