New FrostWire “Bullet” 5.5.6, faster search, archive.org integration and improved Chinese Character support

Download now for Windows

Download now for Mac

The new FrostWire 5.5.6 (codenamed “Bullet”) has an overhaul of its search architecture now borrowing code from the android version which has been meant to be more efficient in terms of CPU and memory usage for reduced battery consumption and faster response times on less reliable networks. The desktop version now benefits from the mobile development efforts.

By Integrating with The Internet Archive’s search API FrostWire users benefit from having access to the largest online database of public domain and creative commons works of the internet. Over 7 million works are indexed and more are added every day. This release is a dream come true for the FrostWire team, we know users world wide will be empowered by the breadth of content they’ll now have access to thanks to the Internet Archive project.

Chinese and other foreign character support has been improved in the areas of search result display, Library display and media playback hopefully opening up the doors to new markets for file sharing in China and Chinese Mandarin speakers worldwide.

Full changelog:

frostwire (5.5.6) stable; urgency=high
* New Feature: Includes search results from archive.org, which indexes
millions of public domain and creative commons works from all over the
internet.
* New Feature: playlist songs can be re-ordered with drag and drop.
* New Feature: all songs in a playlist can now be exported to a folder.
* Upgrade: Improved Unicode support for Chinese characters.
* Upgrade: mplayer update for unicode character file playback support.
* Upgrade: Search architecture upgrade for much faster search results.
* Upgrade: Considerably faster mp3,mp4 parsing in the library, creating
playlists is now faster than ever.
* Upgrade: New more explicit Wi-Fi sharing icons.
* Upgrade: Updated radio station database.
* Upgrade: up to 20% faster listing of files in the Library.
* Upgrade: Video player upgrades for better experience.
* Bug fix: screen-saver no longer kicks in during video playback.
* Bug fix: UPnP Wi-Fi sharing discovery consumes 84% less CPU on
congested local networks. Fixing reported slowdowns and reducing
considerable power consumption for laptop users.
* Bug fix: X11 related error fix.
* Bug fix: Number of files being shared includes the number of torrents
being seeded.
* Bug fix: Library search issues related to unicode characters.
* Bug fix: Multiple null pointer exceptions and crashes fixed.
* Bug fix: Fixed rendering issue related to wrong parsing of bitrate
string data.
* Upgrade: (Developers) ant compilation scripts cleanup.
* Upgrade: (Developers) use of ‘frostwire-commons’ repository to share
common code between FrostWire for Android and Desktop projects.

– FrostWire Team <contact@frostwire.com> Mon, 22 Apr 2013 05:58:00 -0500

FrostWire 5.5.6 Changelog (UPDATE 3)

Attention Technical writers, hackers and hardcore FrostWire enthusiasts, here’s the upcoming changelog for FrostWire 5.5.6 as we polish the last details and begin the testing process.

Update 3 (Apr 23 2013 – 10:38pm EST):
Download FrostWire 5.5.6 Release Candidate Installer for Windows

Update 2 (Apr 23rd 2013 – 9:32pm EST):
Download FrostWire 5.5.6 Release Candidate 2 Installer for Mac OSX

During the next hours we’ll be releasing Release Candidate Binaries for those of you who would like to help catch a few bugs in advance. This list is not final as we’re still closing the development cycle for this release.

Please fork-us and send your patch-branch via pull-request.

frostwire (5.5.6) stable; urgency=high
* New Feature: Includes search results from archive.org, which indexes millions of public domain and creative commons works from all over the internet.
* New Feature: playlist songs can be re-ordered with drag and drop.
* New Feature: all songs in a playlist can now be exported to a folder.
* Upgrade: Improved Unicode support for Chinese characters.

