Pick 'n' Mix BitTorrent downloads

For convenience's sake, many torrents take the form of all-encompassing bundles; you can either download every release, issue, image or whatever of a set, or none at all. If you've ever found yourself transferring several gigabytes worth of data, and discarding the bulk of it, having retrieved a select few files from the package, this tip is for you.

A limited number of popular BitTorrent clients now support selective downloads, making wasted bandwidth (and time) a thing of the past; the list includes Azureus, BitComet and uTorrent.

As Azureus is the only multi-platform client amongst these candidates, I'll use it to elucidate the process - in any case, the technique can easily be extrapolated for use with the Windows-only clients:-

• Open a torrent file in Azureus and allow the client to initialise it.
• Right-click on the entry in your download queue and select 'show details'.
• Bring the 'files' tab into view, highlight all the files within the torrent you don't wish to download and right-click.
• The resultant context menu includes a 'priority' option. Hover your pointer over it until the menu expands to display your choices and select 'do not download'.