MacMembraneThere are peels everywhere…

BitTorrent is a Peer-to-peer technology for sharing files quickly over the internet. In order to download files using BitTorrent you need two things. First, you’ll need to install a desktop torrent client. Secondly, you need to point it at a ‘tracker,’ which you do via a special torrent file that you download from a torrent search engine.

An excellent BitTorrent client for a first-time downloader is Transmission. Transmission is a lightweight and intuitive client that makes it easy to monitor the progress of your downloads and set simple download parameters. Once you get familiar with how BitTorrent works, I recommend upgrading to the feature rich Azureus. Either application is a great choice, and both are free.

Next you’ll need to search for torrents on a Torrent aggregator engine. Some popular engines are Mininova, BTJunkie, ISOHunt and The Pirate Bay. It is, of course, illegal to download copyrighted music and movies via BitTorrent, but there’s lots of great Creative Commons material that is completely legal and free to share.

Here is a simple AppleScript that will allow you to search 5 popular torrent engines by keyword and open your search results in tabs. To run the script, copy and paste the code below into Script Editor (Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor) or download the script, unzip the file and double click on the Search Torrents file. Next, save the script to to your-user-name/Library/Scripts and you’ll be able to access it via the script menu in your menubar (if you don’t see the script menu, open AppleScript Utility (in Applications/AppleScript/AppleScript Utility) and check the box ‘Show Script Menu in Menu Bar).

set search_object to text returned of (display dialog "Find Torrents" default answer "")
tell application "Safari"
	activate
	open location "http://www.mininova.org/search/?search=" & search_object
	open location "http://www.torrentz.com/search?q=" & search_object
	open location "http://btjunkie.org/search?q=" & search_object
	open location "http://thepiratebay.org/search/" & search_object
	open location "http://isohunt.com/torrents/?ihq=" & search_object
end tell

Running the script will open a dialogue box where you can enter your search keywords (shown below). Enter them, hit OK and Safari will open five tabs with your search results from five different trackers.

Download Transmission.