How to download torrents (for ABSOLUTE beginners!)

If you really like music and you just don’t want to buy it, in Canada you can download it for free (note that this can be illegal in some places).  To download music using BitTorrent, you need a “torrent client”, and a good one is uTorrent available at http://www.utorrent.com/, and it is probably the most secure one available. Download it and install it. Once you have it, you can download torrent files such as the ones available at my favourite torrent website, http://www.isohunt.com/. When you search on the website, it comes up with results like the ones displayed at this link: http://isohunt.com/torrents/?ihq=klezmer.

In the picture above, you can see three things circled from the search – Size column, S (seeds), and L (Leechers/Peers).

Size is how big the file is – you don’t want to download something too big because that might fill up all your space. S or seeds, is definitely the most important column. It tells you how fast your download will be. If there are more seeds than leechers (or L in this picture), then your download will be a lot faster. The circled download would probably be a good choice out of all the results. Still, don’t be scared to download something with only 4 or 5 seeds because it could be a good download too – just keep this a standard rule of thumb to pick the best one.

When you’ve picked one, click on its title. This page will come up:

In the above picture, you can see the download .torrent button. Just click on that, and internet explorer or firefox will want to download the file – press “open” instead of “save”, and if it prompts you for what program top open with with, open the file you download with uTorrent. Then choose some or all of the files you want to download and a spot to save them to and then press ok.

While it’s downloading (it can take overnight or longer sometimes), you can minimize utorrent and it will disappear to the lower right section of your screen the “system tray” where the clock is. The icon is a U and you can click it any time (double click) and it will bring it back up (to check your download’s progress).

Wait a while until it’s done and “seeding”, and when it starts seeding that means the download’s done, so you can right click it and click “stop”. To stop it from seeding (I highly recommend you do that) Right click the torrent in the main window and click “Open Containing Folder”, and then it will bring up the folder with all your files in it.

As another final note, Mininova is an excellent site for your purposes if you really just want to download music and may even be better than Isohunt. http://www.mininova.org/cat/. For music, just click the music category.