SoulseekQt

Not much to tonight's build. The wish list feature has been a long time a-coming, and so here it is. There was nothing stopping me from throwing together a quick hack to make wish list searches work on top of regular searches (or so I thought), but I wanted to provide a little something extra, as I try to do with all original client features I have to re-implement. Just getting the basics to work turned out to be more complicated than I had expected.

The subject of banning is one that I've been reluctant to tackle in SoulseekQt since the very beginning. There are few topics in the history of Soulseek that have been as much the subject of strife and ill-will. Horror story after horror story, it seemed as if for almost every case of it being used to prevent download abuse, someone out there has been banning for all the wrong reasons. Because they didn't like what the other person was sharing, or often for no apparent reason whatsoever, and refusing to answer any questions; a situation I've been in myself in the past.

New in tonight's build, the ability to prioritize the download order of users in specific groups, for those of you who want finer-grained control over their upload queue. By default all user groups are awarded a download priority of 0, which means the downloads of users in that group won't be processed in any special order. Raise it to 1 however by means of clicking the 'Configure User Groups' button at your User List tab, and your client will process their downloads before all but those in groups with even higher priorities.

The big change this time around, in response to the many problems the client had uploading files on Mac and Linux, is a complete shift of the file-transfer system from relying on Qt's single-threaded event model for handling socket communication to a multi-threaded, one-thread-per-transfer model. This went a long way toward simplifying things, and had the unexpected effect of greatly improving download and upload speeds on all platforms when the bandwidth capacity is there.

Many thanks to user audiophilepj for his help hunting down some of the most stubborn bugs in the area of peer messaging and uploading, mostly to do with TCP connections more unresponsive than usual due to possible combinations of operating systems and/or routers. Many of the problems that have been fixed as a result of his diligent testing and posting of crash reports echo of issues that have long eluded me in the original Soulseek client.

New in the latest nightly build are one very important feature and one very convenient feature, assuming they should work for you as intended. As with the original Soulseek client, I'm using the very handy miniupnpc library for UPnP functionality. If your router supports UPnP, as most routers do, you should see a serious improvement in peer-to-peer connectivity, covering transfers, browsing and searching if your SoulseekQT listening wasn't manually forwarded already. The initialization is done in the main thread which means the client takes a couple of seconds longer to start.

Not much to say here. Seems like all of the changes made for the Linux port pretty much worked right out of the box on OSX. The no proper dock icon business has been addressed. I went through all of the basics, rooms, downloads, uploads, sharing, browsing, searching. It all seems to work. If this is the first SoulseekQT build you're trying on your mac you'll need the Qt framework installed as before. Link below.

If you've been keeping up with the nightly builds, the only major change since the last one is a reworking of the peer connection mechanism that better packs together the whole simultaneous direct/indirect connection business in a way that's a lot less likely to default on you as you exchange peer messages and/or transfer files with other clients. A full changelog of everything new since Public Build 3 is available further below. And, oh yes, Linux! Many caveats with that one. First of all, it's 32-bit. I haven't had much luck getting it to work in a 64-bit Linux virtual machine.

No major new features in this one, as should be the case for most future public builds. As downloading appears to work pretty well my focus now is on getting the entire life-cycle of uploads to work. This means everything from properly returning downloadable search results to browsing to actual uploading. A bunch of bugs related to this were fixed, and a few unrelated ones as well:

I seriously need a break from development, so I figured I'd release what I have so far as public build 2. The biggest change is the addition of user groups; the ability to assign one or more groups to users on your list, and share different folders to each of those groups in your file sharing settings. The client also seems to now be able to return downloadable search results. Everything else is relatively minor: