part 2 learn how to torrent! @pollackpatrol i still love u
you have obtained a .torrent file! awesome. here is how you extract it
download qbittorrent. well you can use any torrent manager but some of them are sketch and ive had no issues with qbittorrent
install it ? been a while but i dont remember it being hard
press the 'open' button on the top toolbar
it'll open a file browser, go find your torrent file in downloads and open that
it will open a screen like this! you can set it so you skip this menu but i like to go thru it every time bcos it shows you a list of the files on the side to make sure you're like. downloading an audiobook instead of a bunch of weird files. basically the only thing i usually change is where i save something! this depends on where you want your files to save. if there's a folder in the torrent as you can see at the top of mine, it automatically makes its own subfolder so you can chuck it anywhere without having loose files banging about the place. i have my video folder as my default for when i torrent anime but i shove audiobooks in my downloads folder bcos they quickly get transferred to my phone
now you have a torrent loaded up! yay. it should look something like this
now we learn how torrenting works! basically when you're downloading something normally, your computer accesses the computer where the file is stored and gets the file from there. however this puts a bit of strain on yr network especially evident with weak wifi or big files, where like. there's only so much data that can go down one connection at one time. whereas with torrenting, your computer connects to the computers of other people who have the file, and they work together to send a bunch of connections to download the thing from a few different angles and reduce the strain on any particular connection. people who already have the thing and are sending it to you are called seeders, and people who (like you) are connected to the same link and downloading it are called peers.
this is why seeders are important! as opposed to a static download link which works whenever, torrents depend on other people's computers being online to take the file from. if there are no seeders then um you are fucked! but here is where commenting on the page saying 'pls seed' comes in
there is also the option, as seen in my screenshot, of downloading from peer computers! on my file, there are no active seeders but one active peer who already has a bit of the file. while we wait for a seeder to come online, i can download however much they already have and thus might only need to depend on the seeder for like 10% of the file, which is handy if the seeder only comes online for a short while.
^ all of this is automatic! you dont have to make any choices that impact this. this is just an explanation for why something might not be downloading. audiobookbay doesnt have it, but other sites let you filter torrents by number of active seeders, and while those counts arent always accurate, sometimes its handy to switch to a better-seeded torrent if you have the option
if you dont need something quickly, you can just leave qbittorrent open in the background and it'll keep searching for seeders so like hope isnt lost
once your thing has downloaded, people might seed from you. if you actively want to do this to be niceies, just leave qbittorrent open and itll do that, but if youre not a frequent torrenter its probs more an inconvenience
vpns ! people say vpns for torrenting. i would look up local reddit threads to see like how likely it is for your locality to crack down on pirates, and if you're worried you can use a vpn (i used to use mullvad which was cheap) but it makes your internet slower bcos it has to go thru extra hoops and tbh if youre doing small potatoes stuff you will not get killed.
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