Steve, while illegal software, music and files can be found in torrents, there can also be perfectly legal material as well (see legaltorrents.com and any of the torrents for linux live-cds. Heck, even NASA allegedly uses the bittorrent protocol). I guess the same could be said of any other protocol out there, including dominant http!hollowsun wrote: And in response to using torrents, I wouldn't know - I don't have the first clue about them or how to use them and neither, I suspect, do a lot of other people .... other than illegal software, music and films go on them, they are dog slow and littered with false links to dodgy pron sites - I am told ... I really don't have the first clue about them. That doesn't sound like a good delivery method for making sounds available to people.
Regarding torrents being dog slow, that is entirely dependent on the amount of 'seeds' (people with the full files) and 'leechers' (people who are currently downloading the files).
Basically, if there are more seeds than leechers, the speeds can be quite fast. And vice versa, the speeds can be very slow if there's say 2 seeds and 34 leechers.
One other thing, It's wrong to assume that all 'torrents' (It's actually some sites that host torrents) have dodgy links to pr0n etc.
My 2 cents.
Andrew.
IMO, it's a great way for sharing large files between multiple users, as the files aren't downloaded sequentially, so a bit of data that person 1 has can give his bit to person 2 who's missing that bit and vice versa.
but if iTunes started offering FLAC then i would not think of the whole thing as such a joke and being raped, how the hell they sell that craply encoded muck is beyond me... 
