Transmission 0.7 Beta - Redefining BitTorrent on the Mac
Written by Smaran on October 31, 2006Transmission 0.7 Beta is by far the fastest, most light-weight and one of the most appealing BitTorrent clients for the Mac. Here’s our review of it.
When I first switched to the Mac and asked friends of mine who had already been using the platform for a while, what the best BitTorrent client available was, most of them named either Transmission or Bit on Wheels. I tried both out, and from the two, my choice was clear: Transmission.
Bits on Wheels, despite the fact that it’s a 100% native client, was too slow and RAM-hungry for my taste. Transmission on the other hand could probably be called the uTorrent of Mac OS X. And even though it’s possible to run uTorrent in Mac OS X, it can’t be considered a competitor as it has to be run through an emulator. Transmission is less than a MB in size and takes up less memory than any other Mac BitTorrent client.
The last 100% stable release of Transmission is 0.6.1. The latest Beta release is 0.7-svn (993). It is the beta version I’m all excited about as it includes a number of feature improvements/additions and visual enhancements, that make Transmission truly great.
New Icon
The first thing I noticed was that the blue, mechanical-looking icon that is seen in version 0.6 is gone. It has been replaced by a much nicer looking one. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but looks like a lever in a double-arrow shaped frame. Unique and attractive.
Badge Colours
The dock icon badges that display the upload and download speeds have new colours. Instead of fully coloured blue and green backgrounds, they now have grey ones with coloured outlines. This looks a lot classier, and not dissimilar to Xtorrent’s black dock icon badge.
Don’t get the impression that the improvements made to Transmission are limited to eye candy. There’s new stuff under the hood too.
Speed Limit Mode
For starters, there’s now a way to have Transmission automatically limit download speeds at certain times of the day. For example, if you don’t want your browsing speed hindered by your torrents, you could limit it during the day, when you are at your desk. I’ve set it to limit my upload and download speeds to 10k between 11 AM and 3 PM, the hours I’m usually working.
Watch Folder
A feature I was very excited about when I reviewed Xtorrent last month was Autodownload, an option, if activated would automatically copy .torrent files on the desktop to Xtorrent’s support folder and start downloading them. This makes torrenting as easy as downloading files via HTTP, as all the popular Mac browsers save files to the desktop by default. Transmission now has this ability too!
Filter Torrents
Last, but not least, is a Finder-like feature that lets you sort torrents according to their status or by entering a keyword. This could save you some time if you download a lot of torrents at once.
One lingering drawback is that Transmission is still based on the Open Source libtransmission package that is banned by many prominent trackers because of the way it repeatedly “hammers” them (ie. doesn’t obey announce intervals). Its stat reporting has also been regarded as poor. Let’s hope something is done about this. Either libtransmission should be improved or the developers should switch to using libtorrent instead.
Overall, Transmission 0.7 Beta has this polish that I’ve only seen in Shareware Mac apps like Acquisition and Disco. Best of all, this excellent piece of software is Open Source and available to anybody for $0.00!
Download the Beta (.dmg), or visit the Transmission site.
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Does the new version support traffic encryption:
http://torrentfreak.com/how-to-encrypt-bittorrent-traffic/
I have to use Azureus because it is the only client with encryption support. With encryption I can get up to 400KB/sec. Without encryption, my ISP limits the traffic to 50KB/sec or even less.
You have a point there Roustem.
Transmission doesn’t support encryption
Azureus is the only option if you’re on a Mac, and your ISP is throttling BitTorrent traffic.
http://bitrocket.org/
It’s still in beta and I’d say is better than Transmission already. It’s based on libtorrent, which is great; it isn’t banned from the trackers Transmission (which is based on libtransmission) is
I wish the could fix this “hammer”-thing…. one and for all.
I hope you were kidding when you said you had no idea what the icon was.
… the name of the program is ‘Transmission’….
It is a shifter for a transmisison.
I hope you were being sarcastic there…
lol Ken, I think he was being serious, but I hope not.
It happens… earlier today I was on my scooter and was staring at a green light for at least 10 seconds before I realized I had to keep driving.
:)
Sooo.. what can you do with transmission that you -cant- do with bitrocket?
Transmission is banned on several bittorrent-sites, bacuse of a bug in the program.
It does not follow the bittorrent standard and are “hammering” the bittorrent tracker.
For now, it is only BitRocket and Azureuz that is clean on the mac.
this app is ok but you really have to look at xtorrent for the best os x torrent app. dave watanbe who makes inquisitor and aquisition made it and it rules!
“his app is ok but you really have to look at xtorrent for the best os x torrent app. dave watanbe who makes inquisitor and aquisition made it and it rules!”
Yes, definately, the best non-working, half-functional torrent app out there. The first one i’ve seen in my life that’s completely unable to open .torrent files and limits you to its own half-assed search.
But hey… as long as it looks nice… ;)
The new features sound great but one major ommission (IMHO) is selective torrents enabling you to select which files you would like from a particular torrent. This feature is available in micro-Torrent (on the PC) and Azureus, but that is too much of a resource-hog to the point that I can’t use it very well on an iBook G4 800 MHZ.
When I first started looking for a torrent client for my mac,
I found Tomato torrent. It’s always done the job without a
whimper. Is there any reason I should switch?
Qaz,
Much like everything else, if it does the job for you and you’re happy with it then there isn’t really any impetus to switch. Having said that, and depending of course on your needs, I think you’ll find some other Mac torrent clients to be better than Tomato-torrent. Bits on wheels is nice, transmission is small and doesn’t hog your system resources, Azureus is jam-packed with advanced features but is also Java-based so it’s slow and demanding. Try a few other clients to find out what you prefer, but like I said, if you’re happy with Tomato and you don’t need anything else, run with it.
In Transmission no way to select specific files from torrents to get. Trashed.
I’ve used them all - Transmission, Bits on Wheels, the Official client (uh!), Azureus (uh! - JAVA), and BitRocket.
XTORRENT rules them all. It’s from the maker of Acquisition, and it shows… google it people
Build 993 is a few weeks old, try using one of the newer 1xxx builds ;)
Dave do you have a link to the 1xxx builds… I noticed that the 993 build hasn’t been updated, but where do I find the new builds :/
[quote comment="18702"]I’ve used them all - Transmission, Bits on Wheels, the Official client (uh!), Azureus (uh! - JAVA), and BitRocket.
XTORRENT rules them all. It’s from the maker of Acquisition, and it shows… google it people[/quote]
you mean the guy who copied an open source gnutella client for mac, put his name on it, called it Acquisition, and charged for it?
Hal, take a look in this nightly build directory:
http://chucker.mystfans.com/opensource/transmission/
grab the highest-numbered build, but remember they’re “unstable” releases at this point.
I prefer XTorrent because it actually has a builtin search engine.
You don’t have to leave the app to find the torrent you are looking for. Why hasn’t this been done before?
Dude… the links you have posted to DL the DMG are not working… and I wanna get it
I use Azureus, mainly so I can use Safepeer with it.
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