Shareaza

The freeware download presented here is called Shareaza. It’s a dedicated Windows P2P file sharing client you might be interested in for a variety of reasons we will detail in this article.

P2P stands for peer-to-peer and it’s a networking technology based on a distributed application architecture, equally sharing partitioned tasks between peers.

Without entering into the technical details, with Shareaza you’ll be able to download and share multimedia and other files with worldwide peers using the same technology.

Shareaza, a feature-rich P2P file sharing client

Shareaza’s key features are, besides supporting multiple networks as mentioned before, the fact the client application comes with security filtering functionality, enabling filtering content including pornography and digital rights management (DRM) encumbered files, among others and it can even be extended with IP addresses and user-defined keywords, hash filtering and using regular expressions.

This application's basic functionality can furthermore be extended as a framework for additional plugins is implemented.

Shareaza’s graphical user interface (GUI) is also skinnable and as such can be completely changed. Note that a basic list of skins is included in the installer package to get you started. Moreover, three user modes are provided: the default, clean, trimmed and easy-to-use one for normal users, one for power users and a windowed mode.

The last important feature is the fact Shareaza comes with a built-in IRC client allowing chat-based communications between users.

Of course, Shareaza encompasses all the basic features and functionality you might expect from a dedicated peer-to-peer file sharing solution that matured over more than a decade. Worth mentioning is the interesting fact it also introduces the so-called collections, with a collection being more or less an album of songs, including cover, descriptions and more, as a single package available for download.

Shareaza, over a decade of evolution into a versatile P2P file sharing client

In the year 2002 Shareaza was first released as a client for the first large decentralised P2P network, nowadays still used by millions for sharing files. It now still supports gnutella, as well as G2, standing for Gnutella2, BitTorrent, eDonkey, HTTP, HTTPS and FTP network protocols. Furthermore, it also handles ed2k, gnutella, Piolet and magnet links.

What this means is that Shareaza is a versatile peer-to-peer (P2P) client and might be for many the only application required for all their file sharing needs.

From its initial release the developers stated Shareaza is a completely free application, without spyware, ads or anything else such as upgrades to commercial editions, for example.

Hence, here you can download the latest version of Shareaza.

Conclusion about Shareaza

If you’re not happy with the file sharing application you are using or new to P2P file sharing, Shareaza might be just what you need. Besides the aforementioned, it also features a media player to reproduce all your downloaded music and videos.