To do a successful Mac torrent search, you need to know where to look. Not every resource is equal - some provide unique, exclusive torrents; others can give you more info about the upload and have stricter moderation. TPB isn’t always the answer! Find out why.
Torrenting is a popular activity, so the software’s been getting better by the year. At the moment, most torrent clients offer the standard set of features, including bandwidth control, priorities, and partial downloads. Rarely, a company goes out of its way to try something original. We’ll showcase both mundane and unusual clients, but you can be sure that all presented apps are good.
Do you want to solve two problems at once? Folx is a torrent downloader that can act as a tracker website, since it has a convenient built-in search bar. Using it, you can locate torrents and immediately add them to the download list.
Folx saves you time and effort - it’s an excellent magnet link Mac application. It can handle .torrent files, and direct downloads, too. With the PRO version, Folx provides unprecedented control - you can choose to split downloads into up to 20 threads, schedule them for later, start them directly from the browser, control their speed and connect to iTunes. There’s a helpful tagging system, too, that will help you sort your queue.
With its built-in torrent search engine, refined interface, and advanced features, Folx is the best torrent client Mac has to offer. It can find, start, and manage torrent downloads quickly and conveniently.
Make sure that it’s upgraded to PRO.
Use the drop-down menu to switch to “All” and track the download progress.
Remember that you can do a partial download by unchecking some files or folders in the download properties. You can also change the target directory and tag them for convenience.
µTorrent is a well-known torrent manager that has garnered a lot of fame for being lightweight, feature-rich, and totally free. Things have changed, however. Starting with macOS Catalina, Mac users can only access the limited browser version. Which is why many users are looking for a uTorrent alternative for Mac. The desktop application is known for many convenient features, including sorting, bandwidth adjustment, torrent health info, partial downloads, and many others.
qBitTorrent, the open-source alternative to µTorrent, has managed to catch up to macOS updates, and is actually compatible with Catalina, Big Sur, and Monterey. Torrents can be added via magnet links or files, you can view their available fragments and seeders, set allowed bandwidth and priority, and select files for partial download. Your own torrents can be created and seeded as well.
Due to their gray legal status, Mac torrent search engines constantly disappear or become unreliable. The go-to places of 2021 may already be gone in 2022. Even if the tracker exists, the original URL could be banned, requiring you to find a proxy website. As mentioned, each site has its own pros and cons. They are structured differently, with varying degrees of convenience and safety. Content availability is also a factor, since some resources allow DMCA copyright claims.
Almost unmoderated, this resource is notorious for constant takedowns and legal attacks. And yet, it lives on as the unofficial icon of internet piracy. It’s even found on Google’s front page. While TPB is not the darkest place on the Web, its users are not safe from malware. Copyright is not enforced on The Pirate Bay.
Content is structured into 6 broad categories, such as Audio and Video, with each having up to 10 sub-categories, mostly for formats and genres. It’s not the most refined tagging method, and there are no custom tags, leaving it up to the users to make a precise search. A login is not required to use TPB. Currently, it does not allow comments, which used to be important for some torrents, as a warning or a potential solution.
LimeTorrents is a simplistic torrent search engine with only 7 categories of content and very few sub-categories. The interface is good for assessing if the torrent is dead, since it clearly displays current seeders, leechers, and torrent health - a characteristic that indicates how many parts of the torrent are actually available.
Instead of storing .torrent files directly, LimeTorrents hosts links to other resources. The selection is “mostly verified”, but there’s no real proof of this claim. An account is not required to download, but needed to post comments.
RARBG is a multi-purpose site, with sections for news and movie box office ratings. There’s a sparse selection of categories with no tags. The uploads are centered around newer mainstream movies, games, and music, without much niche content, such as old ROMs.
The tracker is semi-legitimate, since it accepts DMCA claims. This is another limiting factor for the platform - it doesn’t host any real blockbusters. Though, its smaller scale reduces the risk of malicious files. Users are not required to log in to download or even post comments.
