Download Torrents Directly to Your Android Phone with Swarm
To appreciate the mega-awesomeness of this feat, let’s first explain what a torrent is.
In the old days, file sharing sites would connect two computers together and one person could transfer a file from the other persons computer onto their own. The problem was that if the sender logged off, the receiver was completely cut off and left only with a partial file and would have to find another computer to copy from and start the whole process all over again. No bueno.
Enter the torrent. Now, instead of getting the file in one big piece from one other computer, your computer assembles it from little bits gathered from a lot of peoples computers. This means that if one person turns off their computer, the download will just continue with bits from other senders. No interruption and a faster overall download process.
To get your computer to download these little bits, first it needs some instructions on what it’s looking for, where to find the bits of information, and then how to put it all together in the end to make a complete file. These instructions are the actual torrent files. First a person goes to a torrent search engine like one of the ones listed below…
Torrentscan.com is a great site because it’s a list of multiple torrent search engines so it saves you some time when searching. From there, you type in the name of the file you’re looking for. You’ll see a list of files that match your search pop up. You will also see a column that shows “Seeders” and “Leechers.” Seeders are the number of people who are sharing a file from their computer, and Leechers (or peers) are the number of people looking for the file. If there are not enough seeders, the file will either be very slow to download or unavailable. Common courtesy in the torrent sharing community says to make sure to seed files you have while you search for other files. That way everyone can keep the action going. Once you know which file you want, click to download the torrent and small file (the instructions for downloading the real file) will be saved to your computer (or phone in our case).
Now that you have that torrent file, you need another application to open that file, read those instructions inside on what you want to download, and then it will begin the process of seeking it out, downloading and putting it all together. Until recently, this fairly complicated function was only capable from a computer as most phones did not have the horsepower or internet speed capabilities to handle this. Now, there’s an app that’s changed all that.
Swarm is an app for Android that will take a torrent and download the file directly to your phone. This means you could possibly download a movie directly to your phone and then watch it, all without having to get a computer involved (as long as it’s the right format, like .MP4). Swarm is an extremely simple app to use so let’s walk through and see how it works. Download Swarm from the link below…
Click Here to Download Swarm from the Android Market
By now you should have gone to the torrent site of your choice, found a good file and downloaded the torrent. Launch Swarm and click on the Add button in the top right of the screen. It will now ask you to find the file on your phone. Usually, this will have downloaded into the Downloads folder on your memory card or built in memory (depending on your model of Android phone). When you select the file, it will ask you what parts of the torrent you want to download. Some of the torrents include multiple parts (for example, an album download includes each song as an individual file…select only the ones you want to download or just download everything). From there it will say that’s it’s allocating the file and once that’s done, the download begins. That’s it!
A lot of adjustments can be made in the Preferences page
You can also go to the Preferences by click on the Prefs button on the top right of the screen and make any adjustments you want. You can also tell it exactly where you want the files you are downloading to be stored. Also, just remember that this sucks down battery like like a madman so you probably want to keep your phone plugged in while you’re downloading. It’s also not unusual for this to also make your phone a little hot because your CPU will probably be working overtime to make it happen.
Files will normally be in the Downloads folder
Hope this works out for you. If you have any other additional sites for finding torrents, drop them in the comments section below. Enjoy and happy sharing!
HackMondo 