Ares Galaxy and Internet Radio: Saving to Disk

So, in the last article, we covered the basics of Ares’ experimental internet radio feature. But what exactly was so great about it? A lot of other media players do the same thing, so why use Ares Galaxy?

Well, apart from the obvious answer that Ares can do a lot of different things apart from internet radio, it also tends to do every individual thing differently and better than the competition. Read on to discover how Ares Galaxy manages to squeeze so much more out of a seemingly simple and straightforward thing like internet radio!

Some troubleshooting

But before we begin, here are some solutions to a couple of problems some of you may have run into. First of all, you might have had some trouble opening a playlist with Ares. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, some other media players also play internet radio, and if you installed one of these after Ares, chances are that the other player took the liberty of changing the file association for you.

Secondly, some directory websites automatically play the radio stations in your browser. While that’s good for listening on the go, it will make you miss out on the excellent and revolutionary features which you can only experience if you open the playlists directly with Ares Galaxy.

If you’re faced with either of these problems, there is one simple thing you can do to solve both of them. Instead of left-clicking on the station of your choice, bringing up the other media player or the browser player, right-click on it, and choose to save the file to disk. This should give you a .pls file in your browser’s downloads folder, which you can then open with Ares. If you want to associate the file with Ares, just right-click on it, choose Open With, and then Choose Default Program.

Saving to disk

Now we have that cleared out of the way, we can discuss Ares Galaxy’s outstanding feature to save internet radio directly to disk. Granted, there are dedicated rippers out there which can also save streaming music directly to your hard drive, but as far as we know, there aren’t any which do it for free. And even if they were free, do you really want to configure a separate new program, which will be clogging up more disk space and memory usage on your PC, just to do something that Ares Galaxy can do with just one click of the button?

To save the music you listen to on internet radio stations to your hard drive automatically, click on the radio button, hover over Save to Disk and click on Active to activate the feature. Too bad that you’re going to have to split the radio file into separate tracks to listen to it again later though, right? Wrong!

Ares Galaxy automatically splits the file! This means that if you turn on this feature, listen to an internet radio station, and discover a great sounding tune, you’ll have the file right there, labeled and everything! It just couldn’t be easier, could it? Download Ares now and try it out!

A Short Introduction – Ares Galaxy P2P

Ares Galaxy isn’t the only P2P (Peer-to-Peer) program out there, but it’s certainly one of the best. With its bittorrent support as well as its own separate Ares network, the program provides you with access to the greatest file sharing community in the world, at no cost whatsoever. But what exactly is P2P and how does it work? In the following article we’ll offer a short introduction to P2P networking.

Sharing the workload

The basic philosophy behind the P2P architecture is built on the idea of identical content being shared by a multitude of users. It differs from the traditional server-based model because it is not completely centralized. To make this concept clearer, let’s bring in an example.

When you’re watching a video on a website, you’re using up some of the bandwidth of that site’s server. However, when you’re downloading the same or a similar video on Ares Galaxy, you’re using a little bit of the bandwidth of many different people who are sharing this video in the network. So instead of one centralized server having to send information to every single user, under the P2P architecture, we are all serving one another in a big happy family of peers.

Centralized and pure P2P

So P2P means that the bandwidth burden is shared by the many instead of concentrated on one single server. But certain functions were and are often still brought together in a single center. The most famous early giant of P2P, Napster, had a central server that was used for indexing of the files and bootstrapping, whereas the peers were used for the actual data transfer itself.

It’s important to understand that the difference between a centralized P2P architecture and the traditional server-client model is that the centralized P2P server does not actually host any content. Some other examples of this model are eDonkey and Audiogalaxy.

On the other hand, a pure P2P network is one which has been completely decentralized. Here every individual peer will have its own index of both the files that are stored locally, as well as those of neighboring peers. Information requests are checked against local content or forwarded to others.