1337x is a curated piracy website with strict uploading rules, including the requirement to seed for the first 24 hours and to label the files correctly. The platform allows copyrighted content and does not accept copyright claims, hence the need for numerous proxies. For this reason, the newest movies and games can be found there. Comments require registration, but downloading doesn’t. Torrents on 1337x can be sorted and selected by star ratings, languages, release dates, and a wide variety of genres.
When the user searches for a well-designed Mac torrent search, TorrentSeeker immediately comes to mind. The home page is very simple and modern - the user only sees the logo and the search bar. Just make a request and get the result. It searches popular torrent sites like Pirate Bay, 1337x, LimeTorrents, YTS, EZTV, Torrent Downloads, Zooqle, small torrent sites like Torlock, etc.
Besides that this torrent search engine also includes niche websites. This allows you to get more relevant results. It's a pity that search filters only include relevance and date of results, and since there are almost no ads, it's no surprise that TorrentSeekers' user interface is much better than its competitors.
Torrends is a website that features a large list of healthy trackers, 132 at the moment of writing, and integrates them all into a single search engine. Unlike TorrentSeeker, it can’t display results from multiple selected sites at once, but you can make a single query and quickly switch between the results from each chosen website individually. This utility is definitely useful in some cases, but it’s very specific, and normal search engines will be preferable to it most of the time.
There are so many Mac torrent search tools out there, it can sometimes be hard to choose. But the choice becomes simple, once you understand what you want to find, and how you’d like to find it.
First of all, you have to consider availability. For example, if you’re a mainstream movie fan, you’ll have no luck on a website that accepts DMCA claims. Overall, resources with stricter moderation will tend to have a smaller variety of torrents. Most of the time, you’ll be unable to stick to a single website, and that’s OK.
Secondly, it’s your safety and the quality of the torrents. Moderation or curation help ensure that the files aren’t packed with viruses. Often, you’ll be faced with a trade-off - a file only will be available on an unsafe site. Be very careful, since a compromised system could mean the loss of your accounts and all the files on it.
Thirdly, consider the download speeds. You may encounter multiple versions of the same torrent with different ratios of seeders/leechers. Well-curated sites tend to maintain higher seed counts.
SEEDERS: are the users who have all the segments of the redistributable file or in other words, these are the complete sources. That is, some computers have already downloaded the file completely and they are already distributing. Thus, the more seeds, the faster you will download the file.
PEERS: are the users who are currently downloading files and distributing them to other people at the same time. The distribution partner uploads the materials that have already been downloaded to their computer and simultaneously downloads the missing files.
LEECHERS: are users who have just started downloading files. Not a single full-fledged file has yet been downloaded to their computer but they also participate in the download, like other users.
Pirating has become so mundane that it’s easy to ignore the dangers and the inconveniences. Perhaps, the unjust nature of modern copyrights and corporate practices has something to do with it. Anyway, stay safe out there. Try not to run any pirated app with admin rights. And make sure to try Folx.
A torrent tracker is a server which helps to transfer files between peers using the BitTorrent protocol. First, a peer informs the tracker about its interest in a torrent. The tracker keeps record of the number of seeds, peers, etc. So it responds in its turn with a list of other peers available. Once you’ve downloaded a .torrent file from any Mac torrent tracker and added it into your torrent client, the latter will send requests to other peers to get portions of that file.
Trackers can be public, or open, and private ones, which require authorization.
The general recommendation would be to seed until you reach at least the 1:1 ratio to give back what you have taken. The BitTorrent network uses a kind of fairness system. In fact, you don't download from the Mac torrent server, but from other users, so we should seed to be fair with them.
Moreover, the users uploading more to other users are rewarded to a certain extent. The higher seeding ratio you have, the faster download speeds you'll get. Private torrent trackers can even ban you from downloading if your upload ratio is insufficient. All in all, unwillingness to seed degrades the quality of torrenting. Nobody likes seeing unseeded torrents on the site or experiencing slow downloads.
Yes, to perform torrent search Mac users(not only) need to use VPN, as it helps them to hide their activity and keep their data anonymous from hackers, ISP and app developers, etc.