Thread: Downloading Torrents For An Idiot-Help Please

Just got high speed internet installed at my house so there I am all excited about downloading entire albums in the wink of an eye but I've got a problem. I downloaded u torrent, bitcomet and ares to see which one suits my purposes but the only thing i can download on is ares. The others find my musical requirements, open a document file in my documents, show the download in the download window and then proceed to do absolutely nothing. At the moment I've got a hip hop collection of about 500mb on bitcomet and it hasn't downloaded a single thing in the space of 20 minutes.

As i'm a novice at this file sharing lark is there anything i could be doing wrong or do you good folks recommend a better torrent downloader that's dead simple like ares?

Ares is great. Find the file, hit download and forget it (nice and easy for a drone like me) but their selection of downloads isn't the most extensive in the world.

Thanks all.

Utorrent also encrypts the transmission to avoid the isp blocking the ports. Try it.
That may be the problem now.

Cheers all.

Zehner. I just downloaded soulseek. Looks good. Is their search engine a bit on the slow side sometimes mate? First search loads of results in a millisecond. 2nd search no results after 30 seconds (nothing obscure in the request either ). Same on the 3rd search. Did a quick test for "elvis" cos that should get mega hits and nothing after a minute.

For some reason I've thought that if you are looking for Stones, Dylan, Niel Young, etc....soulseek ain't the place to go. (So I haven't bothered to register.)

Not trying to highjack Columbia, but is my assumption above correct?

Still looking for a download site myself. A "Glitch" (read "stupidity" wiped out my entire music collection which I had stored in the Kazaa folder. .

Mate for torrent needs with Windows then utorrent is the best by a street. Download it and then check out my thread in the forum here for optimising it. Get a feel for it and then let me know if you have any specific queries.

Soulseek is the best for DLing songs at a time, although it's OK for full albums too. I always DL full albums from a torrent and torrents are the most efficient way to DL large files (movies, applications etc.)

There are loads of sites all over the web that explain how different P2P systems work and how to get started.

Which ISP do you have? In any case I would ignore all references to "portforwarding" until you get the hang of it - even then it may be superfluous to your requirements, it makes no difference to me at all. Other internet users swear by it, but IME it's a waste of time!

Cheers for all the advice and comments lads. I'll give them all a try. I'm a bit of a dunce at computers. My daughter had to show me how to cut and paste and drop and drag. She's 10 years old.

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Originally Posted by russellsimpson

For some reason I've thought that if you are looking for Stones, Dylan, Niel Young, etc....soulseek ain't the place to go. (So I haven't bothered to register.)

Not trying to highjack Columbia, but is my assumption above correct?

I was looking for some obscure old school hip hop russell and didn't get any results so I stuck "Elvis" in as a test. I thought if I don't get any hits for him then I'm doing something wrong somewhere.

Originally Posted by defender

but IME it's a waste of time!

I found it helped my speeds - plus I just love that green tick (although you can get that with uPnP mapping).

Yep I either the get the green tick or I don't - regardless of whether I have port forwarded or not it seems. I have the uPnP enabled.

Some days I do, some days I don't - I've tinkered with everything but IMO it's down to something at the ISP end that determines my connectivity!