LimeWire 4.9.7 Beta
 

The LimeWire 4.9.7 beta has been released. You can download the free version from the LimeWire download page. PRO users can download the beta from their personal download page.

Important: LimeWire 4.9.6 Beta was D.O.A. If you happened to download it, please download 4.9.7 now.


Changes in this version include:

* Magnet link fixes for OSX, thanks to Roger Kapsi - LimeWire should now correctly start a magnet download with a single click
* If you hold Ctrl, Shift or Alt while resizing a column it will resize in new ways - give it a try :) Thanks to Miguel Munoz.
* Resuming downloads was accidentally broken in previous betas. This beta fixes it.
* Various fixes to the update functionality.
* Some changes that should address the problem of LimeWire dropping all connections and refusing to connect without restart
* Updated translations

Thank you for helping us with the beta test cycle, and don't forget to turn on Notifications for new betas! :)

-The LimeWire team

Both Fabion & I have the identical complaints about this version. Difficult to connect to hosts. At startup it quickly rushes thru the incompletes & all are either 'Need More Sources' or 'Waiting for busy hosts' (a large no!!!) So then we are forced to manually search the topics or resume/find sources. Of this both have had limited success. In one day i've had a max of one downld/time, & fabion a max of 4. What's more, the speeds have been very limited for both of us. And for fabion he is used to very hi speeds!

With LW 4.8.1 I am conditioned to downlds starting within LW unassisted 2/3 of times. The betas have not done this (with the exception of the 1st beta on only the very 1st occasion.) And if things are not so good, then a browse finds those sources, but browses are not only harder to find but less effectual.

LW 4.9.7 seems less effective than LW 4.9.5 which is less effective than LW 4.8.1 for my normal use of LW.

I'm not sure about the logic that we need to use the Resume/Find more sources function to get out incompletes started again & even that with less effectiveness than LW 4.8.1

I realise the NIB or whatever it's called has allowed some changes but, I think something's been unnecessarily sacrificed here.

I confirm the bug of LODR.

LODR: minutes ago I told the devs on IRC about that issue :)

The logic of downloading was changed so that LimeWire would remember fewer sources between sessions, but those sources would be of higher quality.

This is a necessary step because now LimeWire quickly discovers pretty much all the hosts on the network that have had at least a part of the file at one time or another, and that number is usually very large. It would take too much room for LimeWire to remember every single download source it ever heard of between restarts, so it only remembers those it successfully downloaded something from.

It is not so much a sacrifice as a different tuning - LimeWire may seem to perform a little worse for downloads which are resumed after a restart, but will perform better for newly started downloads.

LimeWire 4.9.7 Beta
 

Hi

In skin, Metal, backgrounds Show/Hide, Apply Skins & Change Language is transparent... When I choose skin Black Theme and next Metal, Windows Classic or Windows Theme backgrounds Quality, #, Filename etc. is black! In skins: Metal, Windows Classic or Theme, when I click on Search LimeWire's logo is some strange... :)

Sorry too all errors, but I poorly speak English. ;)

Pretty much any theme problem can be fixed by restarting in that theme.

I don't think this bodes well. I've found that a cannot let Limewire run 24/7 (it uses too much in resources). Which mean periodically I need to shut it down before a download is completed. What you are telling me is that the likelyhood of me successfully completing the download will now go down. I've also found that serving as an ultrapeer gives me poorer search results and than when I am a leaf. Limewire also uses up so much bandwith and resources as an ultrapeer that I can hardly search the net. (Im using a 1.8GHZ P4M with 1GB of memory) So even though I have been willing to be a ultrapeer to benefit the network in the past I wont now because I see no advantage to it. Also I am a Pro-Beta user.

The memory used while running as an ultrapeer should be reduced greatly from the 4.8 series. Are you noticing such change?

With respect to downloads, if you start a manual search or click on "Find more sources", LimeWire will perform as if it were a new download - i.e. better than 4.8.

It seems to me about the same. Regarding downloads thank for the update. Have noticed any difference between searching for files as a leaf or an ultrapeer.

Shawn

Double-check your changes to make sure they're for the better
 

I suspect the programmers don't realise exactly how much this has affected the normal users of LW. You should test your changes before making them permanent! I certainly wouldn't buy pro if i was getting results like i'm getting now. I don't believe i need to put it any more clearly. LW was fine before, if you need to reduce certain things to make it more gnutella client community compliant then please say.

