In just a couple of short years, the peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing protocol BitTorrent has become among the most popular methods of file sharing on the internet. By having an ever growing quantity of legal content available via "music torrents," Downloading BitTorrents has an extremely bright future.

What makes BitTorrent different than other P2P networks is its extremely efficient distribution method. Unlike other file sharing networks where downloads slow as increasingly more users download the files, downloads will get faster the better users that will be online, downloading and sharing the files. The BitTorrent protocol is currently the amongst the fastest at moving very large files throughout the Internet.

As a way to begin, the very first thing you'll need to track down is a piece of software to act as the BitTorrent Client. Some users recommend uTorrent because of its small size and limited system resource usage. Others prefer the torrent clients, Azureus and BitComet. I recommend you download a few of different clients and use the one you feel most comfortable with. These clients are easy to install as any other software and really small. Once installed you are just about ready to begin downloading. To find files to download, goto any search engine and search for "Torrent Tracker" or "BitTorrent Tracker."

So that you can download a file using BitTorrent, another user has to be uploading (also referred to as "seeding" the file with their own torrent client. Pick the file to download, click the link to the .torrent file on the tracker page. This tends to trigger your installed client to open begin downloading to your computer. The greater seeders the file has the faster the download will go. There is a great chance that others downloading the torrent will be able to see your ip address so be sure to only use BitTorrent for its intended legal purpose.

Another unique aspect is the possibly for the seeder to force others to seed and share. To be able to keep them working properly everybody must share something. The protocol is dependent upon it. If you share with other users while downloading, your download speeds will increase when you are helping the other users to download.