Though this is the most decentralized model that is feasible, which is therefore very resistant against parts of the network going down (due to there not being any central servers which store crucial information), it is not without its problems. Specifically, the fact that files constantly have to be checked increases bandwidth requirements, and there is a huge potential for files being changed or becoming out of date. The early Gnutella network is the most famous example of this approach.

The hybrid model

Ares Galaxy was one of the early innovators when it came to the hybrid model of P2P architecture, which uses supernodes or ultrapeers which index information and process queries, then redirected to matching peers. The information is still shared by the whole network. There are no central servers, but some have a more extensive duty than others, depending on bandwidth availability. This combines the best of both worlds and also offers better protection against all the problems described in the above paragraphs.

Some Lesser Known Features of Ares Galaxy

Ares Galaxy is an awesome program with its own network of users all sharing an enormous multitude and variety of files. Additionally, it can be used as a media center, for all your audio and video playing needs, and as a communication center as well, allowing you to chat with other Ares Galaxy users around the globe.

And all you need to get in on the action is to get the small Ares free Download by clicking on the download link on the right! But Ares Galaxy has a lot more to offer than its core functionality. There are a host of lesser known, but amazing things you can do with Ares Galaxy, and here are a couple of them.

Playing incomplete files

It’s happened to all of us before. We downloaded something that looked really interesting, and spent some time and effort getting the file, but when we open it, it turns out to be something completely different, or have extremely bad quality, or it’s dubbed in a foreign language, or it has any other conceivable problem that may have been avoided if only you could have previewed the file without downloading it completely first.

Well, if you get the Ares free download, you won’t have to worry about this happening any longer, because you can use the media player that’s built right into Ares Galaxy to play any file, even if it’s incomplete and still downloading!

Sharing directly in a chatroom

You may think that the chatrooms are just for chatting, but you’d be wrong. Any chatroom you enter will put you in direct contact with the other chatters, enabling you to browse their files directly. This is great to find those more obscure files when you all have to go on is a genre or topic!

Showing off to your MSN friends

If you use MSN to chat with your friends, you can automatically share with your friends the author and title of the music you’re listening to on Ares Galaxy! To turn on this option, just go to the Control Panel and tick the “Show what I’m listening to on MSN” box under the General tab.

Downloading torrents

There really is only one contender to the Ares Galaxy network when we’re talking sheer size and content, and that’s the bittorrent community. But you won’t have to put two or more different programs on your pc to download torrents, because Ares Galaxy can download and seed torrents for you! Turn on the “Make Ares my default torrent client” under the BitTorrent tab in the Control Panel to avoid having to choose Ares Galaxy every time you open a torrent file.

So much more

There’s also the integrated library, the specialized search feature, support for internet radio, including SHOUTcast and more, but the most amazing thing is and remains: Ares Galaxy is totally free! So get the Ares free download now by clicking on the download link at the right side of this page and start exploring the Galaxy!

Ares Galaxy vs Frostwire Review & Catch Up

Though Frostwire has always been a contender for the P2P filesharing crown, since Limewire’s shutdown back in October 2010, it has truly become one of Ares Galaxy’s most tenacious rivals. In the following article, we’ll do a quick feature comparison between the two and tell you why (spoiler alert!) Ares Galaxy comes out on top, hands-down.

Looks and appearance

Let’s start with some less important, but still relevant comparisons. The appearance of both programs is mostly dependent on personal tastes.  And, while both have a clean and good look, we must admit that Frostwire probably has the better looking interface, with its trademark blue color scheme.

