qBittorrent official forums

for specific torrents (most are fine) the client just gets stuck on the metadata retrieval screen. i'm using PIA, made sure im on the correct network adapter, port forwarding is on, using every recommended list of public trackers i could find, i've checked all over this board and reddit and no solution i've found has worked. what do i do?

Metadata retrieval simply means you are trying to download the actual .torrent file from peers. IF there are enough peers available. It could simply mean you are trying to download torrents that simply don't have enough seeders to seed you the .torrent even.