As it stands, LW is quite a different program than it was before & requires a totally different approach than any previous version. On top of that, it means that users need to know & understand the most advanced skills of using LW in order to make it work let alone continue incomplete files which now have a "lesser" chance of completing & more & more incompletes will basically become obsolete b/c LW won't recognise or remember the previous hosts.

To amplify what LOTR is saying you are basically making downloading of files a one shot all-or-nothing deal because LW is doing poor job of treating identical files as the same requiring you to start over. PM me and I can send you some examples of file searches that demonstrate this problem.

Shawn

hmmm been running 4.9.7 since last night with several shutdowns and restarts. I have run as an UP and Leaf.

I find I get get significantly better search results as a Leaf by a margin of 5 to 1 than as a UP.

I also run as a LAN T-3 connection setting which my bandwith supports easily, but as soon as I start LW in UP mode it eats up about 75 - 90% of my bandwith. When I start LW in Leaf mode it only uses about 20-40 of my bandwith.

While using version 4.8.1 my bandwith useage as a UP was 40 - 60% at most.

I have I aslo noticed significantly reduced download speads in 4.9.7 over previous versions. I can rarely hit 60 KB/s. I can only at most get 4 consecutive d/ls going at that speed, all of which have 10 hosts for the files in question. All the rest of the d/ls are as waiting for busy host. When one of the d/ls finish one of the previously qued d/ls will start. Odd it should do this as I haven't not had this problem with previous versions.

As previously mentioned d/ls do not automaticly restart, when restarting 4.9.7. I have to do manual searches and then if I find a host it still doesn't restart the d/l. I have to cancel the d/l in que and then select d/l from the search results, which the d/l will start from the previous point it stopped at. Odd also

Memory usage is about the same as previous version. No noticable difference.

Just my observations. BTW Java 1.5_04, LW Pro 4.9.7

bug?
 

i noticed that when i'm playing a song with lw's media player and scrolling through my list of files the song i'm listening to gets all jumbled up and starts skippin around. i checked out my resources and they shky rocket when i do this. any suggestions?

Are you limiting the bandwidth LimeWire would use? There were various improvements in the io subsystem which have made LimeWire much more efficient in transfering data. If you are not limiting the bandwidth through the internal LimeWire setting, it will very likely be consuming more than the 4.8 versions.

The problems with downloads not restarting is something we'll definitely look into.

Well I do not seem to be having the problems the others are having other than incomplete downloads not starting.But I havent been running 4.9.7 verry long either about 2 hrs. I have been able to start as many DL as I want with speeds up to 500+ while UL at unlimited running in ultrapper good search results but havent been searching for rare files either.Mem usage a little bit less than previous versions. All in all it seems to be better to me than previous versions.

Latter Grandpa

Hopefull If I did it right here are a coupple of screen shots

Question: if i change metadata in an audio file such as an mp3, does this change the sha1 hash?

I think limewire does the hash with the meta data so the sha1 is changing. GnucDNA and Raza are stripping the metadata from computing the sha1, each solution has both the ups and the downs.

I noticed after shutting LW down and then restarting that it said no firewall detected which is odd because my router is Firewalled. When I shut down and restarted multiple other times it always showed the firewall icon the Unpd was doing its job and getting around it good connections leaf mode only good UL & DL. I have not noticed any diffrence in preforemce only that no firewall detected did it possibly disable my firewall ??. If you happen to notice the snapshot in my earlier post I was not conecting through the router when that snapshot was taken

Later Grandpa

After further Investigation the firewall on my router had been disabled. Had to reset router LimeWire now showes Firewall Icon. I do not know if LW somehow rest my settings or what happend but I saw a post earlier where someone had a simular problem might be somthing that needs to be looked into. Let me know if I can help.

To illustrate my point that fabian amplified on. Today I connected as an ultrapeer and did a video search of the term "xvid" that term return 847 files. Doing the same search (xvid) three minutes later after disabling ultrapeer capabilities returned 1904 files. Folks that aint right. Why be an ultrpeer if it ruins your ability to download files???

Shawn

Hey Shawn how long did you run in Ultrapper mode and how many connections did you have when you did the search. I have found that if I have 40 conections I get better search results running in Ultrapper. I have also found that sometimes I can not get that many connections. If i run for a coupple of hours and only have 35 connections and I am looking for a rare file I will disable ultrapper and run in leaf. But if I am looking for comon files I wil stay in ultrapper because it does not seem to matter even if it says there are only 6 or 7 sorces for a certain file when running in ultrapper I will usually get 8 connections and DL at speeds between 40kb/s and 200kb/s so I do not see where it ruins my ability to DL files.

