# best bit torrent client for mac?



## Ynought (Aug 6, 2007)

which is it?


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## fryke (Aug 7, 2007)

Azureus is the most complete/accepted client. There are a few lean new clients around, but they're missing features I sometimes need.


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## mudfrog (Aug 7, 2007)

I'm not sure whether this kind of subject is permitted by the mods here to be honest. Don't take it the wrong way but I reckon there would be better places to discuss this type of thing


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## fryke (Aug 7, 2007)

Erh... Go ahead, ignore my being a mod.  It's perfectly okay, I think, to do a superficial comparison between bittorrent apps. No problem. But there can't be any trackernames that also feature copyrighted material illegally and the likes. Best not to talk about trackers in the first place.


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## FlashMac (Aug 7, 2007)

Another vote for Azureus here. I've tried various others but this gives the most functionality. Haven't used it in a while though.


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## fryke (Aug 7, 2007)

While it _does_ have the most functionality of any Mac bittorrent clients I've tried so far, it's also a rather ugly application, I find. The newer (beta) versions seem to go a way I don't really enjoy. I'd *looooooove* to find a neat clean Cocoa replacement - if only those could selectively download files from a torrent. Too often I only want to download one of several files in a torrent, or I want to prioritize single files from a torrent, and I miss such a feature terribly in all other Mac clients.


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## chevy (Aug 7, 2007)

xtorrent is not bad and it includes a search engine. Its integration in MacOS is much better... maybe too good as we lose some control.


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## PGTips (Aug 7, 2007)

Transmission is an awesome application. It's much lighter weight than Azureus and does all that I need it to do. In fact, Azureus seems to slow down my computer when using it and has a much higher network usage. I notice it, because I play networked games when downloading stuff and there is no performance hit with Transmission.

BitTorrent isn't just used for trading warez -.-, Blizzard hosts the Warcraft Client installer and patches via Bittorrent. I don't like the Blizzard downloader since I can't control the bandwidth it sucks up. But if I use a torrent client, I can better manage my bandwidth.


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## Qion (Aug 7, 2007)

PGTips said:


> Transmission is an awesome application. It's much lighter weight than Azureus and does all that I need it to do. In fact, Azureus seems to slow down my computer when using it and has a much higher network usage. I notice it, because I play networked games when downloading stuff and there is no performance hit with Transmission.
> 
> BitTorrent isn't just used for trading warez -.-, Blizzard hosts the Warcraft Client installer and patches via Bittorrent. I don't like the Blizzard downloader since I can't control the bandwidth it sucks up. But if I use a torrent client, I can better manage my bandwidth.



Transmission works for me in about 95% of all cases. The only time that I switch over to the jug of lard called Azureus is when I need a specific file from a very large download.


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## ergo proxy (Aug 7, 2007)

Long time Azureus user, I think it's ok, does what it's suppose to do.
I like some of the extra features but I agree that it doesn't feel like a
native Mac app. I installed Transmission ( I think I have the older version)
but never really used it much, so I can't say if it's better than Azureus.


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## icemanjc (Aug 7, 2007)

I use a program called Acquisition, that does p2p and torrents.
Otherwise, I use Bittorrent.


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## fryke (Aug 7, 2007)

newest version of transmission has partial-downloads (single files from multifile-torrents) support. byebye azureus.


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## Mikuro (Aug 7, 2007)

It depends on what you need. You can't beat Azureus on features, but it's big and bloated. Transmission is very lean, but some trackers ban it because older versions were "greedy". The official client is decent, but I stopped using it after version 4.0 because it started making unexplained connections to unknown addresses. I still don't know why (if you do, please enlighten me!), but I didn't like that it was in constant communication with something even when no torrents were loaded.

Tomato Torrent is a solid client, but its interface is a little funky. That's not altogether bad, just unusual.

I use Azureus and Transmission, myself. When I can get away with it and I don't need advanced features (which is most of the time), I use Transmission.

Both Azureus and Transmission support UPnP, which is a feature of most modern routers that lets software auto-configure the firewall. This is a great feature for anyone who hates wrestling with their router, or anyone who likes things that Just Work. AFAIK these are the only two Mac clients that support UPnP, but I haven't used many others in a while, so I could be wrong at this point.



fryke said:


> newest version of transmission has partial-downloads (single files from multifile-torrents) support. byebye azureus.



Woo-hoo!


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## lbj (Aug 7, 2007)

Put me down as a very satisfied Transmission user except for that 1% of the time I need Azureuz.


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## Qion (Aug 7, 2007)

fryke said:


> newest version of transmission has partial-downloads (single files from multifile-torrents) support. byebye azureus.



Agreed!


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## Giaguara (Aug 7, 2007)

I vote for Bittyrant


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## fryke (Aug 7, 2007)

From Bittyrant's webpage: "Youll find the GUI identical to Azureus..." - So, nope, thx.


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## Mikuro (Aug 7, 2007)

BitTyrant is based on Azureus. The biggest difference is that it supposedly uses a smarter method of choosing peers, designed to get faster download speeds. In my (limited) testing, though, it performed significantly _worse_ than plain ol' Azureus (uploading a bit more and downloading much less), so either it's a total crock or it is only better for specific kinds of torrents or on specific setups. The torrents I tested had a fairly even seeder:downloader ratio; it might be geared more towards torrents with few seeds and many downloaders.


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## lbj (Aug 8, 2007)

fryke said:


> From Bittyrant's webpage: "Youll find the GUI identical to Azureus..." - So, nope, thx.




Ha!  That's exactly what I thought as I read the GUI comment.  

It's like Porsche releasing their latest high-speed variant and proudly proclaiming "You'll find the styling identical to a Chevrolet..."

Yeah, a GUI identical to Azureus is not something you brag about.


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