this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2024
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I never used LimeWire I'm not old enough for that, what is it that people remember so fondly about it anyway? Was there something that made it special or is it just another torrent client?
LimeWire had the search built in. Coupled with being a kid, it made it very easy to download it and get tons of free music. I don't even think I understood what torrenting was at the time. If it was seeding it either didn't make it clear or I was just that young and dumb. Basically, the interface was intuitive enough for people to just use and not worry about the details is what I'm trying to say.
So basically what qbittorrent with a search engine plugin was but before they had search engine plugins and qbittorrent?
Yeah pretty much
Prior to LimeWire you kind of mostly had to go to a physical store to buy a physical medium, or you “pirated” music onto blank tapes or CDs and swapped them with your friends. Shopping from home for (free) music was a game changer.
Is that actually true? I mean maybe I'm wrong about this, since I wasn't there but I've heard usenet was a thing even before limewire.
FWIW Limewire was not a torrent client, at least not for a long time.
The Napster era of P2P file sharing used centralized servers for indexing and querying the content available: it was a much simpler system than torrents, but much less robust.
So your torrent search site and your torrent client were essentially bundled together within a desktop app. Again simpler: you could just tell someone what program to download and they were off to the races. Great for word of mouth when the web was still underdeveloped.
What came up when you searched was essentially whatever was in the shared folders of whoever happened to be online at the time. So it was even more of a wild west with essentially no moderation.
Overall worse than torrents in almost every way, but it was a fun weird time to be online. I personally went from Napster to KaZaA to Limewire before ultimately moving on to torrents.
Oh so it wasn't really torrenting, just similar.
Exactly. Torrenting is just so much more powerful that it's become synonymous with file sharing as a whole.
Seems pretty similar to how Soulseek is today.
LimeWire was based on Gnutella protocol, which was actually the first major P2P file sharing protocol. The file discovery was completely decentralised. But yes, way simpler and less robust than BitTorrent.
The best thing about limewire was downloading "stupify" by Disturbed. Hitting play and it's some random song you have never heard before that absolutely slaps.
Or random wrong names songs then years later you go to a concert and hear random band number 2 playing and it's their song you got from lime wire years ago
I feel like it was a similar experience in the earlier days of torrenting. Nowadays it still happens but only from less reputable torrents. Though also it's been years since I ever torrented music. These days almost everything is online for download or can be downloaded or captured from a streaming service.
The best thing about limewire was that it allowed downloading of video files and it became prevalent just as I became pubescent.
Morpheus was a fantastic successor.
I think LimeWire might have been the first one where you could have concurrent connections and restart an interrupted download. Before that was Napster, where if you lost Internet, the whole download was wasted. On dial up, that could be hours of wasted time
It was one of the most popular clients in the early 2000s. It also had several clones, like FrostWire. I heard about Limewire in like 9th grade and it was my introduction to torrenting. My family still had dial up internet, so I would queue up several songs to download over night while no one was using the phone.
I only ever used uTorrent back when I started torrenting and years later I moved on to qbittorrent, which I still use today.
It may be that I remember associating Limewire specifically with music. I know it was just a torrent client, but as a highschooler I only knew it as a way to get free music. I think a lot of people in my school had the same impression.
Once I was more tech savvy I also went the uTorrent, qbittorrent route. That's what I use in my Jellyfin setup today.
I also don't know xD. I was not even born when Lime Wire was on peak.
I was but I was only a little kid and didn't know about torrenting yet. Not even sure if my household had internet at the time.