RapidShare Downloader
Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 5:49AM | Print Article I am a huge fan of the RapidShare service. With an estimated 240Gb/s of Internet bandwidth and 5.4 petabytes of storage it is the best place on the web to host or download large files, which is why RapidShare.com is currently the 16th most visited website in the world.
The one downside to RapidShare is that files can only be stored on their servers in bite sized chunks, this means you often have to click through 20 or 30 links just to get the download started.
Thankfully there are lots of applications that are designed to make this process significantly easier. I personally use jDownloader which is a cross platform Java based application that has been specifically designed to handle multi-part downloads.
Once installed jDownloader looks and acts like any other download manager. It allows you to pause and resume any downloads as well as queue downloads, specifying how many simultaneous connections should be established.
However it is the RapidShare integration and Link Grabber service that makes jDownloader so useful.
Firstly in the settings under "Plugins and Add-ons > Hoster > Premium" you are able to specify your RapidShare account details. This means that you don't need to re-login every time you want to download a new file. jDownloader will also tell you the status of your account, such as expiry date and remaining bandwidth.
The Link Grabber service works by automatically grabbing any RapidShare links you have copied from a website and runs a health check on them. If the check passes successfully it will then allow you start the entire download with one click (which automatically includes all corresponding parts).
jDownloader can be downloaded from jdownloader.org for free and is available on all the major platforms. However please note you will need the latest version of Java installed on your machine before proceeding with the installation.