What feature would YOU like?
 

What features would you like to see in upcoming versions of LimeWire? We're already making good progress on the automatic re-query feature and on better integrating metadata into the result view. (So you can see bitrates next to speeds, etc.) Here are some new ideas:

1. LimeWire used to display an estimate of the number of searchable hosts, as well as the number and total size of searchable files. With protocol changes, this has become harder to do accurately. Leaf nodes are totally incapable of estimating the horizon. This could change if we introduced a new protocol message.

2. LimeWire used to have a feature to browse the contents of another user's computer. So if you liked a search result, you could see other files being shared by that user. We took it out many versions ago because it didn't work right. But we could re-implement properly it with some effort.

3. If a host has no more upload slots, it could queue people requesting the file and service transfers in a fair manner. The host could even give you an estimate of the amount of time until you can download the file. ("There are 3 people ahead of you, with an estimated wait time of 92 minutes.")

4. LimeWire allows you to sort search results by name, size, etc., but it does not do this dynamically. That is, if you sort by name, results added afterwards are not sorted. Dynamic result sorting would be particularly useful for making high-quality search results "float" to the top of the result list.

5. The library could visually organize your shared files by metadata such as file type, artist, genre, etc. Most likely it would show a number of "virtual directories" to do this.

6. LimeWire already has an integrated MP3 player. We could make it play videos and other audio format as well. We could also increase the performance of the player substantially or add other features.

Of course we'd like to implement them all of these features, but we have limited resources. So vote for your favorite and we'll try to implement the most popular ones.

Remote queueing definitely is the best thing to implement right now, since this could give you an idea how long you'd have to wait for popular files (mainly divx-movies).

The LimeWire-mp3-player is not exactly what I would call useful (it does not reach the quality for winamp or xmms, somehow I've always got some 'blips' more than with those two). And I'd rather want to choose the mediaplayers to use myself and save them in some config-file or so....

BTW. will LimeWire implement the HUGE-Proposal? And when will it do so? When you could search for a hash automated researching could be implemented easily, could it not?

PS: I like v2.1.1 a lot. How about a LAN-Version of LimeWire with the ability to block all IPs except for just a subnet or two? We have something like a traffic limit for outside traffic, so you wouldn't have to configure the firewall to connect to a local gnutella network and some clients, which allow outside traffic could as well be connect to the local and the global gnutella network. - It'd make things easier for people running gnutella in some companies (which they certainly shouldn't - but anyway, nobody cares if not too much outside traffic is generated) or campus networks (at least here in Germany).

I think it could work, if you'd allow wild chars (* or so) in the limewire.props file for the Blacklisted-IPs-option, although it would be even easier if you'd add an IPs-allow-option, where you could enter all IPs to be allowed. But that's just my personal wishlist (and I have to admit I am to lazy to do those changes to the LW - Source myself)

Anyway you're doing a great job! Keep on doing what you're doing.

Chris, 3, 1 and 4 in that order. Of course you can already do number 4 by double-clicking the titlebar of the Host column. But that would be great for lazy people. 3 would be cool, but even better is to actually implement "resuming incomplete downloads". 1 is cool to look at.....

Blackbelt Jones: You can have your own local gnutella network. In previous versions of LimeWire they let you edit the conenction string. You can just run another LimeWire using port whatever, force yourself to be an ultrapeer and change the connection string in your limewire.props file to whatever you want to use. But you must remember other clients that wanna connect to you must also have that same connection string. If you edit the connection string, LimeWire shouldnt be able to make connection to the public gnutella netowork.

Yes, but I want some clients to be able to connect to the local and the global network at the same time.

Thanks everyone for the feedback. Keep voting....err...if you haven't done so already.

John: changing the connect string to make private communities doesn't work in LimeWire 1.8 and later, since they use the "Gnutella 0.6" handshaking protocol. However, the bleeding edge code in our CVS repository has some simple authentication code that could be used for this. If you're interested in getting your hands dirty, contact me personally and I'll give you some more info.

Also HUGE is temporarily stalled on the GDF pending the GGEP proposal ("Generic Gnutella Extension Protocol"). Yeah, we'll probably implement whatever is passed.

-Christopher Rohrs

I have a simple request :
An option to disable the built-in MP3 player is already present .
Now I would like to be able to get it of my screen if I want to .
Make an option in the config-menu to hide the player .

Even if you disable the player it still scrolls that stupid line of text .
It makes my LW GUI unresponsive and draws too much CPU power .

heh, no it doesnt.

