Vuze (formerly known as Azureus) is a bit-torrent client which follows a similar format to eMule but its makers claim it can offer significant improvements in terms of hits, download times and navigating available material.

There's no doubt that Vuze offers some spectacularly fast download times but this comes at a price. Mainly the fact that Vuze is extremely bloated and tries to install two toolbars when you install it. On the upside, because Vuze is an open source project, there is a large community of programmers, designers and users who are continually testing and improving it and there's an excellent FAQ.

You receive comprehensive stats about every file that's downloaded with Vuze (most of which will mean nothing to you though) but most importantly it gives you the all important Estimated Time of Arrival and Share Ratio which tells you how much of a particular file you have uploaded or given back to the community. Apparently, in a perfect world, every file should have a share ratio of two which means for each file you download, two users download it from you.

Possibly the most notable feature of Vuze, however, is the media website that's embedded into the application. It looks like an entertainment website and that's pretty much what it is only the entertainment can be downloaded via Vuze. These include gameshows, user generated content, sports and more.

Vuze has a rather overwhelming interface as a result. It's far more bloated than other P2P clients such as uTorrent and Transmission. It takes some getting used to at first the upside is that it is much more customisable than most Mac P2P apps. For example, if you want to configure Vuze to work only with a VPN, you can do unlike uTorrent and Transmission.

Vuze is generally an excellent P2P application that may be a bit more bloated than most but works well and has plenty to offer.