Filed under: Software, Internet Tools
Transmission 0.7 beta reviewed by Torrentfreak
The market for Mac torrent clients has been expanding quite a bit recently, and Torrentfreak has a nice review of a new beta version of Transmission, a long-standing favorite of many a Mac torrenter. While the review rounds up many of the nice new features, I'll give you the cliff notes for the slackers in the crowd: "Transmission 0.7 Beta is by far the fastest, most light-weight and one of the most appealing BitTorrent clients for the Mac."
Diving further in, some of Transmission's new features seem to be inspired by Xtorrent, a new beta client from Dave Watanabe (of NewsFire fame). Of these new features, notables include time-of-day based speed limits (i.e. - slow down my torrent downloads while I'm at my desk at work from 9-5), as well as a Watch Folder with automatic cleanup of your torrent files (again, very Xtorrent inspired). The idea is: most Mac browsers by default download all files to the desktop, but that might not be where torrent users want to keep their downloads as well. This Watch Folder allows Transmission to automatically snag any torrent files you download to the desktop, move them to a user-specified folder and begin the torrent download. Ah, software automation - it's a beautiful thing.
Check out the rest of Torrentfreak's review, as plenty more is packed under the hood of this new beta.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Michael Park said 4:07PM on 11-01-2006
I'll have to give this again. I tried it a while ago and, for some reason, it didn't work for me. I've been using the last updated a long time ago, PPC build of Bits on Wheels on my Intel iMac. It's been working pretty well for me, but I'm always on the lookout for something better.
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Pedro da Vila said 4:28PM on 11-01-2006
Michael,
You can have a look on Azureus (http://azureus.sourceforge.net/) it is consider for most Mac torrent users as the best. I simply detest it, but sometimes there are torrent files that only work with it. I prefer Transmission that I am using for a long time, you can get the newest beta version here: http://chucker.mystfans.com/opensource/transmission/Transmission-0.7-svn-r1049.dmg. There is another new client that I do not know if you heard about it: Bitrocket, it's simply beautiful a nice icon and a clean and simple interface, with an iTunes style. It also as some new functions like RSS support and an amazing search engine where you can setup your preferred torrent links.
cheers
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Bill I said 4:47PM on 11-01-2006
I used to use Transmission, and while this particular update improves a lot on an already great interface, Transmission still doesn't work on OiNK.
So, I use BitRocket. It's memory footprint is almost as small as Transmission's, the interface (while bigger) is just as clean, and more importantly--it works with OiNK.
http://www.bitrocket.org/
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matthew said 5:09PM on 11-01-2006
XTorrent is also pretty good, but I seem to keep coming back to the BTJunkie.org/Transmission combo.
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Fever606 said 5:38PM on 11-01-2006
Not to nitpick, but the Watch Folder and scheduled throttling (among many other features) have been in the 0.7 nightlies for a while... certainly well before XTorrent was announced. And they're staples of Azureus too, which has been around even longer.
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Alexander Anderson said 5:22PM on 11-01-2006
While Transmission is a very nice app, it still has a long way to go before it could become the Torrent app to use. It still doesn't let you specify which files you want to download, pretty sure you can't categorize your torrents. And like mentioned above it's banned on several torrent sites.
BitRocket is a little bit better, but I've had some very poor experiences with it, random crashes, crashing when clicking on torrents. It has the potential to be great, but again, it still has a long way to go.
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Jon H said 6:24PM on 11-01-2006
Now if only torrent downloading weren't slower than the 9600 bps modem I used in college.
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Shuomi said 6:36PM on 11-01-2006
As others have said previously, the features you outline as taken from Xtorrent have existed in Azureus for quite some time now.
Check out the Speed Scheduler plugin, it does exactly what the name tells you, and has been around for more than a year and the Watch Folder is a feature that appeared in Azureus in version 2.0.6.0 released on December 19th 2003 (according to the changelog), that is to say nearly 3 years before Xtorrent was even talked about.
