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 It has been replaced by a much nicer looking one.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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53 Responses
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xTorrent is nice, but with such good options like Transmission and Bitrocket, way to pay for a torrent client?
Unfortunately, the lack of encryption in any Mac Torrent app makes it a dealbreaker for me. As others in this post have mentioned, my ISP limits all BT traffic (legal or not), so Azureus is still my only option.
[quote comment="18795"]xTorrent is nice, but with such good options like Transmission and Bitrocket, way to pay for a torrent client?[/quote]
I have yet to pay for it, mind you it is beta.
I’ve used Transmission before and while it looks good the lack of a search engine is a deal breaker.
If you don’t want to go to jail…. Azureus is really your only option. Without encryption you are not only subject to trottling. You Americans are also exposing your activies to the autorities!
> You Americans are also exposing your activies to the autorities!
Uh, no. Encryption doesn’t hide what you are downloading or uploading from peers. Think about it: you can see the IPs of peers downloading or uploading the same file you are. That’s all you need.
Azureus is the only client that has all the features I need - encryption included. The plugin architecture means that there will always be more features available in Azureus than anywhere else, and it runs plenty fast on any Mac from the last three years or so. I run it on a 1-Ghz G4 and it’s fine.
As I said in the TUAW comments:
I would implore you to check your facts before posting an article. Your assertions that Transmission’s speed limit feature was inspired by XTorrent are unfounded and quite wrong.
Transmission is a fluid work in progress, and as such, not all new features arereleased in separate versions. Many features have been added since 0.6.1, but there has not been a release yet.
Transmission first used the speed limit schedular back in August, a full month before XTorrent was released. The Speed Limit function on its own was committed to the Transmission SVN back in July.
The Auto-import function is not, in fact, inspired by XTorrent at all. Quite the opposite. Transmission’s SVN had this feature long before XTorrent, all the way back in July.
Please, in the future, don’t make claims you can’t back up.
the new icon rocks.
transmission - like on a car. that’s why its like a lever/switch.
its kinda like a cars gearshift.
I’m with ante on XTorrent. it’s the app I put in the underachiever category. I still use it, but not exclusively and I don’t know why I keep it around, honestly.
I Like Transmission, but if it’s a contest between the two apps, I think xTorrent just does it better. the integrated search is killer. Azureus? That app has killed 2 of my drives. The only 2 drives I’ve ever lost. and one was internal (laptop - go apple care!), I’ll never use Azureus again. Further, when my computer was idle, both Transmission and Azureus ran my fan 24/7. xTorrent doesn’t seem to do that, for some inexplicable reason. That’s worth switching to xTorrent alone. Incidentally, doesn’t anyone else have that fan problem as well, especially troublesome with laptops, but did the same for my G5.
All those saying xTorrent is better overall should do some more research
Good
- Search tool
Bad
- Will be shareware
- Based on libtransmission so it suffers the same problems related to tracker banning as Transmission
Hi guys,
if you are searching about
1. a very lighteight bittorrent client
2. fast
3. small RAM footprint
4. Universal binary
5. Not banned by private trackers
6. Free
What about http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/23255
We give it a try? Cheers….
I’m not a unix geek but this sounds good….
Encryption isn’t going to help you out with the RIAA and its ilk: it simply disguises the data you download/upload to make it look like it isn’t bittorrent traffic. Mostly it’s to help people who have crappy ISP’s that want to throttle their bittorrent traffic.
As a Mac-based bittorrent user here in Mexico, I’ve found that Transmission works best for me. I’m just waiting for the developers to add what I see as the killer feature: RC4 encryption…
It’s not that my ISP throttles bittorrent traffic–actually it feels like the whole connection is throttled after being used to American ISPs (Here on a “128k” connection I get 15k down, 6k up). I just see RC4 traffic encryption as an important evolutionary adaptation as the corporations that control internet connections continue to make more moves against bittorrent. I’m all for Net Neutrality, but it isn’t a reality at the moment.
Thanks to this thread, I’ve learned for the first time about Transmission’s core library being banned from some trackers… that seems like a key thing to fix as well, huh?
Hasta la próxima…
hallo all
can anyone help me
im using transmisson 0.6.1 and ive got a macbook 2ghz intel. im downloading tons of kung fu films and only my average total kb per sec is between 30 an 100. its taking me years…not really in the know with this stuff and just new to getting a mac (my first computer) so not the greatest computer type, mainly use it for makin music. any tips how to get it rocking? cheers anybody,everybody.peace
When does the watch folder feature work other then when the program launches? I let it sit there and added multiple torrents to the desktop and it never “watched” for them nor added them until I quit the program and reloaded it. Normal?
Hi Smaran,
Could you change the article’s link to the following, please? :-
http://chucker.mystfans.com/opensource/transmission/Transmission-latest.dmg
This will always reflect the latest build, rather than a 404 (file not found).
Thanks!
Does anyone know of a Mac client, other than Azureus, that permits selective downloading?
How do we know if our isp is throteling or not torrents trafic? I’m downloading at 140K with transmission, and only at 2K with Azureus the same file. Could anyone explain why? Thank you.
I have tried Azureus and Transmission and the key reason I dont like Transmission is because it seems that after i download a torrent, it stops seeding. In other terms, it only helps my ration when I am downloading as jacked as that seems. Playing around with the options does nothing at all either.
I miss UTorrent….anyone have any advice for a guy trying to get more upload power!?
iv downloaded transmission for my mac but when i open it, and search for something, theres no results.. can sum1 help plz
Transmisson is nice and light-weight, and Azureus is more CPU intensive, but more feature-loaded. I love Transmission, it was great for when I was a torrent n00b and could barely even figure out how to use Transmission itself! =P
But now the choice for me is definitely Azureus. The ability to rename how torrents are displayed single handedly sealed the deal since I have seeded almost 200 torrents at one time. The advanced features can be daunting…. but it’s not too hard to learn.
I must admit that I hate that Vuze s**t in Azureus. If there weren’t the option of using the old, classic, UI (user interface) I would jump right back on the Transmission bandwagon. The Vuze content slows down my computer and wastes a huge amount of bandwidth, not to mention that all the HD content in Vuze has 1 seed and hundreds of leeches.
So what does this all mean for you? Well, take both clients out for a spin. Depending on how much you use torrents and how “advanced” of a user you are, you will be sure to fall in love with one or another. Transmission and Azureus are both great Mac apps. There are always other clients (but they be banned on certain trackers), just say the hell away from Xtorrent.
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