Similar extra features

Primarily a filesharing program, both pieces of software try their very best to offer extra features to make our online, computerized lives easier. Both programs offer a library, search feature, media player and chat feature. But here are the main differences between the two:

-          Frostwire doesn’t have a direct connection function for people inside a chatroom, making it, unlike in the case of Ares Galaxy, purely a cosmetic feature

-          Frostwire’s media player can only play music and some radio stations

-          Ares can scan your pc for you to look for shareable files

-          Ares Galaxy’s search feature is an Ares network search, Frostwire’s is just a user interface for other torrent websites

Unique extra features

On top of the common features, there are a few that are unique to the programs:

-          Frostwire has a mobile device feature, enabling you to transfer files to and from your mobile device. It’s unclear to us what the point of using this over windows explorer is, but it can be handy, we suppose

-          Ares Galaxy has an integrated media player which handles all radio stations and videos, as well as music files and playlists

Filesharing

The look and extra features, described above, are not to be neglected, but the most important thing for a filesharing program is, of course, the filesharing itself, and it is here that Ares Galaxy truly shines and leaves Frostwire far behind it.

The reason is that Frostwire, since version 5 came out, is now bittorrent only and doesn’t use the gnutella network anymore. In comparison, Ares Galaxy has all the features you can expect from a bittorrent client, and, on top of that, has direct access to the huge Ares network as well! And even if we consider Frostwire’s older, now unsupported, versions as well, which do/did have access to the gnutella network, Ares still comes out on top, because of its higher average speed of transfers and the much smaller amount of malicious files on the network.

Conclusion

Though Frostwire is a good bittorrent client, and has a very nice appearance and an active and enthusiastic user-base, it can not compete with Ares Galaxy on features. With its access to both the Ares network, as well as the bittorrent community, its integrated media player, and more, we can honestly say that, if we could download only one of the two programs, we’d go for the Ares free download any time.

They’re both free though, so nothing is stopping you from trying out both of them, and checking for yourself just how much better Ares Galaxy really is.

Ares Galaxy Download Speeds

Anyone who has ever used Ares Galaxy file sharing software will attest to something especially alluring to the program; its super fast download speeds.

We’re not talking just your broadband connection, we’re talking about the configuration of this file sharing software that kicks those download speeds at such rates that it has won awards from the top computer software review websites.

That’s because unlike other p2p software, Ares is configured to maximize the connections and make sure you get the fastest download speeds possible even if you’re on a dial up. That makes for a feature that other file sharing software companies dream about because it’s a major draw to Ares Galaxy and allows for the operation of other features not only within the software program but for other operations on your computing system.

Far too many p2p programs will have you waiting hours, sometimes days to get a file. Especially if it’s one of those major files you need for work or school. If you need that missing piece of software that’s 100mbs or more and you’re on one of the other p2p networks, you could be waiting for who knows when for the download to finish. You can also experience endless stops and starts which can become rather frustrating.

That drives users crazy and Ares Galaxy users knows that when these slow and intermittent downloads occur, that companies lose users and that is not a good thing.

Ares P2P is like any other file sharing software and network but based on the familiar platform, it enhances the experience with it’s own brand of specialties that raise the bar in service and performance and versatility.

To make things even more fun, they catalogue items so that you can just jump in there, hook up and get what you need and want without the nonsense. It’s really push button and get it without your system acting up, slowing down, and doing those weird annoying things that make you want to scream.

Music, movies, software, pictures, and more. With Ares Galaxy you get connected fast, use their fantastic search feature, find what you want quickly and then you’re out of there. Super Fast Download speeds are the way forward in file sharing, and Ares Galaxy is here to help.

You can also follow a cool way to find the fastest files. There’s a rating system on Ares Galaxy that has a star rating system. The more stars, the faster the file will download. It means that the file has more sharers and that means better options to get that file with the fastest connection.

The fact that there are no proprietary software nonsense intruding on the software you get the real deal software created by people who know what fans want. That’s why the software has so many options to increase the efficiency of the downloads allowing you to get the files you want and get them as fast as possible so you can go back to what you was doing before. Ares Galaxy – The Best P2P File Sharing Program Available.

Increasing Download Speeds With Ares Galaxy

We’ve talked about this issue before, but, as so many people keep asking us how they can increase their download speed, we decided to dedicate another article to it. This time we won’t focus exclusively on the most common reasons for slow download speeds, but also talk about some possible external solutions to the problem.

