robinsaidthis

Having compared this to other bittorrent solutions for the Mac, including acquisition, and Bittorrent itself, I have found that it saves me considerable time and effort.

Entering a search in one box, and getting a unified table of results is a lot simpler than searching multiple different web interfaces and then trying to compare the hits.

The downloading capability seems to be as good as the other tools I've tried, but I can't say I've been comparing them side by side with the same torrents.

It's a very nicely designed app. Is it worth paying money for? Generally saving time and hassle is worth something. It all depends how much you're going to use it.

BitTorrent is NOT essentially piracy. I personally don't pirate, but I love BitTorrent because is simply a neat technology, which I use for the occasional video podcast or Linux distro. Unlike with traditional one-server-with-many-clients, everybody that takes also gives in terms of bandwidth. BitTorrent saves content providers a considerable amount of money, and just gets faster and faster the more people there are. It's perfect for large and popular files, especially when the providers of said files don't have much money to pay for bandwidth.

As for Xtorrent itself, I personally wouldn't use it enough to justify paying for it so I'll stick with Transmission because it does what I need and its tracker problems have not affected me with my limited usage.

It's simple, quick, and I love the torrent searching feature. Wish I could find out how it worked, so I could try to get my favorite torrents to come up on it...

Very nice, worth hanging on to, but keep something like Transmission handy as well.

If libtransmission doesn't float your boat, try using BitRocket (similar interface, not quite as slick, but based on libtorrent and released under the GPL).

I like xtorrent, but the libtransmission thing really kills it for me... sure, it's quick, but it's banned in just too many places for it to be useful.

(Update: I notice that the latest beta has a "fix for incorrectly reported statistics" -- might be worth checking out again soon...)

From my experience with David Watanabe’s other apps,
all these issues will be mostly addressed by its first 1.0 release,
then steadily resolved over the first few months after that.

The app's description could use a rewrite: replace sujective statement "Looks fantastic for a beta!" by something more impartial and neutral, and share more meaningful information, such as the fact it uses libtransmission, originally from the Transmission Bittorrent client.

Consistently screws up all downloads and i have to start all over from the beginning. Can't seem to "remember" the external hard drive i'm downloading to. Lame but pretty.

Still no encryption... There is no way I'm paying for a bittorrent client w/o encryption.

Frankly xTorrent is a bit of a mess, not as reliable as Transmission and with a pretty but complete overblown interface. The Torrentcast feature is fantastic though and should be in every Bittorrent client.

This program is even worse at nagging you to buy it than acquisition and newsfire combined: a 10 kb/s cap after using the program after a 1 hour time limit, and search results are randomly disabled, plus a window that you can't close uless you click on either the "purcahse" button or the "activate" button. This program is great looking and somewhat useful and I almost switched to it from Transmission because of the built in search and RSS features. Once I downloaded the 1.0, however, these nags totally turned me off. How useless is a torrent app that caps the bandwith after an hour!

I upgraded to v41 and it lost all my in-progress downloads. Not sure what happened there, but upgrade with caution (backup first!).

Otherwise, I love xTorrent -- but I also paid for it.

When this first went shareware, I wrote an applescript that restarts it every 59 minutes, and hides the app. Works pretty well, then, and avoids the speed capping. From what I remember, it wasn't too complicated (as it was my first actual applescript I've ever made), but I deleted it when I stopped using this app (switched to Transmission).
All in all, a pretty good program. Not the best, but gets a pretty good download speed, and the search function is incredibly handy.
The only real downside I can see is that you can't retrieve .torrent files from the program. Once it's in, it's in for good, and there's no way to back them up.

Buyer beware!!!! NO SUPPORT!!!!

First off why would you want to pay for a bittorrent client. Especially one with all the flaws xtorrent has (banned from many trackers etc).

Secondly why use xtorrent when transmission is basically the same and free(ok xtorrent has a few more things but at the core its just transmission). Im not going to pay someone else when all they have done is put a wrapper around open source code.

I would rather support the transmission guys instead of someone who takes there code, uses it in a shareware app, then completely tries to hide the fact they have done so(ever noticed there is not a single mention of libtransmission anywhere on the xtorrent site).

I like David´s apps a lot and so I happily paid for the full version of Xtorrent. The integrated search and RSS-Feeds really make downloading over Bittorrent a breeze. However, lately I had to go back to Transmission to download a file which Xtorrent did not want to finish downloading (looks like the most recent version introduced a couple of bugs). Transmission has really come a long way since i last had a look at it - and i guess i would recommend it over Xtorrent these days.

From the transmission forum about licensing changes - "Portions of the code will be changed to avoid blatant attempts to profit significantly from our work"

Seems some of the parts that changed to a gpl license are the same bits added to the latest version of xtorrent. Which means xtorrent should be open source to comply with the license.

or they will have to fork libtransmission

david watanabe is the karl rove of mac software development: an extremist, far right minded person that profits from the work of people with a very different approach and belief in softw. develpment. he copied once limewire, and he copied now transmission. beautiful app, but the karl rove of app. won't have my vote.

This torrent client has been banned by a large majority of torrent trackers. Apparently, it's a pretty shoddy implementation of a very old version of libtransmission. In addition, the trackers seem to think the spirit of the developer doesn't fit with their vision of the torrent community.

Use at your own risk.

OCM, I expect Watanabe won't open source Xtorrent. He's happy to profit from it, but he'll never contribute. He'll leave continue using the older version of libtransmission to avoid having to abide by the modified license. He'll just keep throwing more new features into the app to distract people from the fact that the heart of his app is ancient and limited. That or he'll brazenly use it and ignore the license, proving once and for all everything bad that's ever been said about him.

A friend of mine uses this because of the torrent search feature. I've tried to tell him to use Azureus or Transmission, but he likes the search.