Getting started for Newbies to BitTorrent

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This is Mod Tom's help file for newbies:

Please read the FAQ before starting - there is a lot of valuable information.

First, a little about BitTorrent. It is essentially a 5 step process:

1. Download the .torrent file. The .torrent file itself is small (< 100kB) and tells the BitTorrent client what all the pieces of the entire show are and how to put them back together as you download them.

2. Open the .torrent file using a BitTorrent client. This connects you to the "swarm" of everyone downloading/sharing the show. It will take a considerable time to download the show depending on many factors. The BT client will keep track of your progress.

3. Once the show is downloaded, stay connected to the "swarm" as a seed and share until you given back at least what you've downloaded. This is how BT works - by sharing. Please also refer to our Ratio Primer.

4. The files will be in a compressed format that you cannot burn to CD and listen to. You can either listen to them directly on your computer using various plug-ins (I use Foobar 2000 but there are also other programs, and for Mac users, there's Cog) or you can decompress them to their original WAV files and then burn an audio CD to listen to. The same SHN (Shorten) or FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) software below can handle this task very easily and quickly.

NOTE: Do not decode the files as long as you intend to share them! We strongly recommend to keep back-ups of the original file sets (on CD-r, DVD-r, external hard drives...) for further trades or reseeds.

5. Burn your WAV files as you normally would using your favorite software in creating Audio CDs.

Should you not know how BitTorrent works, please refer to the following links:

A good introduction

http://www.bthq.net/btfaq.html

http://btfaq.com/serve/cache/1.html

http://home.earthlink.net/~ozziescum/zep/bt.html

as well as to our FAQ

A very nice software allowing coding/encoding/checking of FLAC, SHN and APE for windows, the swiss army knife for DIME users: Trader's Little Helper

Here is a step by step instruction on SHN - very simple

mkwact SHN software (for Windows):

FLAC Frontend software

Here is a place to start with FLAC: