Changing torrent client - utorrent or bittorrent or transmission?

[madeirabhoy]

whats the best mac torrent app, and whats the differences between them?

i use vuze, but the site i use now has an annoying hit and run system so im starting to use another site which doesnt like vuze.

the options for 'accepted' clients are transmission, utorrent or bittorent.

what should i plump for?

i dont do anything complicated, but i like vuze automatically picking up torrents ive downloaded into my downloads folder. it'd be good if it would open at a set time so i could set it to open at midnight or something but other than that...

[Weaselboy]

I have used Transmission and UTorrent, and really they are very very similar and have pretty much the same feature set.

I settled on Transmission as I found the interface easier to use and understand.

I know Transmission will do all the things you mentioned.

[Trixster]

I´ve used transmission but moved to utorrent when I did a fresh MT install. Transmission is good, but it get´s really slow (atleast on my mini) when there were a lot of torrents in the UL and DL que, and the fact that it had to ask for permission everytime the computer needed a reboot (i.e when you quit transmission) annoyed the hell out of me...

other then that, both utorrent and transmission can do what you ask for.

[Weaselboy]

Originally Posted by Trixster

I´ve used transmission but moved to utorrent when I did a fresh MT install. Transmission is good, but it get´s really slow (atleast on my mini) when there were a lot of torrents in the UL and DL que, and the fact that it had to ask for permission everytime the computer needed a reboot (i.e when you quit transmission) annoyed the hell out of me...

other then that, both utorrent and transmission can do what you ask for.

I'm not seeing that behavior. I think if you have this box checked in the firewall settings you will only get asked that when a new version of Transmission is installed, then never again. At least that is how it works for me on 10.8.2.

[bobright]

I chose uTorrent because you can check/uncheck files from a torrent, can't with Transmission.

[Weaselboy]

Originally Posted by bobright

I chose uTorrent because you can check/uncheck files from a torrent, can't with Transmission.

I don't know howe long ago you tried Transmission, but you can certainly uncheck files in a torrent at least with the current version.

[fhall1]

Originally Posted by Weaselboy

I don't know howe long ago you tried Transmission, but you can certainly uncheck files in a torrent at least with the current version.

You've been able to for many past versions.

If you need a proxy for your torrenting you're stuck with Transmission V2.11 or earlier - the developers took proxy settings out after that (a stupid move in my opinion) - or use uTorrent. I think Transmission's UI is easier to use, but maybe that's because it was the first client I ever used and got used to it. uTorrent is newer on the Mac, but it's getting better with every version.

[Trixster]

Originally Posted by Weaselboy

I'm not seeing that behavior. I think if you have this box checked in the firewall settings you will only get asked that when a new version of Transmission is installed, then never again. At least that is how it works for me on 10.8.2.

no that´s not it.
The problem I had was that transmission asked "do you really want to quit the application" when you rebooted the computer, and you had to press "yes" for it to actually close. Maybe it is a setting though, but from what I remember I couldn´t find it in transmissions preferences.

[Weaselboy]

Originally Posted by Trixster

no that´s not it.
The problem I had was that transmission asked "do you really want to quit the application" when you rebooted the computer, and you had to press "yes" for it to actually close. Maybe it is a setting though, but from what I remember I couldn´t find it in transmissions preferences.

Hmm... maybe unchecking this would help?



I normally manually pause DLs then quit the app before restarting, and never see this issue.

[OtherF]

Originally Posted by madeirabhoy

whats the best mac torrent app, and whats the differences between them?

I'm using Transmission because it has simple UI and useful options like "Execute script after torrent download".

I use script for video conversion.

[bobright]

Originally Posted by Weaselboy

I don't know howe long ago you tried Transmission, but you can certainly uncheck files in a torrent at least with the current version.

my fault it was recently, it was probably just on my part when clicking the .torrent could never find the option to select/uncheck files

[Trixster]

Originally Posted by Weaselboy

Hmm... maybe unchecking this would help?



I normally manually pause DLs then quit the app before restarting, and never see this issue.

yea, that´s probably it!
Thanks

[Quotenfrau]

+1 for Transmission. Great software and Open Source. Wikipedia has more info.

[Ledgem]

µTorrent was my client of choice on Windows, but for Mac I use Transmission. It's a very active project that is updated regularly and works quite nicely.

[dw3bb10]

I've been using uTorrent for years, and for the last few months on my Macbook. Going to try out Transmission, thanks guys.

