Soulseek

A funny thing happened a few days ago when I was going through my apartment, filling trash-bag-after-bagfuls of junk I've accumulated over the past decade. I came across an old D-Link DIR-600 router I had purchased for my mother-in-law several years ago and then promptly forgot to bring along to the other side of the bay. Later on, I tried giving it to a neighbor in need, fully upgraded to the latest firmware, but the upgrade rendered it virtually unusable, unable to hold a TCP connection for longer than about half a minute at a time.

I usually take longer between each release, but as there's already a respectable array of attempts here to satisfy some of the more active unfulfilled feature requests, and despite the fact some of these new features are woefully under-tested, I figured I'd lay it out there and hold off on an auto-update release until I can get enough feedback and the chance to fix any issues that come up. This time around:

As many of you already know, I now have a full-time job that's keeping me horribly busy and leaving me barely able to see straight at the end of each day. Still, I try to do at least one thing every weekend in way of improving SoulseekQt, be it fixing a serious bug, or adding a feature or two that's been sitting in the feature requests list for a while or that I would like to see added myself. Tonight's build is the sum total of my work over the last few weekends since the previous release.

With today's release I get to check off one of the longest and most oft-requested changes to SoulseekQt: the ability to display search results the way they're displayed in the original client, without the breakdown into a tree of usernames and folders. Some of you just preferred the old look, more of you were missing the ability to sort search results by any of the columns. I prefer the new look, and most of the things that can be done through column sorting can be done with filters as well, but now you have the choice.

Smaller release this time around, this is mainly to address a crash bug that affects certain shared folders. Those experiencing the bug will find their client crashing a short while after starting it. I figured I might as well get it out there for whomever really needs it. Additionally:

Though I initially intended room walls to be the centerpiece of the next SoulseekQt build, most users, and especially those who share more than just a few thousands of files are probably going to be much happier about the initial re-scanning of shared folders when the client starts being moved to a secondary thread. If you're used to your SoulseekQt client taking anywhere between an uncomfortable number of seconds to start to, according to some reports, several minutes, chances are the new build will all but eliminate the wait.

Hey guys, sorry for not responding to any connection problem reports over the last couple of weeks. I have a full-time job that's keeping me very busy and I've had trouble reaching even those of you who actually gave me their TeamViewer ID and password. To recap, chances are I won't really be able to help with any connection problems as in most cases it's an ISP blocking Soulseek or something similar.

For the last couple weeks I've been taking a closer look at the way SoulseekQt uses up memory. If you're a casual user, sharing no more than a couple of tens of thousands of files or less, and you don't go around leaving a whole lot of search and share browse windows open, chances are you haven't had too many problems with SoulseekQt's memory use. If you're one of the more heavy users out there, well, you should still be fine as long as your rig gives you enough memory to play around with.

• You can now choose file extensions to exclude from folder downloads. Files with the selected extensions can still be downloaded individually.
• You can now ask to be alerted when a user goes online via the context menu. User online alerts can be viewed under Users->Online Alerts.
• A search filter can now be marked as a default filter. It will then be automatically applied to any new searches, save for wishlist searches that have been associated with a different filter.
• The tabs in many places are now movable so as to let you reorder them.

We're happy to announce a new service for privileged users that we've been experimenting with for the last couple of weeks. If you've donated recently and have privileges time left you probably know this already, as we've notified privileged users via mass message a while ago.