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Mielophone: Mulve-style Music Downloading on Steroids Posted: 17 Nov 2010 01:19 PM PST After the Mulve music downloading app burst onto the scene in September, it didn't take long for it to be closed down and cold water poured on the fun. Now, just a couple of months later, a new application has appeared which not only does everything that Mulve did, but adds more sources, integrates music discovery, last.fm, a playlist and download manager, videos, lyrics and more. While its birth was a relatively low-key affair, the launch of Mulve into the mainstream proved to be quite the opposite. In September the news of its arrival was reported on dozens of sites but it all came crashing down just a few days later. Undoubtedly prompted by IFPI, BPI and the Big Four labels behind them, the British police moved to make an arrest. Mulve was no more. However, as we pointed out in a follow-up article, Mulve-style functionality could be achieved in a number of different ways, but none of them really added anything to the original experience. But now, Mielophone – a new app from a small team of Russian coders – takes the Mulve idea and pumps it full of performance enhancing substances. “Basically there’s two of us. There was also guy who created a design for the app but he disappeared somewhere,” programmer Yamalight told TorrentFreak. While Yamalight is a guitar-playing martial artist currently doing a PhD in Europe, his partner in the project, Recoilme, simply describes himself as a music lover. “Our motivation to create Mielophone was pretty simple. After last.fm (and all other online radios like Spotify etc) became completely paid in Russia (‘cos they couldn’t get an agreement with local music labels etc.), there was no more sites to just listen to music or discover new stuff, or do any of cool things from last.fm,” Yamalight explained. “So we decided to write our own app that combines all cool services into one thing.” Once installed and run, the Mielephone interface is pretty self-explanatory. While one can search for individual tracks by clicking the ‘Tracks’ tab, music discovery can also take place using the ‘Albums’ tab. By clicking here and entering an artist or band name, a selection of album covers will appear as shown below (left). Clicking an album cover will automatically switch to the tracks view where all tracks in the chosen album will be displayed (shown below, right). Album view Selecting single tracks for listening in the integrated player (which also has a playlist editor) is as simple as left clicking them while download queuing is achieved with a right click. Queuing the entire album is achieved with the ‘Download all’ button in the bottom right of the track window. All chosen tracks will then be transferred to the ‘Downloads’ tab where queued but unwanted tracks can be deleted with a right click. Downloading all queued tracks is done with a click of the floppy disc icon. Download folder location can be configured in Options/Settings. Clicking the ‘Artist’ tab will bring up a bio of the artist in question (albeit currently in Russian) and selecting the adjacent ‘Video’ tab willl, unsurprisingly, give a collage of artist videos which can be either be viewed in the app or a web browser. Artist bio and videos But Mielophone isn’t done yet. Aside from the selectable music sources (listed in ‘Options’) and YouTube, three other online services are also utilized. First off, MusicBrainz is used to get albums and tracklists and was chosen for its accuracy. Last.fm is used for a number of functions including obtaining artist info and covers, to generate radio by tag, to get the top 100 songs by artist (right click, track view, excellent for discovery), and to scrobble. Lyrics.com use is self-explanatory and again accessed with a right click in the track view. Mielophone requires Adobe’s AIR to run and was chosen in order to service users of multiple operating systems and to ensure they get new versions of the software as soon as they become available. “The first versions of Mielophone were actually written in like 3 or 4 different languages, but when lots of people started to ask us for a version for Mac and Linux we decided to switch to AIR which has all the stuff we need and works great under all OSs,” said Yamalight. Development of Mielophone is still underway and users of more operating systems will be able to enjoy it soon – there is already iOS and Android versions on the way. The Mielophone homepage can be found here, and the ‘install now’ button is the most user friendly option for those without AIR already installed. Article from: TorrentFreak.

The Pirate Bay, One Year After The Tracker Shut Down Posted: 17 Nov 2010 05:51 AM PST Exactly a year ago The Pirate Bay team surprised friends and foes when it announced that the world's largest BitTorrent tracker was shutting down for good. The site's torrent index would remain online, but millions of users had to find alternative trackers or rely on trackerless technologies to share their torrents from then on. In addition, The Pirate Bay suggested a move away from .torrent files entirely in the future. In the fall of 2003, a group of friends from Sweden decided to launch a BitTorrent tracker named 'The Pirate Bay'. It soon became one of the largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet, coordinating the downloads of more than 25 million peers at its height. The Pirate Bay boasted the title of “the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker” for half a decade, but a year ago this title no longer applied. On November 17, 2009 The Pirate Bay decided to shut down its tracker for good. According to the Pirate Bay team central trackers had become obsolete. "Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, The Pirate Bay has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It's the end of an era, but the era is no longer up-to-date,” the team announced. The Pirate Bay argued that BitTorrent trackers have been made redundant by technologies such as DHT and PEX. In addition, The Pirate Bay team said that they might move away from torrents entirely and switch to offering Magnet links instead. "We're talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and DHT and PEX for all sites. Moving away from torrents and trackers totally – like pick a date and all agree 'from this date, we'll not support torrents anymore'," a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak at the time. The announcements led to confusion and uncertainty among many torrent users, but in reality very little changed for the average torrent user. The Pirate Bay’s dominant position as a tracker has been taken over by two new ones, and even after a year .torrents are still available on The Pirate Bay. What was interesting to see, however, is the response that came from the development community and torrent site owners. Before last year most torrent clients didn’t have support for Magnet links, and those that did spent little time on making them compatible and easy to use. However, after The Pirate Bay’s call for Magnet support this quickly changed. BitTorrent clients such as Transmission, BitComet and Ktorrent all implemented support for Magnets this year. The clients that already offered Magnet support, such as uTorrent and Vuze, didn’t sit still either and spent time optimizing their implementation. Similarly, the operators of other torrents sites were also listening in and nearly all of the larger torrent sites that didn’t already offer Magnet links soon added them. In January, this was followed by the launch of the first 'Magnet-only' torrent index named TorrIndex. Clearly, the words uttered by The Pirate Bay operators had not been in vain. As for the tracker that was shut down, aside from the sentimental value it hasn’t really been missed. OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent quickly took over and have been going strong ever since, and not without a reason. Larger torrents with thousands of peers will work just fine without a central tracker thanks to technologies such as DHT and PEX. But the majority of torrents out there only have a handful of peers and for these files a central tracker is still an essential part of the downloading process. The shut down of The Pirate Bay tracker last year marked the end of an era, but as it stands now BitTorrent trackers are not defunct yet. Article from: TorrentFreak.

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