Yes it does . :D

about 3, what if the host is using another client?

can an auto-retry option be added for these cases?

personally,,I'd like to see a way to save our favortie host so we can try them first when we log on,,alos I like numbers 1,3,4,5,,and I don't use your mp3 player and I doub't if I'd use the movie player eather,,if it affects anything,,eather way,,I love your product and hope to continue useing and enjoying it for years to come;)

thanks.... VTOLFREAK the link worked great for CLW.

i am having a problem using the ANNOTATE feature.
i should be able to rename files ?????????????????
if so i dont know what i am doing.

thanks for any help.

If you want to alter a filename click it to select it , wait 2 seconds then click once again .
Then you should be able to type a new name and press ENTER when you are done .

The library view has worked this way since I can remember ... (Like 1.7 or something)

Thanks for the feedback
 

Thanks, everyone, for the feedback. We'll try to implement the two most popular features, though I can't make any promises. Anurag is starting shortly on the browse host feature, and I will investigate remote download queueing in a day or two. (Need to fix some bugs first.)

Remember that Anurag and I are paid LimeWire staff. So this development is funded directly from ads, bundled software, and PRO sales.

Christopher Rohrs
LimeWire

I'm with VF (and others) about the mp3 player. At lease an easy way to toggle it on and off.

A way to scroll through the file would be handy if it stays.

(What are PRO sales, Chris?)

Would it be hard to design in a feature that allows you to gather the same file from different hosts at the same time? It would cut down on outbound bandwidth and make for a much faster download.

It would also be handy to be able to start a download, then add another host to that download if you find more hosts in subsequent searches.

Would that clog things up too much?

Hello Geraldo. As VTOLFreak pointed out, there is a way of using your native media player instead of the built-in player. It might be possible to visually remove our media player if users do this, but I don't think there's a big demand for the feature.

The multi-source downloads you mention have been in LimeWire since 1.9. The ability to add new files to an existing download will be added in LW 2.2.

<a href="http://www.limewire.com/index.jsp/pro">LimeWire PRO</a> is the ad-free, bundled software-free version of LimeWire that we sell for $6. That payment gives you six months of free upgrades and helps pay for future developments.

-Christopher Rohrs

Secure
 

My place of work monitors my net usage.... any chance of being able to make secure (SSL) connections to other Gnuttella users?

Not possible with the current protocol .
Bad luck . Try posting this in the feature request forum .
They might implement SSL or another kind of encryption into the Gnutella 0.7 protocol .
Or 0.8 , whatever the next version is gonna be .
They are up to 0.6 now .

How about an option to collect automatically all incomplete downloads?

I mean, a button... press it and LM search for all files in the incomplete folder and add them to queue.

is that possible?
if this request is already done, then sorry... i was blind :-)


GMM

Desired Features for Limewire
 

I run a LimeWire server 24/7 off a high-capacity DSL line. I don't do any downloading, instead, I use Limewire to publish educational lectures and radio programs, mostly of a historical or religious nature. I have permission to reproduce these file, and interest is high - about 1000 half-hour programs are uploaded each day. I paid for LW Pro to help the cause.

My desired feature is less anonymity. I'd like to be able to leave a system message, pointing users to my website, or some other way of contacting me. Many users will try chat sessions, but because the system is up 24/7 unattended, I rarely see the chat to respond.

It seems that LimeWire is set up to be as anonymous as possible, and that's fine. But it would be great (for those trading non-copyrighted material) to be able to make a connection with others they find through this system. FTP servers have a system greeting, and web servers have title bars. Some kind of system greeting, which could be left off for those wishing anonymity, would make people-to-people connections easier.

Hi Waltbru. One thing you can do is annotate your files with metadata. To do this, select the file in the library, right-click, and choose "annotate". In this metadata, you can include a link to your website, as well as comments. Anyone downloading the files will get the metadata, as will be downloading from the downloaders.

The problem is that users need to know where to look for the metadata. In older versions of LimeWire, that means choosing the somewhat clumsy "change view" or "show annotation" options from the GUI. LW 2.2 (coming soon) makes the metadata more obvious by including it with normal result data--if the user has the appropriate columns turned on.

Also, one thing we'd like to add in the future are optional user names. This would allow users to locate another user by name in order to look for files, chat, etc. Users could also "bookmark" favorite hosts, regardless of whether they have static IP addresses. Needless to say, this is a big undertaking, so it probably won't happen in the immediate future.

Thanks for the comments!

