Blubster is a peer to peer file sharing network (mainly a music-sharing network) utility created by Pablo Soto, who works under Optisoft. In 2003, Blubster had more than 80,000 users worldwide, often reaching 100,000 during peak times, and has now become a major p2p community. The p2p network now claims to have more than 263,213 users, sharing ranks with well-known networks such as Overnet, DirectConnect, Gnutella, FastTrack and eDonkey2000.

Blubster uses a peer-to-peer network with a new private protocol called MANOLITO, which works without a central server. Once the Blubster client program connects with another client, you can search and download MP3 files from the entire network of users. Blubster claims to be free of malicious bundled software such as adware and Spyware, and to keep transfer information protected, or at least put significant barriers in the way of data collection. And by using the UDP protocol instead of TCP, the serverless network doesn't show detailed IP address information.

Unlike other networks, earlier version of Blubster did not have multisource downloading capabilities in the conventional ‘swarming' sense. On the other hand, Blubster uses a decentralized network, and works by locating a group of exact files, and confirms the fastest and most reliable source from a single location before downloading. As for its network architecture, according to Soto, “In FastTrack or Gnutella, a node becomes a supernode in one step… Blubster nodes are all supernodes… your machine will make as much work for the network as it can using reasonable amounts of system resources.”

Main Features of the Blubster Client:

The Blubster client comes with a very clean interface, and like most p2p file sharing programs, its layout is also configured with the search and other important options positioned on the toolbar. If you have used p2p programs such as BearShare, LimeWire or KaZaA, then you'll be quite comfortable with the Blubster's user interface. The search feature includes an "advanced" function, which can filter out songs by using parameters such as file size, bitrate, and frequency. Multi-source downloading has also been implemented in the latest version.

The MANOLITO protocol, which Blubster uses, allows you to connect with one of the network gateways to search and download mp3 music files, and even professional quality streaming files such as Ogg Vorbis, from the entire community. When a download begins, Blubster will check fingerprints in order to download from multiple hosts, and if you try to download a file you already had in the download process, you can choose to resume, overwrite, rename or cancel the download.

Other features include

• Autoresumable downloads
• Internal music player
• Unlimited scalability
• Hot List/Buddy list
• Chat and Voice chat
• Downloads collection and playlist manager
• Web links support, SHA-1 Hashing