User Guide

User Guide

Adding torrents

Magnet links. Paste into the add box, or copy one and let Flume notice: the add sheet detects a magnet on the clipboard and offers it. Verified on macOS, Windows and Linux.

A magnet carries an info hash, not a file list — that has to come from a peer who already has the torrent, over the DHT. So the status indicator must read Ready first; a magnet added while Connecting will sit waiting.

The add sheet counts the seconds while it waits, and gives up after a minute rather than waiting forever. A well-seeded torrent answers in a few seconds. If it times out, that usually means the torrent has no active seeders — not that the link is wrong.

A .torrent file needs none of this, because the file list is already inside it.

.torrent files. Use the file picker, or drag the file anywhere onto the window — Flume highlights the drop target and opens the add dialog with it. Non-torrent files are ignored rather than reported as an error.

Clipboard. If you have a magnet link on your clipboard when you open the add dialog, Flume prefills it. The clipboard is read only at that moment, when you have deliberately opened the dialog — never in the background.

Selecting files

Each torrent has a file tree with checkboxes. Deselected files are not downloaded.

This matters for distro torrents, which often bundle several ISO variants plus checksum files when you want one image.

Controlling torrents

Action	Effect
Pause	Stops transfer, keeps the torrent
Resume	Restarts transfer from existing progress
Remove	Removes from the list, asks whether to delete files
Open folder	Reveals the download in your file manager

Removal always asks before deleting data. Deleting a partially downloaded ISO by accident is a bad afternoon.

Settings

Setting	Notes
Download folder	Where completed and in-progress files go
Rate limits	Global, plus per-torrent overrides
Max active torrents	Limits concurrent transfers
Listen port	Default 42221
UPnP	Automatic router port forwarding
DHT	Required for magnet links
Theme	Light, dark, or follow system

Looking at one torrent

Select a torrent and choose Open details for the inspector. The overview tab answers a question the list cannot: not "is this downloading" but "will this finish".

Swarm health

The health column carries a word, never a colour alone.

Reads	Means
Healthy	Every piece is held by several connected peers
Thin swarm	Every piece is held, but only just — losing a peer could strand it
No seeds	No connected peer holds some piece, so this cannot finish as it stands
Connected	Peers are connected but none has sent a bitfield yet, so there is nothing to judge from
Seeding	Complete, and serving peers
Idle	Paused, checking, or stopped on an error

Connected is not a synonym for healthy. It means Flume does not know yet. Guessing between thin and healthy from the peer count alone would be a confident wrong answer: six peers who between them hold every piece will finish, and forty peers who all stopped at the same 6% will not.

The piece map

Two strips, stacked and sharing the same columns.

The upper strip is what you have: verified, in flight, not yet requested. Useful because overall progress hides shape — 60% with a solid head and an empty tail is downloading in order, and 60% scattered evenly is pulling rarest-first.

The lower strip is how many peers hold each region. It is the one that warns you: a tail that thins towards the right is a torrent heading for a stall. A region no peer holds is drawn full height in red, taller than anything else on the strip, and the caption says so.

It counts the peers you are connected to and does not count you, because the question it answers is whether the swarm can finish your download. Once a torrent is complete the strip disappears — the question is answered, and a finished torrent cannot stall.

What is limiting this download

Ranks the constraints Flume can actually measure and marks at most one as binding, with a sentence saying whether changing a setting would help.

• Your download cap — binding when you are hitting it. Raising it in Settings will help.
• Peer upload — binding when nothing on your machine is holding the transfer back, so the peers are. No setting will make this faster.
• Piece availability — binding when a piece is missing entirely. Nothing in Settings fixes that; it needs a peer holding the missing pieces to appear.

If nothing is binding, nothing is marked. A factor Flume cannot measure a ceiling for shows no bar and reads Not measured rather than an invented one.

Connection slots, disk write queue and hash-checking load are absent rather than estimated — the torrent engine does not report them, and a plausible number would be worse than none.

Seeding

Flume seeds completed torrents while running. Seeding requires an open listening port — see the firewall notes in Getting-Started.

Seeding Linux ISOs back is genuinely useful; distro mirrors carry real bandwidth costs.

Troubleshooting

Slow or no download. Check the status indicator reads Ready. Check peer count — zero peers on a well-seeded torrent usually means a blocked port.

Torrent stuck at 99%. Usually a single rare piece. librqbit will keep trying; leave it running.

Add dialog stuck fetching a file list. Only magnets do this, and only while looking for a peer who has the torrent. It gives up after a minute. A torrent with no active seeders will never answer, however long you wait.

Progress after a crash. Very little is lost. Flume writes its record of which pieces it has as the download runs, not only at exit, so even killing the process leaves that record at most a few megabytes behind. Restarting picks up from there and re-fetches only that much — it does not re-check the whole file.

You may briefly see Checking on launch. That is Flume verifying data already on disk, which is fast and does not re-download anything.