BitTorrent Tutorial with Transmission

In order to start using BitTorrent we will first need to download a BitTorrent client and then find a torrent file so the program can start to download it. After you have completed this section, you will be able to download any BitTorrent file!

1. Download Transmission

2. Double-click ‘Transmission-X.XX.dmg’ file (where X.XX is the most recent version number).

3. Drag the ‘Transmission’ application to your Applications folder.

4. Open ‘Transmission’ application by double-clicking on it (in your Applications folder).

5. Upon opening it for the first time you will be warned about file sharing, and then asked if you want to donate. Click through all of these pop-ups. Then you should be presented with the window you see below, congrats, you are basically done with setting up BitTorrent!

At this point, you are ready to download files, but it is wise to change a few of the settings first. I am only making recommendations as to what you should change. Once you are familiar with the other settings please feel free to change them at will!

6. Select ‘Transmission > Preferences’ and a window containing lots of options will pop up. Then select the “Transfers” icon at the top of the window, you will be presented with the following options:

7. We are going to want to change a few of these options so that our completed and incomplete downloads are in an organized place. Additionally, we are going to set up a folder that Transmission will ‘watch’ for any incoming torrent files.

Default Location: This is where you want the completed files to go. This could be on your normal hard drive or on an external disk, either way we want to set this location. My suggestion is to create a folder called “BitTorrent” wherever you want your files to go. And then in that folder create two more folders called “Complete” and “Incomplete.” For the default location, be sure to select the “Complete” folder.

Keep incomplete files in: Check this option. Then, select the “Incomplete” folder that we created in the above paragraph.

Display a window when opening a torrent file: Uncheck this option. The normal behavior of the application is to ask you if you want to open and add a new file to the list, every single time. Unchecking this will prevent that and make using Transmission a lot easier.

Display a window when opening a magnet link: Same as above, but with Magnet links.

Auto add: Check this option. Since you download torrent files from the internet, I would recommend as setting this to wherever your default browser downloads its files. For most of us this would be the “Downloads” folder, that is located in your Home folder.

8. The next thing that we want to do is make sure that we give back to the BitTorrent community, but not too much! Staying on the “Transfers” tab in the Preferences, click the ‘Management’ button, next to ‘Adding’ and you will be presented with the following options:

9. We are going to want to change a few of these options so that we limit the amount of seeding we do so that our connection is always quick.

Stop seeding at ratio: Check this option. The minimum you should seed is 2.0 in my opinion. If you are feeling more generous, feel free to up the ratio.

Stop seeding when inactive for: Check this option. Input ’9999′. This works out to be a little less than a week. This way, if no one has tried to get the file for over a week, you can consider it dead… automatically.

10. Close the Preferences window. You are now done with the basic settings.

11. Opening a BitTorrent file (.torrent) is as easy as selecting “Open Torrent File…” from the File menu and navigating to it on your computer. Alternately, if you downloaded it from the internet to your ‘Watched Folder’ it should automatically add itself. If you have correctly checked/unchecked the boxes that we discussed above, you should not be prompted with any windows and see that your file(s) has been added to your download Queue. Once it is done downloading it will seed a ratio of 2:1 and then stop. That is all it takes to download a BitTorrent file!