Torrent Tutorial
Subscribing to Phish Thoughts torrents < new!
Following these instructions lets you subscribe to Phish Thoughts torrents. Your torrent program will automagically start downloading each show soon after I upload it. Wake up to the smell and sounds of fresh Phish each morning!
There are two flavors:
-Downloads of the Day
-No Spoilers
They are separate subscriptions – you can subscribe to either one, or both. If you already subscribed to No Spoilers before, subscribe again to DOTD using the same procedure below.
This procedure is specifically for uTorrent – but some other torrent programs have similar functionality.
1. Open uTorrent
2. You should see a sidebar on the left that includes an orange “All Feeds” icon (if you *don’t*, click on Options and ensure “Show category list” is checked)
3. Right click on All Feeds and choose “Add RSS Feed…”
4. Copy and Paste the appropriate Feed URL:
http://rss.thepiratebay.org/user/b4b0c4b00bd20e4ec8c1682eb9e10a04 (enter this for Downloads of the Day)
http://rss.thepiratebay.org/user/b2efe7c57a01458fb867fb34282b12e6 (enter this for No Spoilers)
5. Select “Automatically download items published in feed”
6. Click on OK
7. Leave uTorrent running
Continued props to Matt Gagne and John Robertson for originally emailing with the idea.
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Phish Thoughts BitTorrent Tutorial
There are a lot of “how to use BitTorrent” sites out there. This isn’t trying to replace them or answer every question. We’re trying to:
a) keep it as simple as possible
a) not scare people off because this really doesn’t need to be that complicated
Seriously – this should take about 5 minutes from start to finish!
If you are having problems, please post to comments on the main page and we (and others) will do our best to help.
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Which client should I use?
uTorrent (pc & mac beta) is probably the smallest/simplest so that’s what we’ll focus on.
This was made for PC folks – if there is enough interest (or if someone wants to write it up), we’ll do a Mac version as well.
- Download and run utorrent:
PC: http://download.utorrent.com/1.8.2/utorrent.exe
Mac: http://download.utorrent.com/mac/uTorrent-Mac-14940.dmg
You should see this:
- Click on “Run”
You should see this:
- Click on “Install”
You should see this:
This is where most BitTorrent tutorials start to get really complicated.
You definitely can do a lot of weird stuff at this point (and later you should, because it will speed things up), but for now just click on “Use Selected Settings”.
That’s it!
Downloading torrents:
When you see a torrent link, generally you want to Right Click on the link and choose “Open”. You will see something like this:
All you are doing at this point is opening a tiny little file that has information about the file (i.e. music) you really want.
Once that little torrent file has downloaded (it will only take a second), it should take you to utorrent and you’ll see this:
This is utorrent asking you where you want to put the actual big file (i.e. music file). You can put it wherever you want – in the example above, we are putting it in e:\music.
Once you click on OK, it will start downloading the file and you will see a % progress update.
Once it hits 100%, you have downloaded the whole file.
What now?
At this point, you should do two things:
1. Start listening to the music!
If there is a .rar file, you can now unrar the file to get at the mp3s in there – unrar them wherever you want.
2. Don’t move or delete the file you just downloaded, and don’t close utorrent.
How long should I leave utorrent open? The short answer is “the longer the better.” (That’s what she said.)
You don’t *have* to keep seeding – but it’s nice if you do. It’s nice if your ratio is greater than 1 (i.e. you have uploaded more than you have downloaded), and it’s even better if your ratio is larger. But if you just grab the file and then leave, you won’t have any problems (except karmically speaking, that is 😉 ).
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Frequently Asked Questions:
1. Do I have to open/forward ports on my firewall?
Ideally you should (it will speed things up for you and others) but you don’t absolutely have to. We will put up a section on how to do this later.
2. Can I get a virus/trojan/etc. from this?
If you are downloading from legitimate sources (like Phish Thoughts), you really shouldn’t have any problems.
3. Is BitTorrent illegal?
No – it’s a tool that, like anything else, can be used for both legal and illegal purposes. This is all above board.
4. I really can’t do torrents (work is blocking them, etc.) – any suggestions?
If you really really really can’t, email me explaining why and I’ll see what we can do. The only reason we’re moving to torrents is that the bandwidth bill for downloads of the day (especially for current shows) is getting costly. We are going to try using sendspace for No Spoilers and see how that works out.