This Watch Folder feature is very useful when you use an otherwise useless computer as a download server, as you can just create an alias on your desktop to the watch folder on the server and then drag and drop your torrents without thought.
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Scott F said 6:46PM on 11-01-2006
Been using this for a week now. Nice, fast, Growl-savvy, and cleans up the .torrent file from my download folder.
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LittleJoe said 8:40PM on 11-01-2006
maximum download speeds (for me):
Same file, same time of day, same number of seeds...
Transmission - 4 kbps
Azureus - 309 kbps
no thanks transmission.
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Gandhi said 8:58PM on 11-01-2006
Tried transmission (official non-beta version) and then switched to BitRocket. I know there has been some controversy about BitRocket regarding the source code, but i am just the end user - I dont care as long as its not spyware. I particularly like the search features BitRocket has and Transmission lacks completely. I am just too lazy to go search on some other web site through my browser - would rather prefer the torrent client do it for me.
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Roger Emmer said 11:17PM on 11-01-2006
I am a new user to transmission. I cant seem to get it to work. Torrents will open in it but it wont start downloading... I can open the same torrents with tomato and they will download. Any ideas?
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Riine said 9:08PM on 11-01-2006
I also think that it should include the option to select which files inside of a torrent that you want. I think it is a great app already but there are features that it is lacking.
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John Clay said 9:11PM on 11-01-2006
Mr. Chartier,
I would implore you to check your facts before posting an article. Your assertions that Transmission's speed limit feature was inspired by XTorrent are unfounded and quite wrong.
Transmission is a fluid work in progress, and as such, not all new features arereleased in separate versions. Many features have been added since 0.6.1, but there has not been a release yet.
Transmission first used the speed limit schedular back in August, a full month before XTorrent was released. The Speed Limit function on its own was committed to the Transmission SVN back in July.
The Auto-import function is not, in fact, inspired by XTorrent at all. Quite the opposite. Transmission's SVN had this feature long before XTorrent, all the way back in July.
Please, Mr. Chartier, in the future, don't make claims you can't back up.
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echidnae said 10:08PM on 11-01-2006
Want to know why Xtorrent is so similar to Transmission and vice versa? Because Xtorrent is based on libtransmission, which is the library that the Transmission developers built.
So, from reading through the Transmission forums, it looks as though the developers of both apps will be sharing some code with each other. Sounds like a good thing for us mac users, if you ask me :)
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Daniel said 10:27PM on 11-01-2006
John, any comment on when header encryption will be added to the tree?
Seems more ISP's are shaping torrent traffic and it's a much needed addition
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John Clay said 10:49PM on 11-01-2006
Daniel: The Transmission forums (http://transmission.m0k.org/forum) has lots of information. Many things are in progress, or are on a list of things to do.
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slingshot said 2:36AM on 11-02-2006
Transmission: Based on libtransmission hence banned at many private trackers due to its announce interval issues.
Xtorrent: Based on libtransmission hence banned at many trackers. Written by Watanabe so end-user likely to be screwed over in near future. Watch this space.
Chartier: Once again under-researched and given a licence to shoot his mouth off by Weblogs Inc. This article is factually incorrect. Each of the features noted in the article pre-exist in Azureues, and have existed in the Transmission nightlies or been listed on the forum well before Azureus was released.
My recommendation for the one to watch would be BitRocket. Its still at version 0.1, so those idiots complaining about stability clearly shouldn't be playing with betas, but is based in libtorrent so will have none of the tracker issues that Transmission and Xtorrent do / will, and is moving slowly but surely in the same direction that Azureus did, but with a Mac interface and small footprint.
Chartier, I don't know what your area of expertise in the Mac world is, but I'd suggest you find it and stick to it. Propogating this kind of rubbish in a Mac blog with a readership as large as this one is just irreponsible.
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slingshot said 2:37AM on 11-02-2006
Edit: for "well before Azureus was released", read "...before Xtorrent was released".
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Niklas said 4:10AM on 11-02-2006
I am disappointed in Transmission since the developer does not want to adhere to bittorrent standards: http://transmission.m0k.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=491
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