This is a Bit Torrent Guide For Mac OS X Clients. We’ll be looking at what software is available and where to download files for your Bit Torrent client.
What software / client do I need to start downloading .torrent files?
There are many Bit Torrent Mac clients to choose from including:
Transmission (BitTorrent) (Download Client)
Transmission is a Bit Torrent Mac client available to download for free and programmed from scratch in C.
Naturally Transmission runs on Mac OS X as well as BeOS, Linux, NetBSD and FreeBSD. However only the Mac OS X release has a graphical interface. Not to worry though BeOS and GTK+ interfaces are in the pipeline.
As with some of the best software on the Mac, Transmission is opensource much like other Bit Torrent Clients for Macs.
Click here to download the Bit Torrent client transmission
The next torrent client for the Mac OS X is Bits On Wheels. The creator (Nicolas Berloquin) claims that “Bits on Wheels is the first 100% Native BitTorrent client for the Macintosh. (And) It is completely written in Objective-C and Cocoa.”
It’s currently free to download and provides some very interesting 3D views and detailed information about the torrents your downloading. Looking through the support forums though it seems that there are some technical issues that may not have been resolved in the latest released version.
It’s worth having a look and seeing if it fits your needs. I for one will be downloading this Bit Torrent client to test it out later. However for now I have had success downloading torrent files on to my Mac with Bit Torrent OS X.
Bit Torrent OS X is the original client of them all. It’s free to download and very easy to use. It’s also available to Windows users. A great Bit Torrent Guide for Windows users can be found at http://www.themanfromdelmonte.co.uk/bit-torrent-guide.
You can download Bit Torrent OS X from http://www.bittorrent.com as well as search for .torrent files.
Once you have downloaded and installed your Bit Torrent client on your Mac the next thing to do is start downloading your files.
How to download .torrent files to your Mac OS X
This is the easy and hard part of this guide for you the user. The fantastic thing about using torrents to download files rather than peer to peer applications such as Limewire (which is a great program) is the faster speed of downloading and the ability to find larger files such as movies and games.
Searching for your file is as easy as using Google. The first site I started using was TorrentSpy.com which I found surfing via Dan Goodwin’s xBox 360 site. I have also singled this out becuase it has a directory structure which drills down to Mac specific torrent files.
Once you have found a file you wish to download simply click on the Download Torrent button. Now you not downloading the the movie or game but a file holds the information about where and how to download your file. Now don’t look in to this too much. All you really need to know is where you saved it.
Open your Bit Torrent Client For Mac OS X and then open the .torrent (the file you have just downloaded form TorrentSpy) file using your client e.g Going to the tool bar and selecting File > Open.
You should then see your downloading to start. Naturally if you have any problems consult the Bit Torrent client manual or website.
Now here comes the hard part….Waiting for the downloading to complete. Once downloaded you should be able to run the game, watch the movie or listen to that mp3 straight away.
Let me know how you get along and if you have suggestions of more resources, be it more Bit Torrent Clients for the Mac OS X platform or new torrent sites please do get in touch and I’ll try include them here for others to view.
