Music fans finally
have something new to rejoice over; and that’s Mulve - a tiny
standalone app that’s changing the way how music is downloaded. OK,
don’t expect Mulve to replace What.CD anytime
soon, but this revolutionary app is the answer to everything that’s
wrong with conventional ‘peer-to-peer’ networks. With a searchable
database in excess of 10 million songs, quite likely you’ll never use
Limewire/Frostwire again - and with good reason.
By its own design Mulve is leech-only; it’s also quick to pull search results, and download speeds will usually max out your home Internet connection. Individual songs will complete in as little as 4 seconds (a 5MB file on a 10Mbit line will finish in under 5 seconds in most cases).
What Mulve Isn’t:
It’s not “P2P”, whereby users are sharing files with other unknown users.
Unlike Limewire, Frostwire, eMule, DC++ or other peer-to-peer, users do not share their IP address with other peers, nor are you inclined to use or create a risky “sharing folder” which may include your own incriminating files. There is absolutely no sharing involved with Mulve; it is a one-directional leech application which, in a way, is similar to FTP or even direct-download links from RS, Hotfile - except much faster.
Since Mulve is not a decentralized network, there’s never a risk of contracting viruses from the downloaded files. No mislabeled or renamed songs, no surprises.
It’s not BitTorrent.
No ratios, no seeding, no wasted upload bandwidth eating up your monthly cap.
Public trackers, private trackers - personal IPs are the backbone behind the ‘tracker’ inasmuch that no trackers are truly safe. We all know that the BT protocol is unsecure. Not to mention that BT isn’t exactly the best protocol for singles; very few torrents contain just one song. Have you ever tried to wean someone away from Limewire, and then introduce them to BitTorrent? I try constantly and get this, “Uhmm, I just download songs I want; I’m not really into albums”. My rebuttal is, “yeah, but you can deselect files in the torrent…”. At this point I’m still in shock that in 2010 there’s a demography of youthful Internet users who can’t wrap their heads around BitTorrent.
It’s not Usenet or FTP.
It could be, but it’s not. Usenet isn’t free anyways. At first we considered Mulve to perhaps be a new method of indexing MP3s found on open/public FTPs, but it turns out this was an incorrect theory. Read on.
What Mulve Is:
As far as we know, there’s never been anything quite like this before. In essence, Mulve is a lightweight app that connects directly to an array of servers that host the music files. Exactly how Mulve gets its search results has always been a bit of a mystery, so we contacted the dev team in order to get their perspective to the magic behind Mulve. They conclude:
“Without giving too much away, I can tell you that we are obviously not a P2P client and in fact we don’t search open FTPs. Instead we directly connect to a few other servers overseas which store the music. Unfortunately, I cannot reveal which these are.”
— Mulve is completely safe and free to use. 100% clear of spyware/malware or viruses.
— Requires no installation, no registration, no configuration. Simply unpack Mulve.zip, run Mulve.exe and enjoy!
Mulve Tips:
• Help/Tips can be found by right-clicking on the title bar, then select “Display help”.
• Due to the sheer magnitude of the reservoir of available songs that Mulve taps into, try to conduct searches for song titles rather than artist names.
• Look for HQ music. Whenever possible, avoid downloading anything with a bitrate lower than 192 (320 is best). Click the Bitrate heading column to filter the search results from high to low.
• By default, 100 results are shown for each search query. Click Extend Search to get the next 100.
333 Says:
A webapp is an application that runs on a webserver and that is consumed through a browser.
This clearly isn’t a webapp
sd Says:
Wow, this looks way better than what I thought it would be.
How can this be free though? I’m a little skeptical that it’ll remain so.
An interesting application though, thanks for pointing it out.
sd Says:
I just noticed something, in the YouTube video he downloads a remix of Heads Will Roll by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and you can see the file downloading and finish in the bottom panel of the program (you can see two letters of the song title file name).
But when he opens it up it starts playing Date With The Night. I guess that was just a mistake or a bug or something at the time in the program, or maybe it was a file that had an incorrect filename and the real title was in there.
