Jay Paroline

I noticed that someone found my blog by searching for “grooveshark peer offline” recently. Apparently that error message is not clear enough, so I’ll try to explain some of the causes of that message. This may not be an all-inclusive list because I’m not directly involved with a lot of the things that cause this problem, but common causes for that message include:

We showed the file as being online even though it wasn’t really (that shouldn’t be happening anymore; it’s the only part I have control over).
The peer said it had the file, but when we tried to access it, the peer said it didn’t have the file.
The peer was flagged as being online, but when we tried to connect to it via the supernode it’s supposed to be connected to, the supernode said that the peer was not connected.
The peer refused the connection (usually happens when people have firewalls and such turned on).
The NAT type of the peer was not compatible with your NAT type. Unfortunately because of the style of communication used by the clients, it’s possible for two peers to both be online but unable to communicate with each other due to incompatible NAT types. There’s no easy fix for this, but eventually we will enhance the site so that users with incompatible NAT types show up as being offline.

If you are getting lots of “peer offline” error messages, then there might be a more serious problem. Contact me and I will get you in touch with the people who can diagnose and solve your problem.