Entertainment For Lively Minds
ATM - Bit Torrents (Mac)
Posted by Mousey on 2 November 2011 - 10:28am.
I am advised that the wonderful - er - musical experience known as Bit Torrents is worth - er - paying attention to.
However as a not very tech person I have been stumped trying to - er - access this wonderful music.
Any Mac users have any advice about a simple foolproof site to use?
I keep signing up for things and then finding I am expected to upload stuff in order to download - ?? or have I got it all wrong?
Thanks in advance.
Here's a song from John Prine in the meantime
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A good friend of mine, right,
downloaded an app called Transmission, which is, like, free an' that. Apparently I - oops - he just googled it an' downloaded it an' put it in his app folder. Then this mate, right, he googled "torrent hosts" and chose one he liked the name of (it doesn't really matter which site you go to, because many of the torrents are shared) and went there and downloaded the entire Val Doonican discography. Just click "download torrent" (and not the most obvious shouting DOWNLOAD button which is the Met getting your ISP only joking) and the Transmission window opens and you tick what you want, eg Val Rocks - But Gently!, and wait for your information to complete its download (anything from minutes to days, depending). Pirate Bay, 1337x, and Kick-Ass Torrents are good places to start. You should seed (upload) automatically, and these places don't demand a ratio. There are others. Usually this mate just googles (f'rinstance) "Woody Woodmansey's U-Boat discography torrent download" and waits for the bill to kick his door in.
For the tech un-savvy among you, here's how a torrent works:
A torrent is like an allotment shed full of stuff; vintage copies of Health & Efficiency, some dodgy packets of seed, old men's huge underpants, sandpaper worn glossy black, curly ends of teak effect Fablon rolls - you know, stuff. This stuff is the "internet". The allotment keys are the "torrent client" (in this case Transmission) and the bitstream itself is represented by beady-eyed neighbours trudging past your shed in their muddy boots over what is clearly your land and peering in at you filing your back issues of Razzle. "Seeding" is, well, what you do up the allotment.
Oops - here's me bus.
Thank you
.
the way it works is that ..
.. The Old Mens Underpants and Back Issue of Razzle 1986 are cut into tiny pieces. And distributed all over the world.. Your "Bit Torrent Client" that you got hold of then downloads them from all over the word and assembles those bits into an entire Pair Of Underpants. It then makes tiny bits of those Underpants available from your computer for anyone else to joyfully download. That's why Bit-torrent took over from the older riskier methods of pillage and plunder. Because no single person is responsible for pirating them, and it's very hard to trace.
HAVING SAID ALL THAT, such file sharing is at present destroying the livings of 1000's of creatives all over the world. In the following industries - Music, Film Industry, Digital Art, Publishing ..etc
It then makes tiny bits of
And that's the aspect of torrenting that puts you in a rather more dodgy position legally – you're not just grabbing stuff for yourself, you're also distributing it to everyone else.
That said, there are tons of legal torrents out there too.
I'm not sure that torrents are particularly anonymous
On account of a friend of mine, who's currently being chased by a lawyer for one of his downloads.
I also
know a friend who checks out blogs for music downloads - lots of good obscure Word friendly stuff out there. He tells me he uses this website:
http://www.captaincrawl.com/
Amazing how many friends there are...
...I've got one too, who recommends Miro as a suitable wheelbarrow for bringing stuff back from the allotment. He also likes btjunkie, because he says it sounds fairly official, as if sponsored by our greatest telecoms outfit.
A friend of mine apparently only uses Demonoid
It's a closed, members-only community so the torrents are of a universally high quality. Members have a certain number of invitations they can dish out so it's always worth asking for an invitation, should you encounter a member... like my friend... for example...
So does your friend have any spare?
I only ask 'cos I have a friend in hospital who could do with being cheered up. (Thinks: that sounds plausible...)
Drop me a PM and I'll ask him
:-)
My mate said
that, despite having lost all his user names and passwords in a recent XP re install, he was still able to access the site.
Let's be friendly
I also have some friends at the Demonoid party who are kind with invites...just in case anyone runs out of invites.
My mate plants
Demonoid seeds all the time, and he doesn't need any keys to the shed. You only have to be a "member" (which is like a root vegetable grown from seed) if you want to empty a wheelbarrow of your stuff up the allotment.
And if FLAC blooms are too heavy
You can prune them down to friendly mp3 size with Switch for Mac, which is like a pair of secateurs. Available at the same shed you got your Parades.
My friend managed to download a rar file
but the stupid git doesn't know how to convert it to mp3 - he's asked me to find out what to do. Any help would be much appreciated.
He should...
...right click and open with Stuffit Expander or similar. Unless there's a password (in which case he has to go back to the source and find out what it is) it will open up in a folder containing mp3s or whatever the format was before compressing - FLAC, etc. Or so I've heard.
Allegedly
a great (and totally free) file expander - and a file expander is like a bag of fertilizer - is the Unarchiver. Grows big showy blooms from any seed, no fuss, no mess, no chalky aftertaste.
(As one commenter has pointed out, you can get hauled off to the nick for this kind of market garden activity and have your house and family taken away and be named and shamed in the Daily Mail. That's if you live in the free world. Out here in the Mystic East, it's all good. Remember - home taping killed music.)
Thanks guys
I'lll pass your info on!