Decoding Flac files

Michael, sorry for the delayed response, and thanks for the references! You will be proud to know I have been succesfully downloading, decoding, and organizing music the past few days thanks to your guidance. I'm enjoying it a ton! Its been a real treat to get my hands on old JGB, Panic, and Dead shows I once had on tape. Brings back great memories.

I am however having a new sort of problem that I am hoping you might have a quick fix for. I started to notice last night that my download speed seemed real slow. So I did a little research on the Azareus help menu and came to informaton about "optimal and blacklisted ports". According to the article I read, port 6881 is a poor choice to use and sure enough, it is the default port on the Azareus set up. I followed their directions on changing my TCP listening port to a more ideal number. Their suggested range was 49152-65535 so I chose 49155. I opened the connection options, changed the TCP port to 49155, hit save, closed out of Azareus, reopened after a few minutes, ran the recomended NAT/Firewall port test, and got the eveything is "O.K." message.

All seemed good to go so I started to download a new show from bt.etree. Show is downloading at a much faster rate, however, I am now getting a yellow circle that says "there appears to be problem wiht the Distributed Databases UDP Port mapping (NAT). I didn't have this error message when I was operating on the 6881 port. I searched the help menu for information on how to fix this problem and all I could find was information on NAT problems associated with firewall settings. I then went to the information on changing my firewall settings to see if that would fix it. Here are the steps I followed:

Opened System Preferences, from the Finder drop down menu in the toolbar at the top of the screen.

Selected "Show All"

Selected "Sharing", under Internet & Network

Selected "Firewall"

Clicked on the "New..." button.

Selected "Other" from drop down menu.

In the fields listed entered the following:
"TCP Port Number": 49155
"UDP Port Number":Left Blank
"Description:" Typed Bit Torrent.
Clicked "Save"

Still didn't fix the yellow circle error. Any suggestions?

Lloyd. I'm glad to hear I was able to help.

Unfortunately I don't really know very much about Azareus. I've not used it at all. I do know that I use port 6881 with the bittorrent client I use, BitTorrent, and have not have any issues with downloading.

The slow download speeds you have may have not been due to the BT port. It may have been that the people you were downloading from were not on a broadband connection.

It has been my experience that if some of the people on a torrent are on dialup, for example, it brings the total speed of the download down to a crawl. This could have been the problem instead of anything relating to the port you had specified.

Or you might see if the developers of Azareus have a support forum you can ask questions on.

Good points Michael. I'll see if I can find some help via Azareus. Thanks as always for you speedy reply.