Firewalls, ports, popularity and settings

Just to be sure, we’ll quickly reiterate the easier fixes for low download speeds. First of all, your firewall and port forwarding settings determine whether you’ll be able to download through Ares Galaxy at all and so should be okay if your problem is low speeds rather than no speed at all. If you’re experiencing more fundamental connection problem, then please do a search on our blog as we’ve talked about this as well.

As for your settings, these can be found in the Control Panel, under the Transfer tab. It is recommended that you do a speedtest online to determine the bandwidth your connection should be able to handle and then set the upload and download bandwidth accordingly (only allow unlimited bandwidth if you’re on a very good connection).

The slower your connection, the fewer downloads and uploads you should allow at once, the reason being that it’s better to download a single file at reasonable speed, rather than a million at a snail’s pace each.

The last “quick fix” is to make sure that the files you are downloading are shared by many, rather than just one or a few, people. In other words, check the popularity/status/amount of users who are currently sharing the file. The more people who are sharing it, the more people you’ll be able to download from, so this greatly affects your download speed.

External solutions

If you’ve made sure that your firewall is not blocking Ares Galaxy, that the port settings are correct, that the transfer settings are okay, and that you’re downloading popular files, and you’re still getting low download speeds, then we’re afraid that the problem is most likely due to your connection itself. Here are a few possible solutions, but know that there is no easy way of suddenly getting better speeds, no matter what some charlatans may promise you online:

- Check your router, proxy settings and cables: you may be accessing the internet through a proxy, in which case this will be the bottleneck for all your activities. Alternatively, you may have to change the settings on your router, or replace your cables. Consult the documentation and other sources on the internet before you change some of these important settings though.

- Contact your ISP (Internet Service Provider): if you’re paying for a good connection, but are getting bad speeds surfing the net and downloading legal files, then this might be due to your geographical location or problems with the wiring or router on their end. Let them do a test and they may be able to pinpoint the problem and help you out.

- Upgrade to a better connection: in the end, you may just be on a bad connection, and the only solution (if it is possible at all) for this problem is to upgrade to a better package. A great variety of comparison websites exist for just this purpose, so simply do a search for “broadband bundles in [your city/area]” and you should be able to easily find the information you need.

We hope this clears up some problems for some people. Remember that our Ares free download generally offers great download speeds. Moreover, it is open source and entirely free of charge, so take advantage of Ares Galaxy now!

How To Share Media files With Ares Galaxy

The vast range of freedom that, Ares galaxy, allows its users means you can upload and download any type of file. It also means that you can create your own content and upload that to share with the world. It’s a pretty simple process and one that can help you get your content to a wider audience. To help you with all your upload needs we have created this how to, with general information and some step by step guides.

Two for one

There are two different ways to go about adding files to allow them to be uploaded and then shared across the Ares Peer to Peer network (P2P). The first one is locating the ‘My shared folder’ that Ares galaxy uses to store the files that you download and upload.

Fire up Ares galaxy and click on the transfer tab, once that’s open across the top you should see four options ‘cancel’ ‘play/preview’ ‘locate file’ and ‘clear idle’. You want the ‘locate file button’, hit that and it should take you straight into the ‘My shared folder’. Now, you need to locate the files that you want to upload and you can either, copy and paste them into the ‘My shared folder’ or you can drag and drop. We recommend the copy and paste option, just to make sure in case of any unforeseen things happening you’ll always have a back up to be able to use your file no matter what.

The other is to scan the files you want to upload. To do this you need to go on control panel, then file sharing and then you should have the option to ‘start scan’, hit that and you should get a list of files your able to share, select the ones you want and click ok. All the files within the folder will move into your library, on Ares galaxy, and will be immediately available for download, by any users.

