Due to a lawsuit against Free Peers, Inc. BearShare was launched in 2000 and used the Gnutella-based peer-to-peer network. The official release of LimeWire 5.0 makes for a much improved P2P experience.BearShare is a free, file sharing application used to download/upload video and audio content, as well as play the content via its in-built media player. This is not the most advertised feature of LimeWire, which may a way of keeping legal challenges at bay, but it's a shame that you can't search for torrents within the program. LimeWire searches remain within the P2P network, but you can open torrent files with it, and it functions very well as a torrent download client. This is much easier than tapping out IP addresses, and if enough of your friends use LimeWire, it could become great community sharing tool. You can sign in with your Gmail, Jabber or LiveJournal accounts, and share files between any of your friends there who are also on LimeWire. The Friends function has been much improved.

LimeWire goes out of its way to check you are aware of the legal implications of illegal filesharing, on installation you have to agree not to infringe copyright, and if you download a file for which LimeWire can't find a license you will be warned and can stop or continue at your discretion.

The built-in player is still unintrusive and useful for checking audio and video files, but no more. The new design makes scanning your search results much easier, and downloading files is totally intuitive. Because it's a new release, there are still some bugs, but the basic file sharing functions as well as ever.

Otherwise it's business as usual on LimeWire, but with a much simplified and cleaner interface.

Download bearshare app