µTorrent is often referred to as “the best torrent client”, well too bad it was only for Windows. Yeterday they released a beta Mac version that can be found here.

µTorrent is a small and efficient BitTorrent client. The main advantage to using it is how lighweight and fast it is. It starts up quickly and makes torrent downloads faster than ever. The Mac beta has a speedy startup as well and according to one user:

The icon looks pretty nice too

So if you’ve been waiting for the day that µTorrent comes out for OS X, or if you’ve been running Parallels solely to use µTorrent (don’t feel bad, I was doing that), the go download it today and tell me what you think.

Background:

For those of you just joining the torrent world, you probably have many questions about what they are, how they are used, where you get them etc… I know that the first time I heard about them was in school one day when some “cool” kid was talking about downloading free music through them. At the time I thought that they were some complicated type of download and I would never figure out how to use them.Things have changed since then, and torrent downloading has skyrocketed in popularity.

About Torrents:

A torrent itself is simply a file that ends in .torrent, and it contains a certain amount of information needed to download a file (or files). This information in the torrent file is then read by a torrent client which uses a tracker server to trace parts of the files to be downloaded. Once these files are located, the computer already with the files will start to upload them at which point the receiving computer will download the files bit by bit. 

So the things that you need to do to download a torrent are:

1. A site where you can download the torrent file
2. A torrent client such as Vuze to open up the torrent file and start the download 
3. Disk space to store the download
4. Optional - but for some downloads you may want to be anonymous, so you would want to use something like Tor