Nicotine+
Nicotine+ is a graphical client for the Soulseek peer-to-peer network.
Nicotine+ aims to be a pleasant, free and open source (FOSS) alternative to the official Soulseek client, providing additional functionality while keeping current with the Soulseek protocol.
Soulseek is a file sharing network for mostly Music but also other files. The most available format for songs are MP3, M4A and FLAC. Almost any song/album is on there so you will have no problem finding what you need. You need to share files yourself otherwise there is a possibility you will get banned. I added a YouTube video tutorial so you can understand it better.
Screenshots:
Downloads are available for:
Been using it for quite a while, it’s very good and allows to share basically everything. I’m sharing terabytes of music but also movies, archives, etc. You can find pretty rare stuff sometimes too
Oh I didn’t know you could also download other things beside music! Thanks for the information
Yep, just make sure to not share a file too far back, I nearly shared my whole computer on accident
You will not get banned for not sharing. What actually happens is that some people have scripts to see if you’re sharing, if not they refuse you access to their files until you start sharing. That has to do with each individual and nothing to do with the network itself, other than the fact that it gives you the option to deny access.
OMFG, Soulseek still exists?!? I thought bittorrent killed it 20 years ago.
Soulseek is great although it absolutely requires port forwarding to share files. It’s also very much a “desktop” app and I don’t think much investment has been made for it to be a solid, containerized server app. Everything I have explored on that front has been very janky.
Not a server solution but it’s not a desktop app. On androids there’s Seeker that does an excellent job of connecting to the network and downloading what you want.
My basic point stands. It’s a shame because the network would be even better if folks could run 24/7 servers easily, like people do with torrents.
I used the regular soulseek client via the Linux appimage, but I switched to nicotine plus when I found it on flathub and I can confidently say I’m never looking back.
I can’t believe soulseek still exists, I have so many memories of getting the wrong content or suspicious files with it more than a decade ago 🥲
Wow, I love slsk and have been using it since literally about 2004 (it has absolutely defined my taste in music), but I didn’t know there were any options for clients except for the main one. This is great!
If you’re reading this and you’ve never checked out slsk, consider this your invitation. I have spent hours trying to “stump” it by searching for increasingly-obscure music. Someone always has it on slsk.
EDIT: HOLY JESUS HALLELUJAH IT HAS DARK MODE
Lucky you - there’s definitely still tons of obscure music not on Soulseek. But for 99.9999% of people they’ll find everything they’re looking for. Certain band and artist names are blocked to avoid copyright issues so you’ll have to search by song ot album title.
Apparently you know your way around there… can you ELI5 what soulseek exactly is? Is this based on torrenting? Is it comparable to what limewire was back in the day?
Stumbled across it and don’t know what makes this so charming for so many people
it’s more like limewire as it does not use the BitTorrent protocol but rather direct P2P connections to other users. In that case it tends to be slower
It’s popular cause it’s probably the most popular P2P non torrent app and there’s a lot of hardcore users sharing over 100k music files including real rarities and mostly public to all. There are some locked file users in search of trades and that’s been hurting the overall community arguably as well as people who ban if you don’t share anything but generally most are willing to share whatever to whoever as long as you don’t download all their shares at once
Thank you very much :-)
This is by far the best way to get your hands on high-quality, less-mainstream music. Been using it for years now.
freakin’ awesome! i used soulseek on windows ages ago and i totally forgot about it. two weeks ago a friend asked for my help to set it up and i went looking for open source alternatives and found Nicotine+
i’m awe struck with it! i’m someone who keeps a local music library and torrenting has been getting worse in this department, specially with newer music. how could i have forgotten about this…
i didn’t even remeber you could search the whole network for titles lol, i expected to browse folders, user by user haha
i’m currently going over all my newpipe playlists of less-mainstream artists
i’ve got a question: when searching for files, the grayed out ones are offline peers or ‘locked’ files?
Does soulseek work with lidarr in anyway? I have been using lidarr for mostly any music content downloading from Torrent and usernet sites.
You can setup lidarr to import from a blackhole folder and have soulseek/nicotine save downloads to the folder. Unfortunately you can’t control soulseek/nicotine from lidarr and have to search & download manually
Been using Seeker for a while now, will have to dl this on my mac at some point!
Thank you! Never knew that existed.
Soulseek isn’t just for music. It’s where I get most of my TTRPG PDFs
I’ve never heard of Soulseek before, but it sounds like exactly the sort of thing I’ve been trying to find for years! I’m so sick of Spotify, I want to get back into collecting locally but it’s hard. This looks perfect :)
Nice the “official” client is garbage!
My only thing is there any simple way to transfer all my stuff from qt to nicotine? I have literally several hundred items on my wish list and user list