Alternatively, you can be more specific about it and click on the ‘manual configure’ option you can browse through the folders on your computer and select any of them or all of them and click ok, as like before, all your files will then be immediately available for download.

Remember the rules

If you are going to be sharing files through the Ares galaxy programme, you have to remember that you’re open to any of the laws that have been passed, so be very careful about what you upload. It’s a big misconception that, because the file is uploaded by you and sent all around the world, that it can’t be traced and this is very wrong, you’re very much at risk if you upload files that are breaking the law.

It’s also wise to check the laws within your country and region of the country, as many countries have different laws regarding what can and can’t be freely distributed, even across the internet. If you’re sensible about it, then you’re going to have a lot of joy, from being able to freely share all the files you want, among the Ares galaxy community.

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Ares Galaxy and Internet Radio: The Basics

On top of the amazing existing features of Ares Galaxy, the latest versions have added experimental support for radio stations, including the very popular SHOUTcast service.

Over the following two articles, you’ll learn how to search for radio stations, how to listen to them on Ares and how the revolutionary approach of Ares Galaxy to internet radio allows you to save and share the new music you’ll undoubtedly discover with the rest of the world at the click of a button.

Internet radio and SHOUTcast

Before we delve right into the good stuff, let’s take a step back for a moment and consider what exactly internet radio and SHOUTcast are. Basically, an internet radio station is a playlist of individual music files (usually mp3s but aac is also quite common).

This might not seem very different from regular radio, but it is, because even though the term “internet radio” drums up an image of radio DJs spinning tracks in a studio, it’s actually much more akin to the Ares library in the sense that all you need to create an internet radio station and connect with the rest of the world is a library of music files and an internet connection.

SHOUTcast is intimately connected with the concept of internet radio because it is by far the most widely known and widely used software by which playlists are broadcasted to and from media players, after which they can be streamed by anyone online. It was developed by Nullsoft in 1999 and continues to dominate internet radio, currently counting over 45,000 stations!

Internet radio on Ares Galaxy

Right, so now we know what internet “radio” is and have an idea of how it works, how do we use it on Ares? Because it is still in an experimental phase, the radio function on Ares Galaxy is not as obvious as one would expect, considering its potentially revolutionary impact on how we listen to music online. But it’s actually really simple, and it works like a charm. You just need to know where to look.

Listening to internet radio on Ares Galaxy is very similar to listening to a regular MP3 file. All you have to do is open a playlist (.pls) file with Ares and that’s it. But where do you get the playlist files? Well, you could look around online for them, or, you could simply use the options that are built right into Ares!

If you look at the built-in media player at the bottom of your screen, you’ll notice an icon to the right of the volume control shaped like a radio. Click on this and it’ll give you a few options.

Go to Directory and then choose one of the playlist directories and you’ll find literally tens of thousands of radio stations to choose from! Browse around, open one you like, and that’s it. You’re listening to internet radio.

Stick around because in the next article, we’ll explain why Ares Galaxy is not just your regular run-of-the-mill internet radio player, and how it combines the power and size of the Ares community with the ease and variety of internet radio.

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How the Ares Galaxy network came to be

Today, with hundreds of thousands of people using Ares Galaxy for all their P2P needs, it’s almost hard to understand that the Ares Galaxy network was not always there. In fact, the network we all use and love so much grew out of a different network in the early 2000s. In the following article, we’ll sketch a short history of the birth of both.

The Rise of The GNUtella Network

In early 2000, a few developers from Nullsoft (famous for, among other things, Winamp), which was under the internet giant AOL’s umbrella, created a P2P client and the first decentralized network of its kind, dubbing it “GNUtella”.  It was made available to download for free and, in a single day, managed to attract thousands of peers who were able to connect and share information with one another through the client. The project became entirely open source, releasing the code under the GPL (General Public License).

