It’s (not) Alright

I have already written about my experiences with other torrent managers and rTorrent in this series before in this post. Now I am set to review rTorrent because, believe it or now, I am actually using it as my primary torrent manager for past 1 month. Don’t worry… I am not going to write a “1 month with rTorrent” here. I am going to review it in short for performance and how to optimize it to use it better. I will start with a short review of rTorrent.

rTorrent - Review

As I said, after using it for a whole month, I am beginning to like it and also getting a little anxious for future releases. As already mentioned, I had many problems with other torrent clients. You can read more about them here. And then came the day when I decided to take a brave step and use a client that is completely based on *nix console. I am happy to say that I, in no way, regret that decision.

Things started with little bumps along the way. I had to do a little research on the site of rTorrent and find some settings which would work on my system. Then I began downloading.

I was immediately surprised with 2 things. First was that even though there Continue reading »

\\ tags: Bit-Torrent, Console, HowTo, Internet, Linux, Old PC, Review, rtorrent, Software, Tools

I have been having a lot of problems with this laptop of mine as it is. I decided not to put it to much strain (afterall, even though it is HP who sucks, I am the one who suffers), so I dumped Azureus (still my favorite client read more here) and go for Deluge. After some time, I was not much impressed.

Deluge is built using python. So it is way faster than Azureus which is Java based¹. Azureus, however comes with plenty of features. Almost overwhelming. Deluge on the other side, has very few features. I mean it doesn’t even display the hash of the torrent to search and add more trackers if needed. It does not display the pieces being downloaded, does not have any information about pieces at all.

Then I tried transmission. It is good and it is fast. Built using C. But it looks quite weird and general tendency of people is towards Deluge than transmission². Even I found that out why, it is really weird indeed. Continue reading »

1. I had a fried of mine argue with me over this. He says that java is faster, but it is the layers that make it slow… I wonder what that is. [↩]
2. Comparing the 2. A review says that 7/11 people use Azureus. [↩]

\\ tags: azureus, Bit-Torrent, Console, deluge, Linux, Old PC, rtorrent, transmission, utorrent

Jamendo is a music sharing website. It contains albums from artists all over the world which are under the Creative Common license.

Even you can join it and submit your music. You can listen to others’ songs. You can write reviews and promote an album/artist/band that you like. Based on your feedback and reviews, the albums are rated and a list of album of month is created.

The music is available in MP3 and OGG Vorbis format. The files can be streamed or downloaded from bit-torrent. And the Jamendo server makes sure that there are a minimum number of seeds for each album, so you can get every album you want.

In addition to this, depending on the albums license, you can also use the album to create your own mixes, remixes, new songs, you can distribute them. If you really like a band or artist then you can also donate money.

Jamendo is the only platform that joins together :

• A legal framework protecting the artists (thanks to the Creative Commons licenses). Continue reading »

As promised in one of my earlier posts, here is the review cum guide of Azureus.

Points Covered :-

1. Getting Azureus.
2. Installation (Windows and Linux).
3. Initial Configuration.
4. Obtaining the optimum speed.
5. Further Resources.
6. Screenshots.

Getting Azureus

You can obtain Azureus from it’s official website here. It is available on Linux, Mac, Windows. Being built on Java, it is platform independent. The requirements are Java Runtime client. Continue reading »