Thanks so much. Baroque opera, anyone? Lol!

Thanks, again. I’ve done all that. Bitdefender used to be clumsy with whitelisting. Since reinstalling everything, I’ve noticed it seems to do that automatically now. I thought maybe the issues were related. In the end, I shouldn’t torrent without a VPN, and Nord won’t allow uploading, right?

Thank you. I used to have direct incoming connections via uTorrent then QBT. I don’t know why they stopped. They stopped shortly before the Reddit boycott. I check for VPN leaks every now & then. I don’t find them. QBT’s network interface is set to Nordlynx.

My external optical drive (Dell, bought at same time as Dell computer) doesn’t want to read metadata. None of the players, except Windows Media & WM Legacy, have access to metadata via the optical drive. Pot Player & Aimp access metadata for torrented audio & video, but not from the external drive. With help from some nice online instructions, I got EAC set up to retrieve metadata from the external drive for audio CDs, but haven’t been able to get metadata from a DVD. (I want to ditch physical media, so it matters.) I looked long and hard for a means, similar to the way EAC does it, to grant metadata access to Pot Player and AIMP. I found DVDIdentifier through rutracker. Bitdefender’s UI shows me that it let DVDIdentifier out to the internet, but DVDIdentifier didn’t come back with metadata. Microsoft f***ery? I was hoping the Windows refresh might help the metadata and torrenting problems.

If I google whether Nord supports port forwarding, I land on a Nord page that says it doesn’t. If I google using Nord with QBT, I land on the Nord page whose instructions I followed. I figured the people who write advice for Nord know much more than I do, so I took their advice. Why on earth are they equivocating? Surfshark stopped working for iplayer, and my subscription ran out, so I got Nord. If I understand you correctly, the only way I’m going to get incoming torrent connections is to bypass Nord, right? I think I read somewhere that DRM holders have sued ISPs for user info, and that’s still in the works. I did some reading on QBT forums. Somebody said that soon we won’t need VPNs. As I understood them, soon meant not yet. So, if I want to reciprocate others’ generosity and/or don’t want to behave badly, I need another VPN, right? Sorry to be long-winded. I’ve just started torrenting, and there’s so much to learn.