Azureus is Dead, Vuze Goes Social

raphjd

Azureus is Dead, Vuze Goes Social

After 5 years, the popular BitTorrent client Azureus is no more. The Vuze team has officially abandoned the Azureus name and the new social BitTorrent client is now completely integrated into the Vuze content distribution platform.

The first version of the Java based BitTorrent client Azureus was released in June 2003, and soon became popular among the early adopters of BitTorrent. Over the years, Azureus turned into one of the most feature-rich clients, backed by a dedicated team of developers and an active community.

Things changed in 2006 when Azureus launched the content distribution platform it called Vuze (aka Zudeo), backed up by a total of $34 million venture capital. For a while, they kept releasing a no-Vuze version of Azureus (when Vuze/Zudeo was in Beta), but Vuze CEO, Gilles BianRosa told TorrentFreak that this only caused confusion among their users.

We started to change our name from Azureus to Vuze over a year ago, but we did not make the change in a clear or consistent manner, Gilles said. This has caused a great deal of confusion amongst our users. We want to rectify this situation by changing our name to Vuze consistently.

Whilst we recognize the strength of the Azureus name and the frog, it is only associated with our original BitTorrent application. As we move towards creating an all-in-one application for finding, playing and sharing great content, that goes beyond the realm of just a BitTorrent client, we wanted to change our name to reflect that, but bring with us the frog who is such a part of our heritage, Gilles added.

Today {16 June 08}, Vuze comes with a brand new release of their client (v3.1), introducing several new features. One of the most drastic changes is the new social layer that has been added to the client. Vuze users are now able to add friends, share torrents with friends, and give friends a speed boost when you are downloading the same torrent.

The new client also includes a meta-search engine that allows you to search across several popular BitTorrent sites, in addition to content from Vuze.com. The search functionality is completely customizable, so you can add you personal favorite if its not already included.

Unfortunately, there will not be a Vuze client available without the Vuze platform integrated. Gilles told TorrentFreak: We are focusing our efforts on delivering against our vision of creating an all-in-one application that enables users to find, download, play and share in one streamlined application.

We have started on a path of creating an all-in-one application that enables users to find, play and share torrents. In particular, we believe that by enabling users to share content and bandwidth through the Friends feature we are adding a completely new dimension to peer-to-peer - a new social dimension, or what we call social P2P, Gilles said.

Azureus is no more, the name change is permanent. On the one hand this is a step forward, as the new interface and functionality will appeal to new users. However, it has also caused quite a heated debate among both developers and users who were happy with the classic UI. Although, its a bit hidden, the original interface still remains accessible with the UI switcher. Time will tell if it is the right move.

mic1303

Maybe it's just me, or has anyone else had a problem with this new version duplicating downloads?? $:-\$

trukr

@mic1303:

Maybe it's just me, or has anyone else had a problem with this new version duplicating downloads?? $:-\$

I'm not having that problem using the Classic Interface, the old school Azureus UI. I've never tried using the Vuze UI, never liked it.
Try this if your using the Vuze UI, click on Advanced found at the top right hand corner, then click on , select "Classic Interface", the restart Vuze.

zimpleguy

I never liked the Vuze interface either… Clasic is much better. I recently changed to using uTorrent... I have a motherboard with an nVidia chipset and azureus and my motherboard could never get along... after a few hours I'd comeback to find out azurus had crashed. It said something about the nvidia firewall a few times which i dont actually have, but I guess it saw something in my nvidia chipset it didn't like... uTorrent seems to be working pretty good...

trukr

µtorrent is probably the best choice for most Windows users. Me, I switched to Mac about 1.5yrs ago.
µtorrent was working on a Mac client, hopefully they will release it one day.
Luckily, Azureus works great for me.

staticenemy

zimpleguy, I have nvidia firewall on my Windows XP install and uTorrent BSOD's occasionally, good thing I dont use it for downloading

As for Azureus, It seems to love updating itself all the time, and every time it does so on my Linux machine, it creates a bug that prevents it from starting up until I remove my .azureus folder with all the data/prefs/download info, which is a pain because I use it as my controlled seeding app and another for pure leeching.

Hopefully one day somebody will create a bittorrent client as powerful as Azureus without all the bloat, bugs and now crapware

kel100

I recently had to have a new hard disk installed which of course meant re-installing all my programs. When I installed Vuse the screen looked completely different with some side bar that I had to click on just to see my download/uploads which were on different pages. The main page seemed more like the realplayer page as far as I remember, with nothing to do with bittorrents. I liked the normal view of Azureus with donwloads at the top of the screen and downloads at teh bottom, been able to double click on a file to get extra info about it, etc,etc.

I disliked it so much I found an old copy of Azureus which I am now running (version 2.5.0.4) but is means every time I start it up, I have to tell it not to do an auto-update which would reload Vuse 4.0.

Reading the posts above, it sounds like I could use the new Vuse but still have the old Azureus layout, is that right? If so, how do I do it please?

trukr

Yes, you can use some odd combo of the old classic GUI along with the Vuze GUI, the full Vuze GUI, or use the full classic GUI and Vuze will not load any of that other stuff at all.

Go to View on the top bar and select Advanced if you want to try the combo of new and old.
It has the downloads at the top, uploads at the bottom, and allows you to look at extra info via right-click–>show details.

Here's how to run in full classic mode which retains the functionality of the 2.x series client, it's the same GUI as the v2.5.0.4 you're using with no hint of the Vuze GUI anywhere.
Go to Preferences-->Interface-->Start-->Display Vuze UI chooser [Show]

kel100

Thanks trurk, that's spot on I think at first view.