Azureus Review

azureus-reviewUPDATE: December 2012

A lot of changes have been brought to Azureus. For starters, now it’s called Vuze and comes with a whole lot of features, some of which are just mind-blowing. Amongst them, we name RSS subscriptions, faster downloads, remote access via another computer or mobile device, integrated HD player, and more. While the file-sharing platform is free, there’s also Vuze Plus, an enhanced version of the regular client that allows you to burn DVDs, has a built-in antivirus, and allows you to play files while downloading them. You can download Vuze’s latest version by accessing this link.

*********

As a BitTorrent client, Azureus is incredibly flexible. This torrent application comes well packed with plenty of functions which just improve your downloading through BitTorrent. Besides its wide-range of features, Azureus also offers plug-in capability, which means you can use any of the additional plug-ins available on its homepage.

When it comes to layout, Azureus depends on the user and how simple or complex he chooses to make it. This is a dual pane GUI having multiple tabs for multiple features among which the most fundamental one -‘My Torrents’ tab, where you can find basics such as the file-rating, file- status (how good is your connection), the name of the file you’re downloading. There’s another very important tab that you can choose to create and called the ‘Statistics’ tab. It allows you to view activities, transfers, your cache, and the distributed database. Last but not the least important is the ‘Vivaldi’ tab, part of Azureus’ DHT (Distributed Hash Tables) which is a virtual positioning system that computes a position for every peer in the system.

Just as many other clients Azureus allows you to track and specify maximum upload and download speeds and open files from within a torrent that hasn’t fully completed its downloading.

Azureus-small.jpgThe app also offers further data like the number of seeders and peers you’re connected to, the speed of your download, ETA and additional options. However, you can’t fully control what your download delivers. Another great thing about Azureus is that it creates new tabs for appropriate functions. Rather than presenting you with many unsorted and croweded windows, it gives you a well organized tab list from which you can choose between information windows.

Though not the fastest p2p client out there, Azureus is makes up for it with its ability to easily download multiple files simultaneously. Still, it gets a minus for resource consumption and for slowing down the system when in use.

Strong points
Azureus currently supports Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Unix and provides lots of features (including resume options) and support. If you find yourself in need of some assistance you can log onto an IRC help channel. This program is highly configurable and it pretty much delivers what you’d expect from a torrent client (+ a bunch of supported languages and extra features).

Weak points
If you’re not RAM, Azureus will turn into a system hog – in brief – you’ll get considerable system draining the longer you leave it running. Being a Java application, Azureus’ performances depend on how JVM is installed and configured on each system.

Screenshots of Azureus:

Azureus-screenshot1-small.jpgAzureus-screenshot2-small.jpgAzureus-graph-small.jpg