Nine Inch Nails has released a new tour sampler – NIN/JA – on their site, and you an also get it for free via BitTorrent.

Trent Reznor, the frontman of Nine Inch Nails, is an advocate of working with Internet technologies, instead of against them.

NIN’s Art Director Rob Sheridan explains:

We use torrents ourselves, and we know that most NIN fans are tech-savvy and familiar with file-sharing, so we want to experiment with ways to use that to our advantage, instead of making the mistake of trying to fight or ignore it, as so many artists and labels do.

Details and previews at the Ninja2009 site.

Bittorrent is a P2P file-sharing tool that is generating a lot of interest. Here is what you need to know to download and install the latest version of it.

Bittorrent is a P2P application designed to solve the problem of distributing large files over limited bandwidth. It communicates with other Bittorrent clients and works with them to allow you to download large files, even if the network is unreliable.

The application was developed by Bram Cohen, who calls himself a “Practitioner of evolutionary design”. He’s developed the BitTorrent application, a free program that runs on OS X, Windows, and Linux/Unix.

Downloading and Installing Bittorrent

The application can be downloaded from his site.

1. Save the installer to your disk, when prompted. Open the installer, and it automatically run itself. You’ll know it done when you get an alert that says “BitTorrent has been successfully installed!”.
2. Once you’ve got it loaded, just go to a site that has a torrent link and click it. This will open a save dialog box:

   

3. Click OK, and save the file:

   

4. Once you save the file, Bittorrent will open and connect to peers in order to download the file.

   

5. Once your download is complete, you may need to uncompress the file prior to using it.

If you have problems working with BitTorrent, a detailed FAQ is maintained by MXDomain.

Legal Torrents – This is a collection of legally downloadable, freely distributable ‘net.label’ electronica MP3 files which can be downloaded using BitTorrent. The site lets you download huge archives of free music from various online record labels.

The Legal Torrent server provides the initial seed, and they supply ‘BitTorrent irrigation’ for all the files by keeping a high-bandwidth seed online at all times, thus ‘irrigating’ the Torrented bits to everyone at decent speeds. From there, everyone that grabs the BitTorrent client and downloads helps contribute more bandwidth, because BitTorrent utilizes your unused upload bandwidth.

All the music is free and legal. You need to use a BitTorrent client to download the files. The files are huge, 200+ mb, so the BitTorrent client optimizes the downloads by sharing bandwidth among connected clients.

Synthtopia has instructions on downloading and installing BitTorrent.