Acquisition For Mac

Peer-to-peer file sharing applications come in all sorts of flavors, some designed to work using as BitTorrent clients, others to connect their users to the ADC or Direct Connect networks. Acquisition has been designed as a Gnutella client and as an alternative to FrostWire, Poisoned or other cross-platform Gnutella based apps of its kind.

Fast, clean and quite OS X looking at the moment of its release in November 19, 2010, this application was one of the better Gnutella clients under development. Since the time of its latest release however, Acquisition's developer hasn't issued any other new versions and, nowadays, its user interface now looks clunky and not that very well integrated with the overall theme of the newer Mac OS X releases.   If there is one thing though that one can say about Acquisition is that is looks like an older version of iTunes. From the file browser like way of displaying search results based on the type of artist, file, and album, to the way your search history is kept within the left drawer like iTunes playlists, Acquisition looks to have been designed on top of an old iteration of iTunes, as a clone with P2P features.

Besides looking a lot like it, Acquisition is also fully integrated with iTunes. When you search for something, all results that you've already got in your library will be tagged with an iTunes icon so that you won't download them again or start hunting around your hard drive for file dupes.

Once a song is downloaded onto your Mac, Acquisition can be set to automatically add it to your iTunes library so that you can start playing it right away. What's more, even if the download hasn't finished yet, you are still able to preview it, while Acquisition neatly pauses iTunes and starts it back again once you've finished previewing the file.

Acquisition uses Gnutella's advanced swarming algorithms maximize your download speeds and, in order to put a limit on the amount of resources it consumes, it also allows you to set a transfer rate limit and to choose a maximum number of simultaneous transfers.

Overall, although its user interface isn't its best feature, Acquisition does prove to be an intuitive and simple to use Gnutella client, with enough customization options to make it an app worthy of a P2P user's /Applications folder.