Optimize Soulseek for Downloading Music

Soulseek is a very good program for sharing music online and is a great way of finding files if you have it configured properly. If your computer is connected to a home network router (such as a Linksys or D-Link router) or operating behind a firewall, Soulseek might appear to be operating correctly but it's possible the program isn't operating to its full potential. Here are some quick tips on how to reduce the number of errors you see and increase your number of search results.

Steps

  1. Download and install Soulseek if you haven't already.
  2. Open up Soulseek, go to the Options menu and select General Options.
  3. You should see a field that says "Listening Port:", Slsk (short for Soulseek) selects a random port, but you can change it to any port you like. Beside this field there is a button that says "Test firewall and router settings".
  4. This will open up a webbrowser. Unless the page says "Your router and Soulseek client is configured correctly.", you can improve your configuration.
  5. If your computer is connected to a router chances are the incoming port needs to be forwarded to your computer. This is a basic problem with using a router. To briefly describe this issue, when you are connected to your ISP through either your cable or DSL modem, you are given 1 IP (Internet Protocol) address. If you have a router, you have the ability to connect multiple computers to the internet using that one 1 IP address (ex: 69.48.100.5). Now when an incoming connection request arrives for a given port, in this case 2234, the router doesn't know which computer to send the request to (even if you only have 1 computer!), because it could be any of the computer connected to the router. So to fix this problem you need to set up port forwarding to on your router.
  6. If you have more than 1 computer connected to the router, you will need to assign the computer you are using Soulseek a static IP address. See the website PortForward.com for information on assigning a static IP address. If you only have 1 computer connected to the router, chances are it receives the same internal IP address each time it connects. (Ex: 192.168.0.1), so you can skip this step.
  7. Open up your router administration control and assign the listening port to be forwarded to the IP address your computer receives from the router. For each router this is explained in detail at PortForward. Pick your router and go through the steps that they list.
  8. Restart your Soulseek client if you have changed your listening port.

Tips

  • If your computer is behind a firewall, make sure that the listening port is open to traffic by "opening" it up according to its instructions.
  • If you are using Soulseek on more than one computer, you will have to assign a different listening port for each computer, have a static internal IP address for each computer and configure port forwarding for each listening port to that computer.

Warnings

  • Sharing copyrighted material without permission is a copyright violation and can carry civil and criminal penalties. Be careful.

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