Certain steel-willed individuals may have simply decided not to listen to the album at all, but who want to hear The Life of Pablo without using Tidal took a different route: piracy. While most major album releases appear on popular torrent sites upon their release, this appears to be an exceptional case.
Torrent Freak has estimated that Kanye West's The Life of Pablo has already been illegally downloaded through torrents by over 500,000 people, with almost 10,000 different users sharing copies from around the world.
The Life Of Pablo Album Download Torrent
Kanye's week has not exactly been going swimmingly, with the album's controversial mentions of pop-star Taylor Swift making headlines and the ongoing technical issues that Tidal users are reporting. Tidal's Twitter has been flooded with complaints and reports of issues since the album's launch, citing download links going missing, unnoticed service support tickets and app issues:
Instead of downloading the .torrent file from a webserver, you download it directly from a seed/leecher. The biggest advantage is that you might be able to download the content of the torrent, even if the tracker is down or closed for registration.
Traditionally, .torrent files are downloaded from torrent sites. A torrent client then calculates a torrent hash (a kind of fingerprint) based on the files it relates to, and seeks the addresses of peers from a tracker (or the DHT network) before connecting to those peers and downloading the desired content.
It is worth noting that BitTorrent can not ditch the .torrent format entirely and rely solely on Magnet links. The .torrent files hold crucial information that is needed to start the downloading process, and this information has to be available in the swarm.
A Bittorrent magnet link contains all the information needed to start downloading the files from peers directly. It is a server-less way of retrieving the right information to start downloading the requested files. A magnet link therefor is theoretically all that is needed to download files from other peers in the Bittorrent network. Magnet links can be distributed by email, messaging and other forms of communication but are most often found on the torrent sites that usually offer both torrent and magnet links to their users.
The main advantage for Bittorrent indexers is that they do not have to store the torrents on their servers anymore which could be beneficial for them in several ways. It could reduce the pressure from the media creation industry and reduce hardware infrastructure expenses thanks to less tracking and downloading.
The end users on the other hand benefit from Magnet Links as well. All they need is the link to start downloading the files which makes them independent from torrent indexers. It also allows them to distribute the information more easily. Torrent indexers remain on the other hand the main source of information for new files that are available for download.
A tracker less environment should raise a question of identification. How can a download be initiated ff there is no tracker to inform the Bittorrent user about other users who download and seed the file? The answer is DHT, Distributed hash tables. DHT is enabled by default in popular clients such as uTorrent or Vuze. Without going into to much detail, the hash of the magnet link is used to find peers using DHT.
Both torrent file and Magnet links perform the same task, that is, download files via BitTorrent. Magnet links contain hashes of the files to be downloaded and location of where these can be downloaded from. 2ff7e9595c
Comments