I’ve been using Azureus as my bit­tor­rent client of choice for years.  It’s true that in the past year or so was bun­dled with some crazy, crappy, bloat-ware inter­face full of adver­tis­ing and stuff.  BUT!  There was always an alter­nate down­load ver­sion that gave the orig­i­nal core func­tion­al­ity, leav­ing out the bloated front-end.  It seems that the alter­nate ver­sion is no more.  Azureus down­loaded a core update last night and now the bloated “Vuze” inter­face is what you get.  I guess there’s a UI-switcher plu­gin, but how long until that disappears?

So I’m look­ing for an alter­na­tive OS X bit­tor­rent client.  Trans­mis­sion seems to be the pop­u­lar one, but when I used it long ago, it was too sim­ple for my needs.  The web­site doesn’t say much about advanced fea­tures in the cur­rent ver­sion, either.  Basi­cally, the main fea­tures of Azureus I’m using and that I’d like to get in an alter­na­tive client are these:

* Web inter­face.  There’s an Azureus plu­gin that offers up a sim­ple web inter­face for start­ing, stop­ping, and chang­ing the band­width cap.  I use this from the iPhone.  I’m not always at a real com­puter or a com­puter with access to my home net­work.  The iPhone can always tun­nel in over the EDGE net­work, so I can do this from work, out-and-about, in bed, etc.

* The abil­ity to NOT down­load cer­tain files in a group.  If a *.tor­rent file con­tains a dozen indi­vid­ual files, for exam­ple episodes of a TV sea­son, I may only want to down­load the first episode or two to get a taste with­out wast­ing band­width on the rest of the sea­son.  Extra points if I can dynam­i­cally change this on the fly with­out restart­ing the down­load.  Lack of this fea­ture is pretty much a deal-breaker.

* Auto­mat­i­cally launch­ing *.tor­rent files dropped in a folder.  If I have Azureus run­ning, I can drop files in a network-shared drive called “auto” and have it auto­mat­i­cally grab the file and start down­load­ing.  If nec­es­sary, I can prob­a­bly do this with Apple­Script, if I took the time to learn how–but I’d rather have it an inte­grated fea­ture instead of a duct-tape script.

* Band­width caps.  I assume all bit­tor­rent clients have this.  If I only want to trickle in a file at 40K/s because I’m doing other stuff on the net­work, it should let me.

* Simul­ta­ne­ous down­load lim­its and reorder­ing.  I assume all bit­tor­rent clients have this, too.  I can tell it that I only want to down­load one *.tor­rent at a time (to get max­i­mum band­width for the one file), but have three or four *.tor­rents in the win­dow.  When the first is done, the next starts.  I should be able to rearrange the order of the inac­tive ones (e.g. pro­mote the one in the third posi­tion up to the sec­ond position.)

So is any­one using an OS X bit­tor­rent client that fits the bill?

If you liked this post, you may also enjoy:

1. Win­dows Horizon
2. Only in Portland…
3. I was born in a world that’s ending
4. Audio­Galaxy is no longer a file shar­ing service
5. Pod­catch­ers

Tagged as: azureus, bittorrent, clutch, transmission