SoulseekQT Public Build 1

Well, it's been many months of hard work, and although the new Soulseek client is far from complete, and can't seriously be considered to be a proper replacement for the original client, I've finally reached a point where I feel it's good enough to at least be looked at. If for no other reason than to provide a glimpse at what's to come. If you try it out, expect lots of missing very basic features and bugs of every stripe. Rather than publish at major milestones, I'm going to be regularly posting new public builds here every time I fix or add any small number of things. I've set up this Drupal website just for that purpose, and you can already use it to add and vote on new feature/bugfix requests via the SoulseekQT Requests link above and the'Add content' option on the left. I also intend to keep a very detailed changelog here so you know exactly what you're getting with each new build.

Here's what (sort of) works already, but should be expected to break without any warning or actual heavy use:

• Room chat
• Private chat
• Searching
• Downloading
• Share browsing
• Sharing and uploading (largely untested)

Here's what's definitely missing, among many other things:

• Automatic reconnecting
• Port forwarding
• Private sharing
• Limiting transfer numbers or speeds
• Showing transfer speeds
• Pretty much anything else that isn't in the first list

Other caveats you might want to consider:

• One of the most exciting under-the-hood developments in the new client, and one that's claimed a lion's share of the time and effort put into it so far is a new, extremely versatile internal data management system that should really help with implementing more advanced client features and providing clearer, more reliable software designs for existing features. The downside right now is that it is heavily unoptimized. If things seem to slow down or gobble up a lot of memory when searching or browsing shares, hang tight, this is definitely something I'm going to work on in future releases.
• The new client is built using the cross-platform Qt framework. This might make it relatively easy to port to other non-Windows platforms such as Linux and Mac. Since I haven't tried do that yet I have no idea how practical it would be, but I definitely intend to once the Windows build generally stabilizes.
• Client configuration data is stored in c:\soulseek-client.dat. Far from ideal, I realize, but only temporary.
• Downloads go into c:\soulseek-downloads\ until I implement a way to set your own download folder.

That's it for now! Head over to the SoulseekQT download page using the link on the top of the page to try it out. If you intend to comment on this or any future posts, please keep things civil and constructive. I may not be able to respond to every question or comment, but know that I read and take everything posted here into consideration.

Thanks! Nir