Popular old-school BitTorrent client Transmission celebrates its fourth major release today, with a huge list of changes coming with the update, including native Apple silicon support.
With Transmission 4, the client is no longer an Intel application that runs on Macs with M1 or M2 chips through Rosetta. It’s now a universal binary, so it now works natively on all Macs.
There are some UI design changes to match the latest version of macOS, and the developers have modernized the code by migrating from C90 to modern C++. Resource efficiency has also been improved, so the app now uses less memory and fewer CPU cycles.
New features include support for using BitTorrent v2 torrents and hybrid torrents, users can now set “default” trackers which can be used to advertise all public torrents, and an option to omit information potentially identifying information (e.g. user agent and creation date) when creating new torrents has been added.
Elsewhere, newly added seeds can now start immediately and verify parts on demand, instead of needing a full verification before seeding can begin, and the web client has been rewritten to support mobile use. When creating new torrents, users can now also specify chunk sizes, and IPv6 blocklists are now supported.
“Streaming on macOS is a truly native and polished experience,” reads the client’s website. “It’s not a cross-platform app that treats macOS as an afterthought. With a sleek and simple interface, Transmission meets or exceeds Apple UI standards while utilizing native features.
Transmission has one of the lowest memory and resource footprints of all the major BitTorrent clients. Its slight overhead is one of the reasons it’s so well suited for home NAS and media servers. Having been used by Western Digital, Zyxel and Belkin, Transmission delivers truly impressive performance on almost any compatible hardware.”
According to the developers, the volunteer-based open-source project is much more responsive to bug reports and code submissions than it has been in the past, with more than 350 new community commits contributing to Transmission’s release. 4.
Transmission 4 is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux, and can be downloaded for free from the Transmission website.