The very next day, however, the iron hammer of AOL came down upon Nullsoft and GNUtella, forbidding the developers to further distribute the client or continue work on the project. This action was hardly surprising since these were the glory (and notoriety) days of Napster, which was at the time in legal trouble as well. However, this did not mean the end of GNUtella, as over the course of a few days, free open source clones of the original client began to pop up on the net. The network’s popularity with its open protocol grew by leaps and bounds, with famous names from a bygone era like the P2P-clients Limewire and Morpheus operating on it.

Supernodes/Ultrapeers

Some six months later, some proprietary and closed-source clients on the GNUtella network began to take a different approach to the decentralized design architecture of equal nodes. Originally, a single client’s search request would be sent to each connected node separately. Some of these early innovators were doing away with this, instead designating some users as supernodes/ultrapeers, who would route these requests and responses of searches for the other users (“leaves”). This led to faster speeds for all and higher bandwidth requirements only for the supernodes.

Ares Galaxy Enters The Scene

In mid-2002, development began on Ares, which was, at first, to be one of many clients which operated and existed on the GNUtella network. As the open GNU protocol had not yet been integrated with the ultrapeer/leave innovation then, the Ares developers decided to begin their own network.

On the one hand, it brought together previous incremental improvements such as, among others, the ultrapeer-leaves architecture, and on the other hand, the protocol was made to be much harder to identify than others. This last fact led to a great boom of the program especially among university networks which tended to block other clients but could not do so with Ares at the time. Ares Galaxy became completely open source by 2005, and has since then known recurring periods of huge popularity and relative decline.

Today, the future is again bright for Ares Galaxy, with its enormous user base in Spanish-speaking countries, and an increasing resurgence of popularity in the Anglo-sphere. So get your Ares free download now and join the Ares Galaxy network today!

How to do effective searches with Ares Galaxy P2P

Downloading a backup of that cd you bought back in the late nineties or an episode of an old TV-show is pretty easy to do on Ares Galaxy. But sometimes, it can be surprisingly difficult to find just what you’re looking for, considering the enormous size of both the Ares Galaxy and the bittorrent network. If you’re having trouble locating the exact files you need, read on and learn how to use the integrated Ares Galaxy search feature in the most effective manner.

Know what you want

Before you begin doing searches and downloading random search results, you should sit and think about what it is exactly that you want. You should never download things without knowing what it is, because in most cases you’ll waste your bandwidth and possibly even be downloading viruses or worms without knowing it! So think. What do you want? An audio file or software? A word document or a video? To drive home the point about knowing what you want, here’s an example: let’s say I’m looking for a picture of Michael Jackson’s Thriller album cover. This is what happens when I type in “Michael Jackson” in the Ares Galaxy search box.

As you can see and as you might expect, I’m getting thousands of results, but none of them are really useful to me. The reason is that my search was not nearly specific enough.

Use the advanced search feature

So the first, obvious step is to look specifically for image files. This will weed out all of MJ’s music, which is great but for which I have no need for now. This can be done by clicking the option button marked “Image” right under the search box. Additionally, I might want to search for “Michael Jackson Thriller” to further narrow my search down. The point is that the more specific my search is, the less time I will have to spend looking for the exact file I need. Here’s the result of my search for now.

Now this is beginning to look more like it, isn’t it? But still, there are dozens of results, and I might not want to waste my time downloading and going through each and every one of the files. One last way with which I can narrow down the search results is by using the filter option in the bottom left corner of the screen. Since it’s the front cover I want, I typed “front” in there, which filters out all the results that do NOT contain the word “front” somewhere in the title or description, giving me a choice of the most relevant files according to my search objectives.

Safety

Finally, we’d like to reiterate some healthy safety concerns you should keep in mind after getting the free Ares Galaxy download. Don’t download suspicious files, always keep a virus scanner running in the background and be aware of your country’s copyright laws! The Internet, and Ares Galaxy in particular, is an amazing place where you can find almost anything you want, but unfortunately there are people out there who enjoy sharing malicious files, so protect yourself against this menace!

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