UPDATE: Here’s an article on the best Grooveshark and Limewire alternatives in 2017. Thanks to Joel Stephens for letting me know!
From the LimeWire forums, this is what’s new in LimeWire 4.9.0 beta:
Searching:
LimeWire now recognizes more types of licenses in the search results. In addition to Creative Commons licenses, which LimeWire 4.3 added, “Weedshare” licenses and arbitrary licenses in WMA & WMV files are recognized. If you enable the ‘License’ column you can see if any search result had a license. You can then right-click on the item and choose to ‘View License’ to verify the information. As if that wasn’t enough, you can now right-click on any search result and choose to ‘Download As’, saving the file to any arbitrary location. You can also choose to search for similiar kinds of results from a new ‘Search More’ submenu.
Downloading:
In a nutshell, downloads just work better. They’re faster, they’re smarter, and they use fewer resources. LimeWire now has vastly improved support for large files due to a highly optimized swarming algorithm. These features will continue to speed up downloads even further in the future, as more users upgrade.
Sharing:
We’ve gone to great lengths to make sure that you don’t accidentally share files you didn’t mean to. LimeWire will now detect directories that are “sensitive”, prompting the user to confirm that they really do want to share them. You can also now choose to stop sharing a single file from a shared folder, or stop sharing a subdirectory of a shared folder. For users who want to share files from arbitrary locations, you can also choose to share any individual file. These files will show in a special ‘Individually Shared Files’ item in the library. The Library tab has also been revamped to give you more control over what you’re sharing while maintaining LimeWire’s famous ease-of-use .
Network Messaging:
The entire messaging architecture has been redesigned and rearchitected to use less resources and less memory. Ultrapeers should notice a significant speed and memory improvement when connected to many hosts. In the future this will allow your searches to return results faster and reach more hosts.