WeStream: Streaming Music From A Torrent File
Written by Ernesto on January 08, 2008WeStream is a new applet that allows you to listen to individual music tracks, streamed from .torrent files. The applet is developed by BitLet, has a great interface, and is compatible with all Java-enabled browsers.
WeStream works in a similar way to BitLet’s web based BitTorrent client. All you have to do is go to the WeStream page, enter a link to a .torrent file that links to music files and hit play. The applet will then scan the torrent for files that are suitable for streaming and provide you with a web interface to control playback and volume.
Currently, WeStream supports OGG and MP3 encoded audio files, but more file types will be included in the near future.
There are a few important conditions to achieve an optimal streaming experience. Most importantly, there should be enough seeds and peers to guarantee a decent download speed. Besides this, the playback time will depend on the filesize of the tracks – the higher the bitrate, the more bandwidth is needed.
Below is an example of WeStream for a torrent from Mininova’s featured torrents section. By clicking on this link you can load it in your web browser.
From a technical viewpoint, WeStream prioritizes the bits at the beginning of each song, otherwise it will be impossible to stream anything before the entire track is downloaded. However, like most other BitTorrent clients, it also gives a high priority to rare pieces in order to guarantee an optimal swarm speed.
The applet seeds the torrents as long as you keep the browser window open. Daniele, the developer of both BitLet and the new WeStream feature told TorrentFreak: “It would have been easy to design the streaming client to be extremely selfish, and make it care only for its needs. Ideally, we tried to avoid it: Westream should behave as most torrent clients, with a slightly different piece choosing strategy.”
WeStream is a great tool for people who want to listen to some of the tracks before they download anything, or for people who want to let their friends listen to an album without having to send all the files over first. Above all, it is a great looking innovation from the BitLet team that shows how much is possible with BitTorrent. We might just see this implemented in some of the popular BitTorrent sites soon.
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26 Responses
Wow!
Look’s nice, probably I will implement it on my site :)
Awesome. They are doing a great work at BitLet
Pretty cool!
Good to check out music new music I guess :)
Good job guys!!;)
[quote comment="258194"]Awesome. They are doing a great work at BitLet[/quote]
indeed
this is dangerous! stream a track even for 32 seconds leaves u a taget for the riaa lawsuits
[quote comment="258235"]this is dangerous! stream a track even for 32 seconds leaves u a taget for the riaa lawsuits[/quote]
Nonsense, the artists (we link to) gave their permission to share the files. Apart from that, there is no difference between streaming and using your BitTorrent client, you connect to the same tracker.
What about seeding? This is clearly leeching, right?
[quote comment="258259"]What about seeding? This is clearly leeching, right?[/quote]
Not really :P
Check out the last part of this blog post: http://blog.bitlet.org/2008/01/music-streaming-on-bitlet.html
[quote]In addition, we always attempt to complete the pieces we started to download: since each peer announces to others only the pieces it has completed, we try to complete each piece we start so to be able to serve them to other peers as soon as possible.[/quote]
awesomeness as usual!
http://paidandpopular.com
[quote comment="258259"]What about seeding? This is clearly leeching, right?[/quote]
You can also see the upload speed by clicking on the green download icon. It shares just like any other BitTorrent client.
This definitely beats searching for samples on iTunes and Amazon.
Sweet. I hope they’ll open up the source code, though. When they launched, they had a thing saying it would be open source soon… no such claim anymore.
looks great, but crashes my firefox when it begins downloading :(
Its not optimal if you ask me. When you close your tab in FF and navigate back it has to load totally again. Not very productive.
/’;m ‘ v’ po poev o A[]r-
This is amazing. Although this has always been possible, it’s great to see someone finally doing it, and it seems like they’re doing a great job with it. Thanks for the link Ernesto, BitLet seem to really be innovating. Hopefully it helps BitTorrent become more well known to the general public, with that other post you made about BitLet allowing people without clients to download torrents. This has been a major roadblock for the adoption of BitTorrent to replace things like LimeWire.
One question though, my understanding is that this is all done through a Java program, so you still download the content, and the case isn’t that BitLet is a middle-man between the transfer, right? That way they can’t be held responsible for what users download. I hope that’s how it is, and hope BitLet continues with this wonderful development!
@15: I don’t think it has to load again completely. I went back and it still had it listed there. From the FAQ:
[quote]
Is resume supported?
Sure, every time you restart a download just click save in the same location where you saved the download the first time (the applet will propose it by default), and your download will be resumed.
[/quote]
[quote comment="258235"]this is dangerous! stream a track even for 32 seconds leaves u a taget for the riaa lawsuits[/quote]who cares?
This is exactly how the Azureus’ video download site should have worked. I’m still pretty shocked that no one has created a streaming torrent video site that works on the exact same principal as WeStream.
does this stream the tracks or download them? i dont want any of the data to stay on the computer… just to stream the data it downloads and delete the bits it already played. anyway to do that if it doesnt?
Very cool! If it could just do this with µTorrent and foobar2000 and with an option to save the files my life would be complete. ;)
However the sound quality is very bad (nothing to do with the technology, just hoping the developers will see this and fix it). Try to change the volume in the applet to the highest level. Now change it back and set the volume in Windows to the same level you played the music at from the applet, or much higher if you want to. There is a huge difference and there should be none if it was working correctly.
so if after listening to the album i decide to keep it, i have to download the whole thing again?
not convenient at all imho…
This is retarded, I suggested a protocol/method like this months ago.
Congrats though, I guess.
dws, no it just changes the order in which chunks are fetched. I’m always stunned when people say streaming isn’t downloading because it IS, it’s just a specific kind of download. Likewise, whether something hits the disk or not, is irrelevant. If people thought about the meanings of “down” and “load”, they SHOULD be able to realize this. That’s my hope anyway.
>>24,
i’m not sure in what way you may have understood my comment, it’s just that i’d like to have the possibility to save the songs after listening (and downloading before / while listening of course), without having to download them a second time, since they’re already in the cache
apart from that, i think it’s a great idea, i’m sorry if my first comment left a different impression
If you like this, maybe you should try out http://torrstream.com This site is like a bittorrent client that leeches from your PC only and converts your videos on the fly into a nice Flash Stream. Trailers are shown while buffering, all you need is decent upload or some friends that seed with you. Pretty cool, I think :)
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