Latter Grandpa

Grandpa I had 33 peers and 13 leaves when I ran the search in ultrapeer mode (limewire had been running for about 13 hours). Statistics showed I was at the 4000 host cap. I must confess that when I ran the search in leaf mode I dont think everything had completely settled down but still an 2:1 ratio of difference is not good.

Shawn

1. Overwriting a file will _sometimes_ causes the icon of the search result to immediately goto a green check. Although it is still downloading, the icon should be displayed as a manilla folder. still seeing lots of these icon bugs.

2. The priority/queueing of downloads were for some reason out of sync and skipping a few numbers... it would skip numbers. ie: 1..3..4..5..7 etc.. i wish i took a screenshot of it.

3. I have a folder in my library that is called "2.1.0", the right pane cuts off the last decimal ".0" of my folder name. (its now doing it with any last digit)
http://rootproject.servehttp.com/alk...scrnshot06.PNG

4. I noticed an upload that kept going frm 95% to 100% about 10+ times before killing the connection to avoid wasting bandwidth for other uploaders.
http://rootproject.servehttp.com/alk...scrnshot05.PNG

5. I noticed an upload that was crossing over 100%.. screen shot: http://rootproject.servehttp.com/alk...scrnshot03.PNG
... http://rootproject.servehttp.com/alk...scrnshot04.PNG

Maybe you guys need to start from scratch....
 

The other big issue is the fact that I can begin downloading a file get to 20 or 30 percent and then it becomes disconnected by the network and then when you do a subsequent search limewire will find the file that is still in your download que but it will have a broken symbol and when you hit the continue download button it will say "You are already downloading "XXXXX.XXX" so now I have to cancel the download "and get rid of the 15 or 20 percent already downloaded" or hope I can find it some where else. this is a BIG PROBLEM

Shawn

This is normal - depending on the number of free upload slots you have and how active the other side is, the downloader at position 2 may sometimes get ahead of that at position 1. Nothing to worry about.

It is possible that the data was just getting corrupted along the way, or the downloader was buggy. Its also possible the other side got different hash tree for the file.

The progress displayed depends on how much data the other side claims to have downloaded. It doesn't mean that you have uploaded more than 100% to them. (i.e. they could very well lie)

Re: Maybe you guys need to start from scratch....
 

I am happy to inform you it will be gone in the next beta :)

I'm still getting those disconnects that were meant to be fixed.

As, in my mind anyways, an experienced user, I find that the PRO BETA ver. 4.9.7 is the worst "improvement" ever. Did I say "improvement". What am I?? A damn politician?? My searches show as many as 29, 30, 45 resources for a download, but when I try to download it it say "need sources". Huh?? I have successfully downloaded pretty much what I wanted, but now?? And my computer's resources went to hell. There is just no way I can run LimeWire and surf the net at the same time. It takes too long. And playing a game is virtually impossible. The game freezes because LimeWire Pro ate all the resources. I don't usually complain, but this is B A D!!!!

I am running a P4 1800@400mhz with 1 Ghz Ram with WINXP+ & 2 HDDS (102 GB & 80 GB) with a very clean Cable connection.

Now you show me where I should pay you $14.50 for a renewal or is that why I got a price break. This BETA Sucks worse than the RIAA and that is going aways.

Go ahead someone, give me a few platitudes to salve my soul while I go to Hell with this program. I'm going back to basic. Leastways I don't have to pay to get my computer screwed up.

People unclear on the concept...
 

Folks, folks, please calm down. This is a *BETA* meaning it is for TESTING. I'm sure that the programmers are concerned about all your reports of problems and are looking into it. If you're not willing to experience problems, however, you should NOT be running the beta. If you weren't having problems with the stable version, just go back to 4.8.1.

Me and the other beta-testers will help them figure-out what's wrong with the current 4.9. When 5.0 is eventually released, it will work perfectly.

Hi deacon72 and the rest in this thread.

I'm sure the developers are working there best to get these bugs worked out. It just doesn't happen overnight. Patience is a virtue and I'm sure the developers will get it sorted out and fixed.

That is why they release beta versions and let the experienced users and beta testers use it. That way they can get the bugs worked out for a better performing application.

I have yet to see any new software versions come out that didn't have some bugs, whether they be free or comercial products.

well the resuming of downloads is fixed in CVS, I just tried it. It will be available in 4.9.8, maybe today or tomorrow.

Ciao