Other than that it looks cool.
m4verick Says:
For those who are curious, the source of those mp3 files appears to be vkontakte.ru, a Russian social network site.
SirHound Says:
Servers are in Russia
Mulve is working fine for me
when searching for Killing Joke Turn to Red
I get 2 results (320k bitrate) which download at my max speed (6MB)
Hydra by Toto also gets 2 results in 320k, download also at max speed
Pretty good!
andrew110 Says:
Nice program won’t ever use gnutella again for individual songs. Wish there was a default save folder though.
Paradox Says:
Pretty awesome
Perplexed Says:
sounds like a great idea, but when I tried the same search, I come up with ‘no results.’ So I tried a different search, and again, ‘no results.’ WTF?
sharky Says:
@ 08
Taking this from their blog/facebook - if you receive no search results, kill and restart Mulve, it should clear it up.
hero Says:
Sharky, did you get this info from filehoard?
James Says:
I downloaded this program and looked into what it does with wireshark. It connects to some russian social network (vkontakte) which has some functionality where you can look up songs and stream them online. It pretty much just copies the search result from there and lets you download instead of stream. Vkontakte could shut it off at any time by making slight changes to their API. I don’t speak russian, so I haven’t investigated that site and what its policies are for programs like this, but I doubt that they condone it. Mulve does do what it says that it does fairly well though.
Humza Says:
I am experiencing some PC lags. Are they because of Mulve - I don’t know clearly.
roy Says:
It would be nice if users can share their songs with encryption like filetopia or one swarm.
This is great soft swedes keeps on amazing me!!!
roy Says:
Do online virsu scan of the app here: http://virusscan.jotti.org/en
a/s/l Says:
seems pretty good actually, i’ve got speeds of 800k/s which maxes out my connection. i daren’t run it from anything except a sandbox at the moment though, there’s something fishy about it…
gunnar Says:
have used this for many weeks and its great, found much but not every time
node Says:
Do they have lossless files (flac)?
Will they expand into other types of media (tv-shows, movies)?
also let me be the fist to mention spotify, it pretty much covers 95% of my music needs.
SirHound Says:
the app isn’t working anymore, button is gone
SirHound Says:
…the search button i mean
Mulve crashes about half the time when I start the program
i guess Vkontakte are not amused
D Says:
Hi sharky, great article. Any chance you could do some write ups on some DDL stuff again? Seems there hasn’t been much in this area/direction.
alex Says:
sometimes it just doesn’t work
GM Says:
Most of the guesses are incorrect here.
Also, a new version is out, which should make it more stable.
File Hosting Says:
I think it works great.
I haven’t had any stability problems and finds a decent amount of stuff
me Says:
Problem with windows xp sp2 , keeps crashing!!!
GM Says:
Your problem is not windows xp sp2, your problem is an application that randomly injects code into processes.
Skype with some extensions used to do that, but there may be other applications as well with sloppy coding.
Gargamel Says:
Servers=central location to bust/shut down=fail.
leechme Says:
check out leechme.eu fo r music too its leech free too
James Says:
I don’t think so that they gonna survive long…
It’s just a new program to download illegal music = pure piracy.
Where does that all music is coming from ?:DD
a/s/l Says:
i wonder how long it will be before someone makes a hacked copy of the application under a different name and chucks a load of viruses/trojans in?
yawn Says:
why the hype? this is hardly revolutionary. you can do the same thing with youtube and a firefox addon
Blah Says:
@30: Youtube? 320k audiophile tracks from youtube?
rmdashrf Says:
Its safe, it works by using a Russian social networking site located here:
vkontakte.ru
It uses the cookie:
Cookie: remixchk=5; remixsid=443e5664676c33c3d37cb2da2a257a094c26b998e18b1b5d97636e8e;
(i dont’ know if the session id is hardcoded)
Then it does a GET
/gsearch.php?section=audio&q=
it enumerates all the results and URLDownloadToFile() (or equivalent) which usually points to
csxxxx.vkontakte.ru
xxxx being a 4 digit ID number for the content server which is serving the file.
