Image: Aurous
A simple, decentralized alternative to Spotify is poised to launch in the coming weeks.Aurous, a new music streaming site operating on BitTorrent networks, functions as a kind of musical version of movie streaming project Popcorn Time. The service works through BitTorrent DHT search engine "Strike," essentially turning each user into their own peer to peer search engine. It will be available for public alpha October 10.Aurous advertises its interface as an easy-to-navigate technology for the average user that enables importing playlists from other apps like Spotify, Pandora, and YouTube. Geekier users also have the opportunity to look under the hood of the app and customize its code."Don't like our UI? Want to add a feature yourself? Or do you just want to help improve the quality of Aurous for everyone?" Aurous wrote on its site. "You can do so using our powerful plugin API. Write plugins using Javascript, HTML5 and CSS. Aurous will handle the rest."Developer Andrew Sampson told TorrentFreak the app will link to iTunes and other paid services so users can support artists if they want to, and that it is built to be completely user-powered."The app itself is decentralized, nothing routes through any external servers for the primary features," he said. "Even if as a project, development stopped and we shut down our website, the app would still continue functioning without any problems. It can look through entire BitTorrent archives in milliseconds to get individual files."Aurous is compatible with Android and IOS devices as well as Windows, Mac, Linux, and it supports a variety of file types, including .mp3, .wav, .flac and .opus. You can get more information and sign up for the alpha release here.
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