The best things in life are free, but human in general - myself included - have the tendency to take free things for granted. One of the examples of great and free things that I took for granted is the torrent downloader known as Transmission.

I've been using Transmission forever. It sits dutifully in the background ready to fetch any torrent downloads that I throw at it. It never complains, it just works; while I never really pay attention to it.

It turns out that Transmission is a torrent downloader that has more convenient features under its hood. All the user has to do is dig a little deeper into its Preferences (Command + Comma). And oh boy, it is rewarding.

Automating The Downloading Tasks

All this time, I stuck with the mundane manual torrenting tasks. Everytime I wanted to download a file via torrent; I would download the torrent file, manually add it to Transmission, wait until the download finishes, then move the file to their respective foldesr: movie files to Movie folder, mp3 files to Music folder, png and jpg files to Picture folder, you get the picture.

After looking into the Preferences options, I realized that I can automate the process using Transmission's built-in features.

Our first stop after opening the Preferences is the "Transfer" menu. The "Adding" tab is the place to set the default location of downloaded files. You can also tell Transmission where to put the unfinished downloads and whether Transmission should show the "Adding transfer" option window.

But the automation magic is in auto-add setting; you can automatically add torrents from a specific folder to the download queue. If you combine this with default download setting from your browser or download manager, you can really simplify your torrent life.

You can take this automation concept further by utilizing the "Groups" feature. Basically, Groups allow users to categorize files based on some specific criteria and set a specific location for each group. Users can save their time considerably because they don't have to manually move the downloaded file over to a new location.

To set a group, select one color from the available options on the left pane. Rename the label, tick the "Custom Location" checkbox, and set the download location for this group.

The next step is deciding on the filtering criteria for the group. Upon ticking the "Assign group to new transfer based on criteria" checkbox (and later by clicking the "Edit" button), you will see the familiar Finder-like filtering system.

Click on the "Plus" (+) button on the right to add more rules, and if you want to delete a rule, simply click the "Minus" (-) button.

The last automation option available via Preferences is bandwidth usage automation. If you have an internet connection with a fair-use policy, you can schedule specific transfer speed limits at certain times here. Just tick the checkbox and set the time when speed limit will occur.

Subscribing to torrent?

For those who love to download TV episodes, it would be nice of you could subscribe to the series so that it will be downloaded automatically without the need to add them manually every time the new episode is out.

Transmission doesn't have that kind of feature, yet, but that doesn't mean that users can't do anything about it. The same result can be obtained by using a help from another application called Automatic which will automatically download RSS items based on a preset criteria.

If you "subscribe" to the RSS torrent of a series, it will be added automatically to Transmission and downloaded to the specified location. All that's left to do is to enjoy it.

Do you use the Transmission torrent downloader? Check out other posts about Transmission and the comparison to uTorrent. And don't forget to share your thoughts and opinion using the comment below.