Quote: The full version looks like it is zipped into two files. I kind of wish it wasn’t because if this fails I'll probably loose the entire zip and just not a few songs, oh well beggars….
I think it doesn't actually work like that -- until you've got the whole lot, none of your downloaded files are valid. I'd love to know exactly how it works, but it seems to fill the files in the order it receives the blocks, whether or not that's the right order. This surely involves it in reshuffling the blocks when the right ones do arrive, but maybe it does that on-the-fly too. It must be a bit like those jigsaw screensavers.
No, you can definitely work with files within a torrent before the entire torrent is completed.
Now, it's possible that whatever Torrent client you're using doesn't actually do that, and only collects the blocks it receives into a big blob and then parts it out when it's done, but that's certainly not how it has to work.
Azureus seems to allocate files when the download starts and put the blocks in the right place when it receives them. I think there's an option to not preallocate, but that probably increases fragmentation significantly. Again, your client may do it differently.
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