Count me as another of the growing group of former Azureus/Vuze users who have happily switched to µTorrent. I was happy with Azureus for a number of years and content to Seed torrents to fairly high ratios, even though sometimes the Java environment and AZ put a real load on my first-generation Intel iMac. Lately, though, Azureus became Vuze and fundamental transformations in the software's functions and apparent purpose developed. I wasn't entirely happy with these new developments, since they seemed irrelevant to the software's primary purpose, BitTorrent file sharing. Adding a social network on top of the informal and anonymous community seemed like a bad idea from the start. Even for those of us who use BitTorrent to distribute free software and Creative-Commons-licensed works, knowing who else was doing the same thing seemed pointless and led to the addition of more code and a consequent increase in number of bugs and dilution of software debugging efforts. For those individuals using BitTorrent to distribute files for which their permission to "make available" is unclear, being known to others would seem to be an active problem, not just a parasitic feature. I suppose that for some people the ability to give preferential treatment to their friends might seem like a good idea, but to me it seems like a way to turn groups of friends into "leech clusters," which to my mind makes it a misfeature. My perception of these new developments as harmful made me ever less enthusiastic about using Vuze, but it was software I had on my computer and could use without learning anything new. Most recently, Vuze announced the availability of features to transcode audiovisual content for multiple devices and distribution systems, such as the iPod via iTunes and the TiVo via the TiVo file copying protocols. I own both these devices and the prospect interested me. Transcoding and transmission for my TiVo never worked, though. At first I thought that this was due to an issue with unsynchronized releases: the transcoder components which were known to work with the last but one release of the core components not working with the latest release of the core components. An upgrade to the TiVo-related code came out, though, and still didn't work, even while TiVo functionality had been announced and was being used to promote adoption of the Vuze client. To me, this seemed like confirmation that my concerns about the size of the feature set and its effect on code quality were quite justified. After a couple of days of frobnicating my Vuze installation to try to get TiVo results out of it I discovered that µTorrent was available for MacOS X in a well-developed Beta state and I decided to give it a try. After a few days of using µTorrent, I threw Vuze into AppZapper and committed myself to using the new client. It's true that it still lacks some features of Vuze and (it says here) the Windows version of µTorrent, but I haven't missed them much. Rather, I found it easy to find a few critical controls and some features I'm not sure I ever had before. Setting bandwidth limits was easy, and I knew the amount of bandwidth I wanted to give this use of my Internet connection from experience with the other software. Port randomization is a feature I don't remember seeing before, and since my FiOS firewall can be configured on the fly by the software, all I had to do was let the software do its thing. The feature I had to research the most was encryption, and that was just a matter of reading a paragraph of documentation. Turning it on but not requiring it was a no-brainer. Moving the torrents I was seeding over to the new software took a little more effort and a certain amount of nailbiting, and I even managed to overwrite a copy of one distro image in working it out. Some documentation on how to migrate existing seeded torrents would be a good thing to have on this site. Switching to µTorrent was one of the easiest software change decisions I've made and implemented in more than thirty years of working with computers. The reputation of µTorrent is good, the functionality and user interface are clean and simple, and it has a characteristic we Mac users are very fond of: It Just Works. Kudos to the developers for an outstanding piece of work.
