Transmission has been my day to day BitTorrent client ever since I found it. It isn't as full featured (bloated) like Azureus is, but it worked great for most things.

All of a sudden Transmission has checked off two important features that I've been hoping would happen for a long time now. Creating torrents and selective downloads. These two new features can be found in the most recent build of Transmission, they warn that it may be unstable, but it's certainly working well for me.

If Transmission is your torrent client of choice then you know that it wasn't ever able to create torrents. Well that has now all changed.

I'm not sure if the news that uTorrent is heading for the Mac had any impact on these two features getting completed all of a sudden, I guess we'll never know - but whatever the reason I'm certainly very happy that we've got these features now.

You can see here that I've customized my icon bar to include Create [Torrent]

If you select Create [Torrent] here is the screen window you are presented

The next great feature that has been implemented is the ability to selectively download. Say a torrent has 3 files, 1, 2, and 3. And each is 1GB big, if you only need 2, then you would have previously had to wasted a lot of bandwidth and download all 3 files in the torrent - even though you only wanted file 2. Now you can selectively choose which files in the torrent you download. Additionally you can set priorities for individual files at Low, Normal, or High.


If you go to the Inspector window for a torrent that you are downloading, you will see checkboxes to the right of each file, you can uncheck the box if you do not want to download that file, additionally, there is a little pill looking icon if you mouseover the file, this is the priority setting.

Priority Setting & Selective File CheckBox

Now, more than ever, is the time to check out Transmission for ALL your torrent duties.
Admittedly, I do wish that Transmission were a single window application, not the main window for torrents and a separate window for Inspector information. I think a condensed version like they show now is good for some and maybe that should remain an option, but it would be really nice for many other people if they gave you more information on a single unified window. But I promise I won't complain about that what with the two nice gifts!

Latest Build, Home page.