* Upgrade: mplayer update for unicode character file playback support.
* Upgrade: Search architecture upgrade for much faster search results.
* Upgrade: Considerably faster mp3,mp4 parsing in the library, creating playlists is now faster than ever.
* Upgrade: New more explicit Wi-Fi sharing icons.
* Upgrade: Updated radio station database.
* Upgrade: up to 20% faster listing of files in the Library.
* Upgrade: Video player upgrades for better experience.
* Bug fix: screen-saver no longer kicks in during video playback.
* Bug fix: UPnP Wi-Fi sharing discovery consumes 84% less CPU on
congested local networks. Fixing reported slowdowns and reducing
considerable power consumption for laptop users.
* Bug fix: X11 related error fix.
* Bug fix: Number of files being shared includes the number of torrents
being seeded.
* Bug fix: Library search issues related to unicode characters.
* Bug fix: Multiple null pointer exceptions and crashes fixed.
* Bug fix: Fixed rendering issue related to wrong parsing of bitrate
string data.
* Upgrade: (Developers) ant compilation scripts cleanup.
* Upgrade: (Developers) use of ‘frostwire-commons’ repository to share
common code between FrostWire for Android and Desktop projects.

– FrostWire Team <contact@frostwire.com> Mon, 22 Apr 2013 05:58:00 -0500

FrostWire 5.5.6 New Feature: Export playlist files to folder.

New Feature: Export playlist files to folder.

Sometimes you have a playlist made from songs that come from many different folders and you’d like to make a “mixtape” cd, or just copy all those files elsewhere (maybe a USB Drive) in a single place.

Now you can right click on the playlist name, or on top of any of the files in the playlist and use the “Export playlist files to folder” feature, you will be presented with a dialog to choose the target folder and then all the files will be copied to it.

New FrostWire for Android 1.0.6 – Now with access to Archive.org’s 7.3MM files

Download the APK or get it at Google Play

A new FrostWire for Android is here, this is a major update that you should not skip, specially if you’ve had issues in the past.

The biggest changes are:

Integration with Archive.org

Archive.org indexes free files from all over the internet, there’s a huge amount of Public Domain files and Creative Commons files, so keep an eye for those archive.org results if you’re looking to remix legally free available content, FrostWire will be a great tool to find it.

Archive.org also indexes torrents of these files, if you download and seed you will help make its contents more decentralized and durable, not to mention you will save archive.org some bandwidth.

The Archive holds over 7.3 million files, it’s a powerful content library that now is easily accesible from anywhere using FrostWire, we hope you find it very useful, for example, law students and attorneys can now use FrostWire to search for public transcript of court cases, among other documents. Almost every known public domain film, book, and audio recording is available and best of all we’ve integrated it with FrostWire after revamping our search architecture which now delivers results as soon as possible to your android device.

Search results coming from archive.org include basic information about the file’s license if available, make sure to check the licenses and to respect your local copyright laws, FrostWire condemns copyright infringement.

Faster Search, Reduction of CPU/Battery consumption

We’ve made search considerably faster, now results are shown as soon as they come in, in the past our algorithm would wait for a certain amount of results to come in and show them to you, the search experience should feel snappier now. Also we optimized and fixed our code and some third party libraries that weren’t meant to be used on Android so now the app consumes up to 84% less CPU which will result in your battery lasting a lot longer if you’re running FrostWire.

We’ve made a few improvements in the bittorrent core, namely the hashing algorithms are about 15% faster than before which also reduces battery consumption while downloading and checking torrent chunks.

More stable and compatible

Since our last release in november we received thousands of crash logs from users worldwide and we went through all of them fixing bug by bug, in the process we did a few updates on the user interface you will notice a nicer looking navigation menu, and more intuitive icons to share/unshare files on the Wi-Fi network.

Many fixes related to the audio player, specially an annoying double-playback bug lots of you reported, thank you.

