Shareaza v1.1 is now available!

Since the first version of Shareaza was released last week, there has been a flood of useful comments, suggestions and feedback from supportive users in the Gnutella community. We’ve tried to incorporate as many of these as possible into this new version. As a result, Shareaza now offers even more features than it did before, and is without doubt the most feature rich Gnutella client available. There’s stuff in here you won’t find anywhere else -- and its still 100% free.

Here’s a list of some of the cool improvements we’ve made.

Much better UltraPeer address storage and selection in the host cache. This seriously drops connection time by a factor of 3 or more once it's had time to accumulate some entries. It also helps other clients get connected better. It worked alright before, it works even better now.

Full 100% support for the latest HUGE specification. Previously Shareaza supported 90% of it, with hashing, secure fragment downloading by hash, grouping and requesting by hash, etc -- the important bits.

Now however the final 10% is supported – download source meshes. This has the potential to really improve downloads for everyone once more clients adopt it. Shareaza helps to build a mesh of alternate locations for each file by receiving and transmitting alternate sources on every upload and download transaction it performs, and maintaining a database of potential sources for each library and "in progress" file.

Ability to access and download Bitzi metadata. You can now query the Bitzi.com online file information database for information about files in your library or the Gnutella network. As far as I’m aware this isn’t available in any other clients yet – very cool. (see www.bitzi.com for more information)

Select a single file and open the Bitzi web "ticket", which shows information about the selected file in your browser. Or use the innovative Acquire Metadata feature to download metadata directly from Bitzi.com to your local library database. Shareaza automatically converts data formats and merges foreign information with any existing annotations. This information is then stored in your library and can be used by you and other Gnutella users for richer, more powerful searches.

Comprehensive security system. The new Security Manager window allows you to create simple or complex access control rules that govern incoming, outgoing and routed traffic. Deny connections from hostile hosts or networks, or create a private network of servents by listing the network ranges to accept and denying the rest. Each rule has individual hit counting and automatic expiry control. The security manager provides more power than you’ll find anywhere else, but it’s also very simple to use with easy point-and-click Ban Host options in the Uploads and Search windows.

Enhanced library management tools. The Library window has undergone some major additions, and now offers a whole lot more than it did before. You can now copy, move and delete files within your library, right from within Shareaza. This has the advantage of coordinating with the file sharing core, and it also operates transparently on any metadata you have stored. There’s also commands like Enqueue to add selected files to an external media playlist, and Refresh to update statistics. You can also see file hashing progress (unhashed files appear gray), and shared/unshared folders are more clearly indicated.

The ability to directly download URLs, and manually add sources to existing downloads. You can now leverage Shareaza's fragmenting download engine (which from what I've seen is more advanced than that found in any other P2P product) to download any URL, Gnutella-based or not. HTTP download URLs can be entered on the Tools menu. You can also add sources to existing downloads by right-clicking, and entering a URL.

The uploads window has been redesigned for more intuitive control. Uploads are now displayed by file rather than by host, and shown in green when active and in black when disconnected. You can still view the enhanced view by selecting “Group by Host”.

More statistics - Shareaza displays the total unique files and total hits in search windows, and displays a readout of bandwidth and transfer usage on the status bar. This stuff is not new (there’s lots of reporting functionality in the performance graphing system already), but now it’s visible all the time. You can also see the number of active download transfers, sources per file, requests per upload, etc.

Ability to search by raw SHA1. Simply type the file’s URN, ala "urn:sha1:xxxxx" into the search window to search for an exact file by hash.

Better Search, Monitor and Packet Dump performance. Some people noted poor visual performance in these windows, which has been corrected. These areas now utilise batched updates to prevent CPU use from getting out of hand.

Better upload limiting. Shareaza always supported limiting the number of total uploads and the number per unique host, which provided good protection. However some clients can be very aggressive and send frequent requests without closing their old connections. Shareaza now has additional measures to limit not only the number of active transfers per host, but also throttle the number of raw connections.


This is a very cool version, and I strongly encourage everyone using Shareaza to upgrade. And if you haven’t tried Shareaza yet, give it a try. It’s strangely addictive.


http://www.shareaza.com/