[Mr. McMac]

I use micro torrent (utorrent) for both mac and PC's. I'm not saying it's the best, but it's worked for me for years on my PC, and the last couple on my Macs. No complaints whatsoever....

[phoenixsan]

ease of use, I will go with BitTorrent. But needing more options, I will lend towards Transmission....

[benny46]

Just this week I've ditched my PC and bought myself an iMac. I'm getting started slowly and thought I'd jump on this conversation. I had Bittorrent on the PC and was wondering which is best for the Mac, after research I'm feeling the majority are saying 'Transition' hoping this is a good option for a new Mac user?

[torana355]

Originally Posted by benny46

Just this week I've ditched my PC and bought myself an iMac. I'm getting started slowly and thought I'd jump on this conversation. I had Bittorrent on the PC and was wondering which is best for the Mac, after research I'm feeling the majority are saying 'Transition' hoping this is a good option for a new Mac user?

They are all easy to use but UTorrent and Deluge are the best by far when it comes to speeds as they pick up more peers. Transmission is easy to use but the speeds are too slow, especially the upload speeds.

[Weaselboy]

Originally Posted by torana355

They are all easy to use but UTorrent and Deluge are the best by far when it comes to speeds as they pick up more peers. Transmission is easy to use but the speeds are too slow, especially the upload speeds.

I have used both Transmission and UTorrent, and I don't see any difference at all in UL speeds between the two.

[G-Mo]

Performance wise, uTorrent and Transmission are about the same I've found, however, Transmission has a tendency (used to, haven't used it in a year) to be be a real resource hog for no apparent reason... One minute running fine, then maxing out the CPU for no apparent reason and slowing down then whole machine (fixed only by force quitting the Transmission app). It was a PITA, so I sacked it pretty quickly after uTorrent came out for Mac. Don't know if they have fixed the issue yet (it persisted for years over multiple releases, and is pretty well documented), and frankly don't care... I'm happy wih uTorrent, it's been perfect for me.

[kjs862]

I've been using transmission for years but recently switched to utorrent after transmission started giving me problems.

[torana355]

Originally Posted by Weaselboy

I have used both Transmission and UTorrent, and I don't see any difference at all in UL speeds between the two.

It depends on your tracker, im using a private one and UTorrent is noticeably faster. UTorrent is well known as one of the best file sharing clients, Transmission, not so much.

[msandersen]

Originally Posted by G-Mo

Performance wise, uTorrent and Transmission are about the same I've found, however, Transmission has a tendency (used to, haven't used it in a year) to be be a real resource hog for no apparent reason... One minute running fine, then maxing out the CPU for no apparent reason and slowing down then whole machine (fixed only by force quitting the Transmission app). It was a PITA, so I sacked it pretty quickly after uTorrent came out for Mac. Don't know if they have fixed the issue yet (it persisted for years over multiple releases, and is pretty well documented), and frankly don't care... I'm happy wih uTorrent, it's been perfect for me.

That was the reason I quit using it; there was a long bugreport on the issue going back years with the developers seemingly not able to pin it down, partly because they are mainly Linux developers. They blamed it on an OSX IO bug from memory, although Transmission was the only Bittorrent client affected by the issue. I don't know what triggered it in my case, as it had worked ok for a while before the instability issues set in; maybe I was using Transmission more and longer at the time. It seemed to slowly eat up resources to the point when it slowed to molassis, and if you weren't quick enough to shut it down, getting any menu up or force quitting could take minutes of beachball-watching as the mouse stuttered and everything became unresponsive. I got sick of it and thankfully by then uTorrent Beta had been released, although it was incomplete with only a subset of the features of its Windows original. I think it still doesn't have the same features, I haven't used the Windows version in years (aside: My Vista machine runs like molassis as par for the course these days; only a complete fresh install will fix it, and this is a Dell machine so not sure how to do that and frankly can't be bothered nor wanted to spend money on Windows 7, and 8 is not for me).
One thing I miss from Transmission is the ability to relocate a finished Torrent and still be available for seeding. I don't want all my finished torrents sitting in the torrent directory. At least uTorrent can move finished torrents to a specified directory and into a subfolder matching its tag (eg Movies). What I need for keeping things organised and to clear up space on the Downloads drive is the ability to move them manually post-download to any arbitrary location while still being active. It's good to seed.

[benny46]

Originally Posted by torana355

They are all easy to use but UTorrent and Deluge are the best by far when it comes to speeds as they pick up more peers. Transmission is easy to use but the speeds are too slow, especially the upload speeds.

Thanks, and thank you to everyone with their input, I'm really liking the real reviews from this forum