SableSlayer Says:
The mulve website is down however the program still works & you can download it here –>
http://kickasstorrents.com/mulve-v1-06-webseeded-t4455879.html
pruteanu Says:
You should stop saying where the servers are located. Better enjoy what we have for free!
jhon Says:
servers are dead )
eBoy36 Says:
site is dead…servers are dead…mulve is dead!!!
inkspot Says:
http://www.inkspot.it/MULVE.html
SEXMACHINE Says:
i just downloaded it from the link above…and it works.
dunno what all this (there is no search button) or (its dead) talk is about.
seems to work fine.
SirHound Says:
If there’s no search button
how can it work fine?
ist Says:
it work fine for intelliggent ppl
Rookie Says:
Its works perfectly.. And i have to say this is one hell of a software..
I had been trying to find certain songs for years.. Searched nook and corner of internet, What.cd and even Apple iTunes.. wasnt able to find it.. But when I searched on mulve i not only found one song but various versions of it in upto 320kbps bitrate..
This software is amazing.. Hope it lasts long.. Everyone knows where the servers are located, so stop telling how the system is working or the server will be blocked and we wont be able to use it anymore.
panchobrilla Says:
how can u guys said it works when i’m trying like 10 times w/o connecting???
if theres a way around let us know plz.
sherlock Says:
since the app isn’t working for me no more im getting the songs from the Russian website, the problem is that i cant find out the audio bitrate before downloading, have anyone figured this out
Xiang Says:
didn’t take long for that to go bust, yea? Website won’t load and the app won’t connect. Maybe it’s temporary, but I wouldn’t be surprised if something like this with so much attention gets put down quickly.
file hosts Says:
Ive tried to connect to app and website for a day or two now and it will not connect… i dunno if its temp either, Xiang, but it’s definatly down for now
Nunya Bizness Says:
I just got on now, but it was very slow to connect. Probably took a good minute, and I’m on a 15 MB fiber pipe. I’ll try a few searches now and see how it plays out…
panchobrilla Says:
is working again!!! as i write this….dunno for how long
Al Burrelli Says:
Wow, that’s hot thanks for sharing !
GoodSeeder Says:
Get yourself signed upto http://leech2seed.info if you want the lastest torrents at the fastest speeds.
Great new tracker with lots of content going up daily. Dont see what you want, stick in a request and someone will have it up for you in no time.
Friendly staff and members always willing to lend a hand where needed.
Voodoohippie Says:
OK now it won’t connect. I figure its because their doing some sort of maintenance on it or its just too full what with everyone trying to use it.
Here is an interesting thing that happened to me Yesterday. Before I go into this my ISP said they were doing maintenance on their nodes, but here goes:
My fiancee tried to get onto GSN to win OOdles. But couldn’t get there. Some p2p sites I tried to get on were pointing to my ISP’s search page. I thought Hmmm so I Downloaded and installed Hotspot shield a FREE vpn and got on no problem. Then I called them and asked them why they were blocking me from certain sites.
I sure hope this is not some sort of trap by the RIAA (I doubt it but man that was scary) has anyone else had this happen? Maybe we should all use a VPN when we use Mulve because I’m sure this service is getting spies trying to harvest IP’s. Hotspot Shield did the trick but I’m looking for an overseas VPN so I know they won’t narc.
thedeh Says:
This program has been officially shut-down by the developers.
Voodoohippie Says:
Well that sucks. I’m using Grooveshark Downloader now anyways and I have Orbit Downloader to use with vk.com (thank God we know the source). It was fun just DLing when Mulve was working. My suggestion is get Orbit Downloader and or Grooveshark Downloader and your music needs are met. BT is great too for Full Progressive Rock discographies as well.
For the best Prog Rock,Album Rock Radio on the net
http://thelegacyrocks.tk
THEPAWN Says:
I recommend VK Player http://vkplayer.blogspot.com for convenient listening and downloading via vk.com. Plain easy and works