Full Changelog

For those of you following the codebase and who know geek-speak

FrostWire 1.0.6 - APR/08/2013
 - Faster search results. Search architecture revised and improved.
 - Includes search results from archive.org, which indexes millions
   of public domain and creative commons works from all over the
   internet.
 - Reduces CPU and battery consumption up to 84%.
 - FrostWire won't disable screen locking during audio playback.
   It's now up to the user to set longer auto-locking timeouts if
   they want to use FrostWire as an audio player in their vehicles.
 - UI fix, media player screen is correctly updated if a song starts
   while the screen was locked.
 - Updated icons and graphics.
 - Improved mime type detection.
 - Supports WebM video search results.
 - Updated UPnP cling libraries for better Wi-Fi sharing discovery.
 - Multiple crashes and freezes fixed.
 - Opens .torrent files from urls and from any file browser.
 - Faster hashing and checking of ongoing and finished torrent downloads.
 - Fixes a crash when sharing files from third party apps like FileKicker
   which pass filepath uris instead of android provider uris.
 - Fixes double audio playback issue with third party media playing apps.
 - Fixes bug where the app would force close and restart on phones without SD cards.
 - Fixes bug on Android 4.x where finished document downloads wouldn't appear under
   documents.
 - Avoids crash caused by AdMobSDK and WebView's cache being null.
 - Fixes bug where sharing files from a third party app would open FrostWire
   in a way that hitting the back button would take the user to the desktop and
   not back into the third party app.
 - Replaced navigation menu for a better one that presents itself with a smooth
   brief zoom-in animation.
 - Navigation menu and transfer screen looks properly on Motorola Razor
 - More efficient use of Bitmaps should cut down on the number of Out of Memory errors on most devices.

FrostWire at Mount Everest’s Basecamp thanks to Azoora’s John Purcell

We think Azoora‘s John Purcell has raised the bar to the top of the world with this Hoodie picture.

Download Azoora’s A Thousand Ways Ep if you haven’t already, it’s absolutely free and free to share, remix and even make commercial use of thanks to its Creative Commons license

Absolutely cool, thanks so much, this makes FrostWire Everest cool.

Archive.org as a new search engine in FrostWire puts millions of free legal files in your hands.

We’re currently polishing our next release of FrostWire for Android 1.0.6.

Our last release was back in November 2012, since then we’ve received crash reports and lots of complaints that have helped us make the next FrostWire for Android much more robust and compatible for the +2,600 different supported Android devices that run FrostWire on hundreds of thousands of mobile devices every day.

We’ve taken this time to make the search experience considerably faster and we’ve finally been able to integrate our search with another great source of legally free available content, Archive.org.

Archive.org is a non profit organization that crawls and indexes the web’s free content and as of the moment of this writing by having FrostWire connect to its search api you will be able to search through an astonishing number of free and legal works, here’s how they break them down on their home page today:

1,181,452 movies
114,118 live concerts
1,567,041 audio recordings
4,386,872 texts

that’s over 7,246,483 works most of which are tagged with Public Domain and Creative Commons licenses that you’ll be able to download and share with FrostWire.

Most of this content is under the Public Domain and also under Creative Commons licenses.
If FrostWire can detect the license on the content it yields on search results you will see it on screen.

And every year that passes, more works automatically fall into the public domain so you will be able to access more and more information for free absolutely legally, literally from the palm of your hand via FrostWire. We think this goes in line with our mission, and once this update is released the world will be a little better place to be in since all of you will be empowered with free digital works and culture.

Other than that we’ve fixed many crashes, freezes, lowered cpu and memory consumption (which will make your battery last more), we’ve done upgrades on almost all of the application icons, fixed issues for older phones that didn’t have SD cards the way new phones do now, bugs on the audio player and so much more.

Archive.org as a search engine, and a revamp of the search experience is also being added to FrostWire for Desktop so stay tuned for our next desktop release as well (5.5.6)

changelog

FrostWire 1.0.6 - 03/28/2013
 - Faster search results. Search architecture revised and improved.
 - Includes search results from archive.org, which indexes millions
   of public domain and creative commons works from all over the
   internet.
 - FrostWire won't disable screen locking during audio playback.
   It's now up to the user to set longer auto-locking timeouts if
   they want to use FrostWire as an audio player in their vehicles.
 - UI fix, media player screen is correctly updated if a song starts
   while the screen was locked.
 - Updated icons and graphics.
 - Improved mime type detection.
 - Updated UPnP cling libraries for better Wi-Fi sharing discovery.
 - Multiple crashes and freezes fixed.
 - Opens .torrent files from urls and from any file browser.
 - Fixes a crash when sharing files from third party apps like FileKicker
   which pass filepath uris instead of android provider uris.
 - Fixes double audio playback issue with third party media playing apps.
 - Fixes bug where the app would force close and restart on phones without SD cards.

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