In his latest book “Free”, Chris Anderson explains how the latest generation of humans who lives with the internet have the tendency to consider everything in digital version as free (or should be free). Maybe that’s why file sharing – legal or not – is very popular among internet users. And speaking of file sharing, there’s a name that will always pop out as one of the pioneers: RapidShare.
For those who support the spirit of free-ness, living in the Rapidshare world is a kind of cat and mouse game. On one side, Rapidshare is always improving its way to try to ‘force’ the free users to switch to premium users; whereas on the other side, the free users are also always improving their way to get around every ‘obstacle’ to download the files that they want without having to pay the premium price.
A Minuscule Rapidshare Download Manager
RapidDownloader is yet another Rapidshare download manager, similar to jDownloader. But what makes RapidDownloader unique is that this one focuses on the function and light weight of the app so much that the developer chose to abandon the pretty UI and use a text interface instead.
The download comes as a zip file of only 12KB in size. In the world of gigabytes and terabytes, this size could be considered a speck of dust. You could download it in less than a second. And when you extract it, you’ll have a 45KB folder – bigger, but still extremely small – with everything that you need inside, ready to use, no installation necessary.
However, no installation doesn’t mean no set up. There are some things that you need to prepare prior to using RapidDownloader.
The first thing that you would want to do is to read the “Readme.txt“. You’ll find some quick info about this app inside.
Next, edit the “Downloads.txt” file. Put all of your Rapidshare links there. You could insert the links tidily line by line, or you could just select all text in one conversation at some forum which contains some Rapidshare links and paste the text inside the Downloads.txt. RapidDownload is able to recognize those links among other text.
With your download links ready, you can start RapidDownloader – the “.exe” one. This tiny app will be opened as a text window displaying all of the ‘status updates’.
You can minimize the app and forget about it. It will hide itself in the taskbar and work dutifully in the background; downloading all the files one by one, waiting and retrying the downloads when necessary.
All the downloaded files will be saved inside the “Downloads” folder within the RapidDownload folder. The app will also create “history.dat” – to record the history of all downloaded files so they will not be re-downloaded; and “error.txt” – to record the history of all errors.
Further Adjustments
Although everything will work as it is, RapidDownloader gives its users some tweaking possibilities.
First, the IP changer. There’s a file called “IP_changer.bat” that you can edit using Notepad. The function is to bypass the waiting time. Rapidshare is famous for making its free users wait for long minutes/hours between downloads. To eliminate the waiting time, you can change your IP and continue downloading the next file as “another entity”.
There are several ways that you can use to change the IP using “IP_changer.bat”. If you know a command line proxy switcher, you can insert one here. Or you could try the codes that are already written in the file by erasing the word “REM” (sans quote) in front of the last three lines in the text.
Next, the configurations. Open the “RapidDownload.ini” file using Notepad and edit the ones that you want to customize. You could set the download location by writing down the path after the “DownloadFolderPath=” command. The waiting time after executing the IP Changer can also be adjusted to whatever number of seconds you want.
To activate other commands, change the “0″ after the equal signs into “1″.
And finally, the final command. If you want to execute something after all the downloads finish, write the command line here. I was thinking something like scanning the files for viruses, or popping out notifications about the finished downloads. Honestly, I’m not geek enough to be able to come up with examples; but if you are a command line maestro, maybe you could help us out with several examples of command lines to use?
One little footnote before wrapping everything up, there are many sites that you can use to find Rapidshare files to download, including the big “G” and “Y”. One example of such sites is FilesTube.
My short experiment with RapidDownloader told me that this app is worth keeping. But what about you? Have you tried the RapidDownloader? Do you use other alternative Rapidshare download managers? Please share using the comments below.
Image credit: Frankie Roberto
Tagged: download manager • downloader • rapidshare
