SoulBox

SoulBox is a way to automatically share your favorite files with friends. Drag and drop files or folders to the SoulBox application window to add them to your library. Files in your library can be shared or unshared at any time. Shared files will be automatically transferred to your friends, and their shared files to you (See the technical info section below for information about how it works.)

You can also attach comments to any file in your library, and see comments that other users left anywhere on the system.

SoulBox is in early development, so new features are very likely to be added in the future.

To use SoulBox, you'll first need to register your e-mail address by going to:

http://soulbox.herokuapp.com/users/sign_up

Then download and run the client. Latest Windows/Mac builds:

Windows: https://www.dropbox.com/s/59zy7nks9ektgh2/SoulBox-2014-11-5.zip?dl=0
Mac: https://www.dropbox.com/s/vahm345y2pheyh2/SoulBox-2014-11-5.dmg?dl=0

Feel free to add me, my SoulBox e-mail address is: desktop@desktop.com

Technical information:

  • Your client will attempt to download any file that's shared with you from anyone on the system who has it, not just your friends. For that reason, having more friends helps ensure everyone will get your shared files. You may not be able to form a peer connection to one friend, but you might be able to connect to another, and they'll in turn upload the file to your other friends.
  • Files in your SoulBox library are stored in a private partition. To access the files, you need to save them from the context menu.
  • Files are organized into file sets. When you add files to your library, the default file set name is the folder the files are in.
  • As you can imagine from the above, and just like with Soulseek, having your port (4444) exposed helps a lot. The client will try to use UPnP on Windows and UPnP+NATPMP on OSX to automatically forward the port.
  • The backend for SoulBox is very different from Soulseek. It's actually a web server which supports JSON API calls with a database behind it. That should scale a lot better, but currently there's no way to receive real time notifications. Things like friend requests and information about newly shared files arrive whenever your client syncs with the server, which automatically happens every ten minutes. You can also sync manually from the menu bar.