-Christopher Rohrs

Re-search
 

I can't tell you how many times I have wanted to right-click on the results tab and see 'Search Again' as an option. Also, could you use a tooltip to show the search category for the tabs? That would be great to know what type of search each one was.

Enable CMD-C copy, CMD-V paste and CMD-A Sellect all. All are needed to keep track of "Upload Names" (on the Monitor Page) in order to create log and keep track of most popular uploads (mp3's etc).
:(

upload auto cut-off
 

I think there should be a feature to cut-off very slow uploads. often my limewire gets caught with six people uploading at .5k / sec or even 0; this reduces the number of slots for people that can actually get content from my machine quickly.

slow uploads
 

Slow uploaders don't necessarily waste upload slots. Check out the options in your tools->options->uploads window. LimeWire will initially give out "start upload slots" uploads. Then, as long as there's enough bandwidth, it will continue to give out uploads until it reaches "max upload slots". Be careful not to set "start upload slots" too small, our LimeWire won't be able to tell whether it's you or the downloader that's run out of bandwidth.

another upload auto cut-off question
 

Thanks for the tip; my upload slots were a bit low. But i have another question: the people that are constantly uploading at 0 or .5 k/s get their file only after many hours; this is one of the complaints of new users that the gnutella network is slow. Most people usually download from another host if the connection is slow; many people don't. Wouldn't it be a good idea to prevent these slow connections in the first place to encourage people to download only from those who they have a fast connection to? For instance, right now there are two people trying to upload from me at 0 k/s; my concern is that these people will never get their file because they are stuck on my slow upload.

LimeWire tries hard to swarm downloads from multiple sources whenever possible. So one slow download doesn't mean the whole file will be downloaded slowly. Future versions of LimeWire will try even harder to find faster locations.

None of the features you presented. they are all needless in my opinion, except perhaps the remote queuing.

first: HUGE or any other hash-enabling protocol.

second: auto-resuming that actually works.

do you actually enable multisourcing for modem users by now? if not, than that is definitely number three.

Abaris: HUGE is actually one of our top priorities at the moment, and will likely be included in 2.3. (No promises!) "Browse host" is a really easy one, so that will probably be included as well. Remote queueing may or may not be delayed somewhat in response to some skepticism that it will actually help the user experience.

As for resuming: it really does work, if you try to download a file with the exact same name and size. But we understand that this this is not intuitive. In the future, we will likely add the ability to select incomplete files in the library, right-click, and have LW automatically resume, initiating new searches if needed.

Swarming is typically not effective for modem users because their downstream capacity is less than that of most uploaders. This causes modem users to tie up upload slots needlessly. Of course LimeWire has had dynamic upload slot allocations since 1.9, but there are still lots of older clients out there.

I would like to see items 2, 1, 3 implemented.
Thank you for your suppport.
LW221pro user

backbones connections and blocking hosts
 

I like John Blackbelt Jones ideas about blocking hosts except for some subnets / backbones domains or IP.

Would be greate for eg university networks with speeds like 2,5 Gbit/s and 10 Gbit/s (sunet/nordunet), or for better crawling in northern Europe, and to get rid of all american modem users and theirs futile attempts to download iso-files.

/Mutatis mutandis

How about this..
 

How about making resume downloads work. Queing and all the rest will not make that much different if everytime you lose connection or log out etc you have to start downloading again. The forums are screaming for this to work. PLEASE!

I'd like to see HASH and fixed download resumes.

Re: backbones connections and blocking hosts
 

I may be taking this comment out of context, and if I am, please forgive me. I take offense to this comment. It is understood that it is cheaper for Europeans to get broadband modems, but on this side of the pond, broadband is anywhere from $40 to $60 in my area, compared to dial up which is $10 to $25. The majority of us would be more than happy to get DSL or cable, but my dad's a contractor and we're unable to afford the luxury of the broadband modem. You choose broadband because it's cheaper for you than dial up, we're on a dial up modem because broadband is outside of our budget.

What feature would YOU like?
 

I am most interested in being able to browse others' computers (a great way of discovering music I never would learn about otherwise). Remote DL queuing and dynamic results sorting would also be nice.

I prefer my own audio/video player software. Nor do I use LimeWire's library feature, as I generally listen to tunes once, then burn them onto a CD to make room for more DLs. My music player sorts files adequately.

Other requests:

I would like to set column widths ONCE in the search window display and have them show up that way in all searches. I know what fields I'm interested in!

Better file naming for Mac users please? Rather than hack off the end of the filename, which usually contains the song title, how about hacking off the beginning?

what about ip grouping
 

What about a (ip grouping) feature for those people who have ten million songs of one artist? You know, to tidy up and compress the search results. There is one already for grouping the same named songs, why not add a feature like that? I think that would be a nifty little addition.

