Listen to streaming BitTorrent MP3 downloads using WeStream
Posted on January 12, 2008 at 8:04 am
Downloading music online using Bittorrent lately? If you are anything like me that annoying progress bar whilst downloading can be quite stressful, especially if you are sitting waiting for the download to finish. BitTorrents are even more frustrating due to peering issues and suchlike.
I always find this situation is at it’s worst when I suddenly think of a music track I would like to hear and queue it up in my torrent client. I sit there waiting and watching, crossing my fingers that there are enough peers and so forth. OK so I’m impatient, I admit it, but I’ve just found something that can possibly ease my stress a little.
It has been developed by the guys over at BitLet and is named Westream. It is a java applet that you can use to download BitTorrents with an embedded torrent client right in your web browser, and more importantly it will stream MP3 music as you download it, no more waiting for the download to finish.
This is a seriously cool piece of coding, although I have one reservation, it only supports MP3 and OGG formats, so those windows media files are not going to be playing until they finally hit your hard drive in their entirety.
Westream works in a very simple fashion, just point your browser at their special java applet which can be found here, paste in your torrent URL and click play. You are then presented with a web interface to control the playback of your MP3 music downloads, it’s as simple as that!
The only real problems I have had whilst testing it are not really the fault of BitLet at all, I use an internet connection that is little better than a dialup as I live in a remote location without ADSL, cable or satellite and the streaming is sometimes a little choppy for me. But as I say, I cannot really attribute this to the application in question although I am often able to stream traditional content most of the time without problems.
I was really quite impressed with the way Westream chooses which part of the torrent to download next, it uses a very simple process, basically it always gives priority to the parts that are less common, nothing new there, all the best torrent clients have been doing that since year dot.
Where it differs is in choosing a download segment when there are no more un-common pieces left. In this situation, it will analyze the download and attempt to grab the very next part so that the streaming will be as stable as possible. With hindsight this coupled with my slow connection, could be why I experienced choppy playback whilst streaming.
Another great benefit of this applet is that you can use it as a preview system, sometimes I am not sure of the title or artist for a track I want to grab, using this little baby I can preview a song to check that it is exactly what I am looking for. In my mind this is the icing on the cake and I shall definitely be using Westream in this way in the future.
This is a guest post by Mac T. Wheeler who is an ex-corporate techie and now earns his living as a copywriter and blogger whilst living in the sunshine.
Technorati Tags: bittorrent, music downloads, streaming music, streaming downloads, bitlet, westream, streaming music downloads, bittorrent downloads, music torrents
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but aren’t applets slow?
Not necessarily. There are some very slow Java Applets, but those are badly programmed. Have you tried Westream out yet and found it slow?
I will say that I generally find JAVA applets to be slugish and avoid using them if I can find a traditional software application to do the same job.
But now and then something comes along that makes up for the resource overhead, this is one of those times.