mindset.

This is a basic guide to downloading torrents. Before you start, know what your monthly internet useage limit is (your monthly internet plan) and be sure you don’t go over it. Wouldn’t want to be charged extra by your ISP!

1. Client: You’ll need to download a torrent client — it’s what lets you download torrents, which is important. I use uTorrent. Download that (it’s an incredibly small file) and move on to step two.
2. Protection: Download PeerGuardian2 to protect yourself from people who want to steal your babies (like the movie and music industries). PG2 is like a condom, except instead of the potential of becoming pregnant, your worry is getting a lovely cease-and-desist letter from your ISP. This is unlikely, but unpleasant if it does end up happening to you. This step, like a condom, is optional.
3. Find a torrent: Anything you like! An album, a movie, whatever. (Note: TV show torrent titles can be hard to understand. Check out my run-through here). Use a torrent tracker website to find a torrent. The Pirate Bay and Mininova are two of the most popular. There are millions of torrents on each of these websites, but it is possible one site will have torrents that the other does not. For this reason, torrent search engines come in handy. Isohunt is like a Google for torrents. It searches a variety of torrent trackers to find what you want. Before you download a torrent, be sure there are enough peers to be able to complete the download (explained below).
4. Peers: There are two types of “peers”; seeders and leachers. It’s important to understand that when you are downloading a torrent, you are doing so from multiple sources. These sources are people’s computers all over the world. A seeder is someone who has the full file on their computer and is “seeding” (sharing) it with anyone who chooses to download it. Someone who is downloading a file is called a leacher — the person is downloading a file (and sharing what they have), but doesn’t have the whole file on their computer yet. The more seeds a torrent file has, the faster your download speed will be. If a file has no seeds, don’t download it. It won’t ever complete as a full copy of the file doesn’t exist. If the torrent you want to download has seeds (a few at the least), continue to step five.
5. Comments: Reading the comments on torrents made by other users is extremely important. Be sure to read them to be sure the torrent you want to download is safe and good quality. More ways to determine whether a torrent is worth downloading: The Pirate Bay’s “quality scale” (shown above the date uploaded) and Mininova’s “Thanks” system (shown along with comments in/on the comments tab).
6. Download: If the torrent has a sufficient number of seeds and positive comments, download it!
7. Seeding: When your torrent has finished downloading, you will notice that the Status in uTorrent will say “Seeding”. You never would have been able to download the torrent you did without seeders — people who are hosting the whole file for others to download — so you should do the same. To give back to the torrent community, do nothing… let the file seed. Seed for as long as you downloaded for, or 24 hours, whichever comes last. If you particularly enjoyed a file (or if you notice it has very few seeds), there’s no harm done in seeding for a few extra days or even weeks.

You’re done! Now that you’re torrent-savvy, you can download mindset’s monthly Cut The Crap Playlists!