Definitely, (2), being able to see what other files a given host has on their machine. It's a great way to find new stuff that you might enjoy.

Thanks.

Feature update
 

Hi everyone. Just want to update you on the features we're planning for future releases. First of all, resumed downloads should work properly in 2.3.0, which is now in <a href="http://www.limewire.com/index.jsp/download_beta">beta</a>. (Ok, that's a bugfix, not a feature!)

Of the features listed in the poll, browse host and remote queueing are definitely the most popular. Browse host has already been started and should be done in a release or two. Remote queueing is temporarily...um...queued...while we work on HUGE and HTTP/1.1 download support. We think this will have a bigger impact on downloading performance. And as always, we're tweaking ultrapeers to get better search results.

Thanks for good feedback!

-Christopher Rohrs
LimeWire

Potential Features
 

Unreachable IP

I would like to be able to exclude unreachable IP addresses under the Search quaification options section... I periodicaly get a wrath of non-routable IP addresses (IE 10.x.x.x 192.x.x.x). Since I can't get to them there is no reason to display them in the search results window . . . right?

Mouse Wheel
It would be nice to enable the use of a mouse wheel for scrolling.

Endorsement
I have been using Llimewire for a year or so and have tried the leading competing products.... I prefer Limewire... I am a registered 2.2.4 user and the last few releases appear to produce much more reliable results... great product!!!

If you install java Runtime 1.4 , the mouse wheel is supported ...
So what are you complaining for that ?

About the IP's I totally agree .
Those 10. addreses really annoy me .
I can list them following IP so that the stupid addreses are down the list but then I can't sort them by size and such .

I wasn't aware it was a complaint.... more a would be nice thing. Thanks for the tip I will get the newer Java lib.

Java 1.4
 

Well... I downloaded the latest JRE from the SUN site and installed it, rebooted ... the mouse wheel still not functional in Limewire. It could be O/S related (running Win 2KP) I will go to the Microsoft support site and see what I can dig up. -

At any rate thanks for the tip.

A few ideas
 

I am a new Pro user after seeing how you guys responded to a not so nice exchange (not with me, btw) rearding broken resume, and Adam fixed it and posted a new beta, thank you. You guys are more professional about your client and it shows.

Anyway, I think you should definately put the multimedia stuff on the back burner. In fact, it might even be good to fork the mp3 player code into an addin module or separately downloaded client, since most people seem to not want it right now.

File hashing: this is a must do. It would be good to have hashing done once on each file before connecting, and results saved until a manual refresh is asked for. (I don't know if this HUGE thing is hashing, so that dupilcate sources can be found by hash?)

It would be good to have a more aggressive search for more sources built in, so you can "set it and forget it" knowing Limewire is looking for what you want at all times.

Thanks for your hard work!

My List
 

Please please, let's have Browse Host!! I snagged a file I'd been searching for the other day, and my DL time could not have been more than 5 seconds! Awesome. Back in Napster days, I could have browsed the host, and gotten any other files I liked of his, FAST. With cable modem, I occasionally get some truly amazing DL speeds, and it would be nice to be able to identify and (maybe?) maintain a listing of those hosts who are also fast so I can periodically browse their files.

The scrolling feature...I haven't tried the java solution, but it appears to not work that well from what the previous poster has written. Is there more info on this somewhere?

Refresh search is a must also. I just hate all that re-typing!

I'm with the others on forgetting about the players. I have my own that I like just fine. I'd encourage you to spend the time working on other features more people want.

I'm using the Pro version these days and like it a lot. Keep up the good work!

Pamela

To be honest I don't really care about any of the features you've mentioned in the poll. Perhaps browse host. Integrated media players are completely useless. We all have our own preferred ones that are likely much better. Why reinvent the wheel? My computer can multitask. I'll use iTunes or Winamp to play mp3s, Quicktime or Mediaplayer to watch movies while Limewire runs in the background.

What I NEED is a reliable way to resume broken downloads. I know this is supposedly fixed in the latest beta, which I haven't yet been able to download (it keeps stopping halfway through).

What ****** me off the most when using Limewire is when I resume a download from the same site, same file and it disregards what i've got so far and STARTS OVER AT ZERO % wasting my time. There should be a resume button and it should NEVER EVER NO MATTER WHAT delete partial files. Why this isn't included yet is a mystery to me, but anyway that is the feature I would like to see most in Limewire. I suppose if I had a T1 or faster connection I wouldn't care, but man I want to kill someone when I see hours are wasted because the program deleted a 45 meg partial file when I resume dl'ing it from the SAME site.

