Hello Sownloader Community,
in this post I would give you more details about the current situation regarding the availability of Sownloader and it’s future. You may have noticed that our service is no longer working anymore.
The reason for this comes down to the high popularity of our service. You guys have been downloading so many songs that our web server has generated so much traffic to Smule’s servers that it has been blocked by Smule’s Cloudflare protection.
This already happened in 2020 with our metadata fetching mechanism. At the time, we were able to resolve the issue by fetching the metadata via an external Raspberry Pi at my home. We tried the same approach this time for the actual content, and it worked at first. However, it again generated so much traffic that it literally killed my Raspberry Pi in just a few hours.
To give you some numbers, over 86 TB of media has been downloaded in the past 30 days alone. In September, Sownloader set its all-time record with over 690,000 unique visitors. In addition to this people have been using AI Agents to download their entire Smule catalog with Sownloader (which is actually crazy to think of).
Which options do we have?
The data clearly shows an upward trend that is far too much to be handled by a small Raspberry Pi hosted on my home network. Unfortunately, there’s no quick fix in sight.
A quick fix would be to switch to a different server provider, which would get the service running again in no time. However, this would only be a temporary solution, as it could easily be blocked again—most likely automatically. Additionally, we don’t want to generate terabytes of traffic from a single server, so we have to look for an alternative.
Sownloader Windows
Our native Windows application is completely unaffected by this, because you download the files directly from your own computer rather than from our servers. As a first step, we are going to release an update very soon to upgrade it to the latest .NET 10 release. Feel free to submit feature requests and bug reports directly on GitHub.
Sownloader Web
We are going to release an update shortly that will at least allow you to download your songs in some form. Unfortunately this changes come with some limitations.
- We can no longer provide a default file name
- MP3 downloads won’t be possible. Only m4a and mp4
- m4a files cannot be saved on iOS
We can no longer provide these features, as they all rely on our servers downloading the content in the first place.
What are we going to do?
The only real solution to this problem is to provide native applications for all major platforms. But this will require some time.
According to our Google search data, the majority of our users are using Sownloader on mobile devices, which is why we are starting with those.
As a first step, we will start with a native iOS application. The reason for this is quite simple: I use iOS myself, and at the moment I don’t own any Android devices to test the app on.
I will use the current donations and income from Patreon to buy a cheap Android phone once the iOS app has been finished. The major challenge in providing native applications is the need to learn new programming languages. For iOS, I need to learn how to code in Swift, and for Android, I need to learn Java. In addition to this, I also need to learn how to use their integrated development environments (IDEs) before I can even start to code in them. Please also keep in mind that I’m doing all of this in my free time alongside my full-time job.
First look on the native iOS app
I already did some initial work to get familiar with iOS and Swift development. Right now I have a bare bone prototype which supports downloading files, searching them and playing them. Please take a look on this short video for a first impression.
Which features will the app support?
To get somewhere started I have defined some core features which will be part of the first version of the app.
- Downloading via URL just like Sownloader Web
- Searchable library of your downloaded songs
- Play and share your media from the app
- Renaming files
- Deleting files
- Tutorial on how to download your media
Which features will come in later versions?
These features will be implemented later on and won’t be available at launch.
- Setting meta tags like artist, title, year, etc.
- Automatically setting cover arts
- Library shuffle play
- Share directly from any Smule app to Sownloader
- Mark as songs as favourite
Additional features and wishes
Do you have any features in mind that you’d like to see added to the app? Don’t hesitate to leave a comment below or contact us via email at support@sownloader.com
Lastly, I would like to thank everyone who has supported the project over the past 13 years through donations, contributions, feedback, or any other form of support. It’s crazy to think about the impact Sownloader has had on the Smule community over the past decade. I never thought that this project would become this big one day.
This is not the end of the world—it’s just the beginning of a new journey for Sownloader. I will keep you updated as soon as I can share more details with you! ♥️
Much love
Marvin Klein
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