State of Bittorrent in 2013

January 19, 2013 11:38 PM

What's a quality Bittorrent site in 2013? Demonoid is down, and TPB has no focus on quality. My interests are in film and music, with an experimental bent.
posted by dunkadunc to technology (22 answers total)

Bitsnoop is a search engine I like.
posted by blazingunicorn at 11:44 PM on January 19

I like kat.ph.
posted by neushoorn at 11:58 PM on January 19 [7 favorites]

No expert here but I use the Torrentz search engine.
posted by Bangaioh at 2:57 AM on January 20 [1 favorite]

Whenever I try to use the Torrentz search engine, it always leads to another page which requests registration information - and a credit card. How does one avoid this? The page asking for credit card information and the "free trial" seems suspicious, and a Google search confirms that.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 3:47 AM on January 20 [1 favorite]

TPB is acceptable quality if you look for the people with pink or green skulls by their name. They may not be Neil Young quality, but they will be what they advertise.
posted by Sparx at 5:02 AM on January 20 [1 favorite]

Dee Xtrovert: Weird, to me it leads to a page listing one or more trackers for the individual torrent I picked from the search results. The list should look like this. The green "Download Direct" link at the top is bogus but clicking any of the others below it will take you to the respective tracker's page (which itself is often full of baity "FAST! Direct Download!" links that should be ignored, the "Download torrent" and Magnet links are what you want).
posted by Bangaioh at 5:03 AM on January 20

I did just find this list, which might be helpful.
posted by Red Loop at 5:28 AM on January 20 [1 favorite]

I fell back on isoHunt after TBP lost it. It's been around forever.
posted by Acey at 6:32 AM on January 20 [1 favorite]

I still use all the trackers I mentioned in that comment, except tapecity, which doesn't exist anymore.
Dimeadozen covers the widest range of musical inclinations.
posted by nicolin at 7:27 AM on January 20

A quality Bittorrent site in 2013 isn't public.

There's good resources in the sidebar of the trackers subreddit as to which private torrent sites have what kind of content (music, or movies, or ebooks, etc.) and how to get invited.

The big one for music is what.cd, and I think they've still got an interview process to get an invite without knowing someone. I think the big one for film is tehconnection.eu, but I'm not much of a movie downloader, partly because I'm not enough of a movie-watcher and partly because movies more than anything else seem to be the way to get caught these days.

It can be hard to maintain ratio at private torrent sites, though, because there are a lot more seeders than downloaders, the opposite of the public torrent problem.
posted by mendel at 8:56 AM on January 20 [10 favorites]

If it's experimental/noise/electronic music you're looking for there's tons and tons of netlabels out there that give away their music for free. Here's one to get you started.
posted by Gev at 9:26 AM on January 20 [2 favorites]

For non-mainstream movies, find karagarga (tho' I'm not sure about its current state).
posted by progosk at 2:39 PM on January 20 [1 favorite]

mendel: The big one for music is what.cd, and I think they've still got an interview process to get an invite without knowing someone. I think the big one for film is tehconnection.eu

Right on what.cd.
The big one for movies is PassThePopcorn, but it's closed and ridiculously hard to get into. Basically, you need a proven history at several other private sites to get in.

Torrent-Invites.com is a great place to get started on invites. It'll take about a half-hour or more to get set up, jump through the hoops, and get your approval started; with that you can get into the lowest-level of invite threads and get into a couple private trackers. After you build a little rep there (upload/download ratio and sometimes #posts), you can get invited to other, often better sites.

Basically, it's security through annoyance/effort.

mendel: It can be hard to maintain ratio at private torrent sites, though, because there are a lot more seeders than downloaders, the opposite of the public torrent problem.

The good news is that you usually can buy ratio. For most of them, a one-time donation of $5/$10/$20 will buy a few dozen gigs of "upload" in your history. It kinda defeats the whole "prove you're a good contributor" aspect for other sites (that ask to see your ratios), but it's not too bad/too pricey.

The other good news is that some of these sites simply don't track up/download accurately, partly because it's hard to get your ratios up. One site doesn't track downloads at all(!). Some of them have "bonus" weeks where downloads don't count towards the ratio, or uploads count double.
posted by IAmBroom at 9:09 AM on January 21 [1 favorite]

Seconding kat and isohunt, in that order. Quality control on kat is pretty good. Isohunt is so large that it takes a fair bit of digging to find the stuff that isn't dodgy but when you do it's generally as good as anywhere. tpb when I'm really desperate to find something mildly obscure, 1 time in 50 they will have it when the other sites don't.

I also use this SUPER AWESOME torrent site for metal (all kinds; experimental, post-metal, too future, etc.) but I don't remember it offhand, will look it up when I get home if anybody is interested. Found so much good stuff on there.
posted by turgid dahlia 2 at 2:31 PM on January 21

http://thebox.bz for BBC-type things
posted by pracowity at 10:52 PM on March 4 [2 favorites]

torrentz.eu they still search the major ones. i think it's less about the website and more about quality torrents actually existing.
posted by cupcake1337 at 9:49 PM on March 5

At the risk of sounding particularly naive; is there such an animal anymore as a windows torrent client that doesn't try install all sorts of crapware? I've just had to rebuild my box, and I don't remember what I had, but I know it didn't try to install toolbars and whatnot.
posted by dejah420 at 5:23 PM on March 6

uTorrent won't install any toolbars or other bullshit.
posted by grapesaresour at 8:53 PM on March 7

Yeah, utorrent is what I use to have; but the latest version tried to install a toolbar, reset all my home pages, change my search, it was full of crap. I guess I'm going to have to install a linux partition; it looks like all windows torrent clients are loaded with junk.
posted by dejah420 at 5:54 AM on March 8

qBittorrent
posted by Bangaioh at 6:00 AM on March 8 [2 favorites]

Thanks Bangaioh, that's what I've settled on. :)
posted by dejah420 at 10:40 AM on March 8

dejah420: "looks like all windows torrent clients are loaded with junk"

Deluge also works on Windows, no crapware.
posted by meehawl at 8:41 AM on March 30