Downloading Music Torrent

[Guest Chris]

I have attempted to download a music torrent and all the mp3 files inside the album folders seem to have other audio on top of the original file. Also some of the artist names have been replaced with other artists names on my sytem, although file names (track title) remain correct. The correct music file usually plays for a few seconds then some random music begins covering the source file. Is this a virus unique to bittorent? My AVG doesn't detect anything. I uninstalled Bittorent completely and re-installed the new version but it still does the same. It's very odd as some of the music contained in the downloaded file/s is taken from my system (stored elswhere). I noticed that some music might have come from recent torrents I downloaded as the artist's and contents seemed mixed up. After changing my music location folder name, re-installing Bittorent it's still the same. I only seem to have this problem with a couple of torrents but now worry about downloading anything else because without listening to every single downloaded file, I will not know if they are faulty. Any help would be appreciated.

[Harold Feit]

When are you trying to play the files?

[Guest Chris]

Dear Harold

I think I sense where you are going - I had one torrent that would not complete fully. Only one file inside the music album folder was unfinished and the torrent had been waiting for a few months so I gave up and decided to play the ones that showed up as "complete functional" mp3 music files (Windows XP system). All the files seemed to play back OK so I purchased the missing track from Amazon for 69 pence to complete the album. This gave me an idea that perhaps other "stuck / dead" (or missing seeds) torrent's in my list might also be usable, rather than simply deleting them and giving up.

I have a discography I would like to download that is quite rare (unable to purchase most of the albums now as previously on vinyl and not on CD) and it's about 3.6Gb. It contains about twenty albums. Again I noticed that it only wanted to download very slowly, sometimes not at all for days/weeks (couldn't find any trackers to add to it's own listing) so I tried to play a couple of the mp3 files that showed up as complete inside the torrent download folder to see if they were good enough quality to be bothered with. They were good but then I noticed that some of the track titles were showing other artists names (in the mp3 tag data) and not the actual artist I was downloading. I tired to play a few but then other random music was playing and not the "named" artist or track title. Most of the music was sections or bursts of music from other albums contained in my system. Other music playing was not my taste in music so I don't know where it was coming from. I assumed this to be very odd, virus like - file names and contents mixed up. I also noticed that suddenly the download speed had increased to about the maximum I ever get via my telephone landline (broadband) which was fast at 263kb/s compared to usual torrents with a lot of seeds (this was showing no seeds and one peer (active). All very strange and I have used Bittorent on and off for a couple of years without any problems.

So I think you are asking if the torrent is actually complete or is it still active. It was still active, so I removed the torrent and then tried playing the completed tracks. The odd files were appearing in several of the folders that were contained within the actual torrent. I deleted them all, uninstalled Bittorent, run a registry cleaner, re-installed latest version (I maintained previous settings on the un-install) and re-named the folders that contain my other music in case a virus had loaded a file path to them. It was still the same problem. I tried playing the music files that were already on my system to make sure they were still there and correct and they seem to be OK, just that the music from them seems to be taken by Bittorent and loaded into the torrent files I am currently trying to download. Hope this makes sense, not easy to explain. Thanks for your patience, much appreciated.

Best wishes,

Chris.