14 DAY TRIAL // The Internet is all about information, and, let's face it, the web can only go so far. And when the web is not enough, we turn to file sharing programs. There are many programs and many networks out there, many new ones come out everyday and some fall into the shadows and are forgotten. LimeWire is one of those filesharing programs that has stood the test of time and has been constantly improving.
Gnutella, with a G not an N LimeWire is a filesharing application that makes use of the gnutella network. This means that there is no central server or higher authority to dictate what is and what is not shared. When you establish a 'bridge' to another user, you automatically become connected to all the other people that person is connected to, and them to you. The gnutella system offers real freedom of interaction and is the closest approximation to how humans establish relationships. This means your interaction with the gnutella network becomes better and better the more time you spend connected to it because you establish more and more 'bridges'.
Looking for... Ok, now that we know what it uses to connect users to one another, let's take a look at the client itself. After opening it up, the program points you in the general direction of its search functions. You have the option of searching for a particular file type or doing a general search. General search works like a web search, using keywords. Other programs return a huge mess of files with hardly any options to filter them in order to find that relevant file.
After you enter the keywords, LimeWire gives you the option to further filter the results by media type, and then two additional filters depending on what media type you choose. If you wish it you can customize the three general search filters to whatever you want by using the small button on their titlebars and selecting a filter from the pop-up menu.
Searching for a certain file type from the very beginning offers a very different search experience. Selecting audio file, for example, gives you fields for title, artist, album, track number, genre, year, length and bitrate. This makes it so easy to find exactly what you are looking for. LimeWire has these different fields for each media type, so you always know what you are searching for.
And as if this was not enough, in the result list you can hover over any result to get even more information about that particular file which helps a lot if, for example, you want to find a book knowing only the author. You can just look at all the results until you recognize the name of the book you want.
Now I've found you... get over here! If you're looking for something, chances are, other people are too. And if several people are looking, chances are there are many people who have what you want. LimeWire automatically informs you of how many different sources it finds for any particular file. This serves to reduce confusion, since even if there are a hundred people with the exact same file, that file will only appear once. Another interface nicety is that in the results listing you are shown which files you have already downloaded and which you have already added to the download queue. If there are multiple hosts with the same file at the same time, you can download from all of them in the same time, at greatly increasing speed. If one person logs off, you can jump to another person and continue the download, the program automatically does it. As you would expect, LimeWire has full support for pausing and resuming downloads. And remembers the download queue from session to session.
There are some stability issues as the program is a bit demanding and it does crash every once in a while. All in all, it is stable and gets the job done, it does its job well and looks decent enough.
The Good The search is very well implemented and really makes your life easier, it functions well enough even for people behind firewalls and nat, and perhaps most importantly, it is popular and used by many people.
The Bad There are some stability issues as the program is a bit demanding and it does crash every once in a while. The crashes are rare but the resource hoarding is pretty much constant, and if you have an older machine, you probably won't be able to do anything demanding with the computer when LimeWire is running.
The Truth LimeWire is one of the most loved filesharing programs on the Mac, and for good reason. The search functions are excellent and since it's so popular you can easily find more than on other networks... It's like having your cake and eating it too.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
