It needs very little configuration and is designed to be as minimalist as possible, so files just open in a small window displaying a single upload bar. Transmission is an extremely light BitTorrent client with a good range of features. Transmission is the most Mac-like, with a gorgeous interface and Apple-like simplicity – not that Apple would ever make a BitTorrent app it won’t even allow them on the App Store. Once it’s found them it will begin downloading the file. This accepts the file and logs on to peer-to-peer networks to hunt for other people sharing the file. To download a torrent you must download first a torrent client. It has something of a bad reputation because of its association with file-sharing sites like The Pirate Bay, but the technology is often used to share less controversial large files, such as software updates, Linux installation distributions, and open-source or copyright-free programs, movies, music and other large files. BitTorrent is an efficient way to share large files across multiple computers. One person has to seed the whole of the file in the first place for other to share it. These parts are then shared until you have the whole of the file, at which point you can continue sharing the file (known as seeding).

You download a small file, called a torrent, and this enables you to connect to other computers with the same file and download parts of it from each other.

BitTorrent enables people to share large files with each other using a peer-to-peer network, which means they share parts of the file with each other, rather than downloading the whole file from a central location (such as iTunes). The torrent client then downloads a larger file from the internet using a process known as BitTorrent. Torrents are small files that you can download and open in a torrent client.

Mac software torrenting sites