Torrenting

I torrent.

Look. There are hundreds of legit reasons to do this. I’m not going to argue if it’s right or wrong, because we all know that taking something that people charge for, without paying, is called stealing. Let’s put that aside. I’ve got a torrent I want to download, because downloading this way will be faster than a normal FTP of a 1G file.

The first thing you need is a Torrent client. I like uTorrent personally, as it’s small and easy for me to use.

The next thing you need is a torrent file. Let’s say I want to get the DRM free music from SXSW. I could download them all one at a time, or I could use a torrent from http://www.sxswtorrent.com/

That’s 2.6 gigs of music. And you’d think this would take a long time to download. You’d be wrong. What you download is “SXSW_2005_Showcasing_Artists-Release_1.torrent” and open that tiny file in your client.

uTorrent lets me select what files I want to download (all of them today):

I click okay, and it starts to download. This is where it gets fun. The more people who are sharing this file, the faster my download goes.

Here it is, trucking along at 1M a second and it’ll download in about 45 minutes. Just enough time for me to take a shower.

The magic in the torrent sauce is that instead of FTP where it’s one person asking one server for one file, this is a million people asking a million people for a file, as bits, not a file. So I can get one snippet of a file from Bob in Minnesota, and another from Arman in Atlanta. The more of us who download, the more of us who are sharing what we just downloaded!

But torrenting is really my favorite way to share large files to the masses. And yes, when I’m done downloading, I leave it up to ‘seed.’

I am aware, by the way, that as of 2010, SXSW was a little iffy about distribution via torrent, but it’s been three years and no one’s shut the site down. They’re all well aware of it so if no one’s been slapped with a C&D by now, they’re all okay. Anyway, all these songs are available to download off SXSW’s official site. The issue was with the distribution, which I can understand. I try really hard to only download legal files from legit sources, because I appreciate the value of the work that went into what I’m enjoying.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some new music to listen to!

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

I’m Mika (aka Ipstenu) and I’m complicated. I’ve been on the net since the days of dedicated terminals and Novation CAT modems and solved Missionaries and Cannibals (or Goats and Cabbages) before I was six, and blog about WordPress and technical/computer things at Half Elf on Tech.

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