Mac Torrent clients reviewed

"16. If your ISP uses traffic shaping to restrict your p2p bandwidth then use Azureus to encrypt and bypass ISP imposed limits ;-)"

How would you go about doing this?

Azureus. Why? Only because I can use it on all platforms which makes it a lot easier to instruct others on getting started with the torrent world. Azureus does the job and with every release it gets better. On my 12" 1.5GHz G4 it does become a resource hog when transfer speeds heat up. a 160K/sec transfer will easily chew up 25% user cpu (menu meters are the best and everyone should have them installed).

It's great to be able to jump on a friend's Mac or PC (hell even a linux box) and set them up with Azureus and have it be completley familiar.

I will say that I'm excited to see the new release from David Watanabe (Acquisition fame) come about. Taking torrents to a true OS X integration. Not out yet and was just on Digg. Look for it!

How can I find info on this headless azureus?

I'm running Azureus as a daemon (headless) with a dashboard widget as interface.
I couldn't imagine a better torrent client, it just works perfect.
Not hogging my system at all and still have all the features Azureus offers.

I have one word.... BitRocket http://www.bitrocket.org

Best Torrent app ever!

If your ISP uses traffic shaping to restrict your p2p bandwidth then use Azureus to encrypt and bypass ISP imposed limits ;-)

I use BOW and am very pleased with the download speeds, and have never experienced any malfunctions. Am I missing out on something? Is there truly something better out there? Really, what makes one client better than another? BOW consistently supplies me with what I ask for in an expedient fashion without any hassle. What else is there that I am missing out on? Please illuminate…

When you say : "As some of the more torrent astute readers might guess, Transmission and Bits On Wheels came out on top"

AND the article clearly states : "Clearly, feature-wise Azureus is the winner"

It shows that you are either :
a) not one of the aformentioned 'astute readers'
b) far too busy to research all that you blog
c) both of the above

keep up the ...er, work

Azureus is by far the best, and only decent torrent client for mac. For people running older, less powerful mac's I can understand not wanting to use it. All of the other torrent clients are woefully inadequate on the features front. As for download speeds azureus is faster than the others too, but only when properly configured, this is the key to azureus, you MUST spend the time setting it up correctly to get the best out of it.

Anyone saying any other torrent client is faster than azureus has not taken the time to configure it correctly.

Tomato torrent for me. Simple, resource friendly and reasonably good speeds can be acheived. I just wish all my downloads could be shown in one window rather than many scattered over my desktop.

I also use the Applescript and Mail rule that auomatically opens Torrent files for me if I email them to my home computer from work.

It's been linked to before but here it is again.

http://www.bigbucketblog.com/2006/06/12/email-activated-torrent-downloader/

Well worth the effort, just modify the script to suit your Torrent client of choice.

M.