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Friday, April 20, 2007
Last June, we told you about Azureus and many commented about other great Torrent clients, but we think we’ve just found a new one that betters them all. It’s name? Xtorrent.
Xtorrent for Mac OS X 10.4 and higher uses the now very familiar iTunes look-n-feel. With searched items on the left column and current download speed at the bottom of that column, you can quickly gain insight to what your little beaver of a Torrent client is doing. 
On the right side, the search results for the selected term from the left side reside. You can even filter your results by entering some key words in the filter box on the top right. When clicking on the download icon (lower left), your current downloads are now displayed on the right. Transfer rate, progress, and time left are all shown for you to quickly acquire information to where you are in each one of your downloads. Clicking on one of the downloads will give you detailed information about it such as the tracker URI, amount of seeds and leaches, as well as a graphical display of a box with multi-colors indicating downloaded, uploaded, and remaining bits. If you chose to limit bandwidth speed for an individual torrent, you can click on either the download or upload meter and make a change via the drop down. You can also predetermine where each file time goes via the preferences such as AVI, QT, and MPG all go to your Movies folder and MP3 and such go into your Music folder. Images would go to the Pictures folder. All very nicely done.
Download speeds seem to be as fast, if not faster, than other clients we’ve used on both PC and Macs. We performed a download of Lost Episode 17 from this season in about 2 hours while CHiPs and a Lost spoiler were also downloading. Not bad for 700 MB XvID file.
What we liked, no, loved about Xtorrent was its built-in search feature. It’s excellent and the best we’ve seen thus far. Are number one test for searching torrents is “CHiPs”, the hit TV show from the early ’80s with those two great motorcycle CHP officers Ponch and John. Rarely does CHiPs ever come up but Xtorrent not only found some hits but also the entire first season! In just a few short days, I’ll have the entire first season (which by the way Universal, I’d gladly pay for the DVD set if you ever would release it!). Further, you can quickly see which torrents will download more quickly than others with a star rating system for the swarms. The higher the star, the better download rate. In addition to the default Yahoo and Google search sources, you can add others such as Pirate Bay to the list of searched sites for your torrents. Powerful and easy.
With RSS, Growl, Apple TV, iTunes, and iPod support right out of the box, Xtorrent seems pretty difficult to compete against. For $20 for the Pro version (removes bandwidth limits and nag screens) and then $9 for a family pack and 9 more for unlimited upgrades, $38 seems cheap for such a great client. You’re free to check it out but if you’re like me, you’ll be hitting PayPal within you first search completion.
April 20th, 2007 at 12:51
HAHA! The irony of paying $38 to buy a program that allows me to steal other peoples digital content! Someone should put it on mininova.org so I can get it for free.
Like beer, be free!
April 20th, 2007 at 14:24
FYI – pre-order price for Season 1 of CHiPs on Amazon is $28. Coming out June 5th.
April 20th, 2007 at 17:06
At first sight it looks great. Seems to be working pretty well too. However, i feel a bit reluctant in spending $30 in this as the author (the same who developed NewsFire) seems to be well know on the web for being rude and providing poor support. I’ll wait a little while and see whether these are unjustified or not.
April 20th, 2007 at 17:19
Just saw the reviews on Version Tracker (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/30840&mode=feedback) and, well, it seems that the guy still shows no respect whatsoever for his customer. Registration keys never received, never answers emails… I’ll go and look for something else.
April 20th, 2007 at 20:03
Hey Chip, you’re the best! Thanks. I just pre-ordered my copy of CHiPs Season 1. I can’t wait to watch Episode 12. “I” am in it. Well, my name is.
Too bad to hear about the poor support. I did receive my key within five minutes of purchase. It appears to be all automated via PayPal. I did e-mail him to let him know that we mentioned him but haven’t heard back. I’m not expecting immediate reply, though.
This is a really stable product and I can’t imagine what support would be needed, but I can understand the apprehension for poor support at $30.
April 21st, 2007 at 6:01
This app sounds great and I’ll probably use it, but it looks like a direct rip off of Aquisition http://www.acquisitionx.com/
They both really take their interface from iTunes but Aquisition created the perfect interface for a DL client long befrore this. At least give it a mention.
April 21st, 2007 at 8:13
The same developer makes Xtorrent & Acquisition & Newsfire …
April 21st, 2007 at 10:01
I still like Transmission. It’s free. It’s just a simple list and it’s updated fairly frequently improving performance and interface. To each his own, I suppose.
April 21st, 2007 at 14:22
If you look at the Xtorrent “About” box, it shows you what Open Source components it has. One of those is “libtransmission”, which is the underlying engine to the cross-platform Transmission client. (Which also means that most major trackers will ban Xtorrent like they already ban Transmission, *sigh*)
As someone on Digg so aptly put it:
“[Xtorrent author] Watanabe is a con man like so many others in the shareware OS X “community”.
1. Steal open source code
2. Slap “pretty” GUI on top
3. Charge $$$
4. Profit!!!”
April 21st, 2007 at 16:55
Don’t use Xtorrent. Use the latest nightly builds of Transmission — they aren’t banned like older versions, and they are totally up to date.
And yes, Watanabe appears to be a fraud.
April 21st, 2007 at 20:13
Not to defend Watanabe (as it sounds like his support record suffers from user satisfaction); however, from Apple’s web site: “With its open-source core based on FreeBSD 5.0 and the Mach 3.0 microkernel, Mac OS X is the best Macintosh operating system ever for UNIX users.” So using your formula Riot Nrrrd™, Apple stoled some open source, slapped a pretty GUI on top, charges $129 a copy, and makes a profit. You might want to install Ubuntu on a PC and be pure.
Now yes, I’m over simplifying the comparison, but both products do add functionality to the open source it uses.
Open source doesn’t require one to make software with its components for free, so Watanabe has done nothing wrong since he credits libtransmission as per the license of open source. I like this interface and it is very easy to use. I’ve used Transmission and it’s good but I think Watanabe did a better job on the interface.
Just my 2 cents.
April 22nd, 2007 at 14:57
Tried XTorrent through several betas… and dumped it due to endlass crashing instabilities. Transmission, on the other hand, is free and has been rock solid for me.
XTorrent, the best torrent client for the Mac? Not in my experience.
April 22nd, 2007 at 17:44
Sven Rafferty:
Obviously, you know nothing about Mac OS X.
Here’s a start: http://www.levenez.com/unix/
(Please, please, please, don’t mention Linux again. People with sex lives don’t care about running it on their personal computers.)
April 22nd, 2007 at 20:13
FrankieC, I guess I’m missing your point. My point was that OS X is based on an open source component of UNIX like this torrent client. So I’m not sure what your point is.
August 2nd, 2007 at 22:23
XTorrent can be stolen just like any other program can be