Features I want
 

I'm going to be buying the Pro version very shortly (today or tomorrow). I find the $8.50 more than reasonable. I'll even buy it again after 6 months if I get my feature requests.

There are some usability problems, likely Apple's fault. If they're Apple's fault, then Limewire should be able to take their estimated userbase size and ask Apple to fix them. If they can be coded around, Limewire could do that.

More importantly for all of us, I'm currently a freeloader. My cable company will kill my account if I upload more than 500MB/day. I'd prefer to kill the slide bar of upload speed and have a box I can type "5KB/s" (which I can only get to if I tell it I have a modem), which by my estimates, would make me uploading about 430MB/day if I have popular stuff. Likely harder to implement, I'd honestly prefer to have a field to say, "Go as fast as you please, but never upload more than 450MB/day, when you reach that, stop sharing my files until midnight". Of course, that field should be whatever the user wants. I hate the slidebar, because the scale changes based on what connection I type in, and the connection type impacts my maximum download speed (is that real or a false observation? if it's real, it's stupid.) I'm currently lieing to the service and telling it I have a T3 and not a cable modem because I observe faster downloads.

I have a cable modem .
And hard to believe it actually get's close to some big pricy connection .

Cable technology has a roof of 10MB/sec .
If you have bad performance on a cable modem , don't yell at the modem , yell at your ISP's overloaded backbone .

My ISP has a good backbone and outperforms cable connections of other ISP's .

That's also the reason why I have to lie to LW about my connection .
If I put it on cable it just won't utilize my entire connection .


For example : I put LW on cable and give it a huge list to download .
While LW is going stupid downloading 40 files at once (the standard limit of 8 is way too low) , I still have enough bandwidt left to stream music of the net at 96KB/sec using Windows Media Player

As far as increasing the potential number of available files, I like what BearShare has done in their latest release which is to have an auto-force ip option where if you're behind a router, it will go out to these free services to discoever your real IP address and then use that. I always force my IP, but I'd be willing to bet that a lot of people don't realize that they're assigned a different IP by a DHCP, or how to change it even if they do know.

-Chuck

I use a NAT router with a built-in DCHP server .
But I don't have to put LW in firewall mode .

It knows a nice trick :

Normally it addresses the PC's in your like LAN this for example :
First PC : 1.0.0.1
Second PC : 1.0.0.2
Third PC : 1.0.0.3

But my DCHP server looks at the real IP of the router ,
then addresses my LAN like this :
First PC : **Real IP**
Second PC : 1.0.0.1
Third PC : 1.0.0.2

Then I let it forward all incoming data to the PC with the **real IP** and voila !
The machine doesn't even know it's behind a NAT router , it's completly transparent .

Unfortunatly , most people don't have DCHP servers and NAT routers like this .
Don't think I have some big expensive piece of technology overhere , this thing came rather cheap .
When I first bought it and looked at the box it thought : How the hell can this be so cheap ?
It has a NAT firewall , USB port for configuration , rendunancy (multiple modems attached) , built-in print server , NAPT , PAC server (that's right , I plug in my PC and I don't have to set my proxy ! It does it for me !) , and the list goes on ...

The trick that bearshare does is also a smart move , but what if the NAT router at that IP doesn't forward those packets to the PC with BS on ?
How did they do that ?

i like most of what ya said
 

but i'd also like:
for limewirepro [paid money for it]:
1. return the search to top and tab format

2. in search window: add block ability to rid us of those posting known incomplete files [particularly the 1 k files - videos normally several megabytes..]

3. give current version option of reducing upload bandwidth share to 0% that way most people would use current instead of ver 1.6 er so [ really leeching off current version users.]

4.have a toggle in options that can disregard files beginning T-######### etc [known incomplete file] for searching

5.show ip addresses in search window. so we can ban 1k file twits without downloading their crap.

New Idea: Prioritization
 

When I connect using LimeWire, I almost always get elected as an ultrapeer. I have a combined upload/download of around 700 KB/s (yes, kilobytes).

In the interest of rapid data dissemination, seems to me high speed hosts should get priority in downloading. This way, files can spread more quickly and more copies could be available for slower users.

Before kazaa took away the Linux client, I was upping around 20GB/day. But on Gnutella, I just can't seem to get the files.

Fact is, if I could get the files, I could also up them. I can support a large number of file uploads.