Automatic Rapidshare Downloads

We live in an on-demand world. Its true. We're spoiled. I remember just a few years ago, downloading a 1GB file off of the Internet was completely unheard of. I also remember the time when 1GB was 25% of your total hard drive storage space!

But today technology had moved in leaps and bounds and we're riding the wave along with it. We have fast internet connections, large hard drives and even larger appetites for digital media of all sorts. I myself admit whole-heartedly to being an anime freak and complete narutard. Thankfully the internet provides.

There are several p2p (peer-to-peer) fileshareing programs out there, but the recent rise of File Depositories, such as Rapidshare cannot be overlooked. I recently came across some files that I wanted to grab, that I couldn't find anywhere else, so I sat though the "download & wait for 15 min to download another file" process, before thinking of a way to make an automatic downloader from Rapidshare, using some code I was toying with a couple of months ago...

Alas, the story of my life... someone had already done it! Turns out there are several free rapidshare downloaders. So I went off and looked at most of the options available, benchmarked them
I review here my findings along with brief information on how to "click-and-forget" rapidshare downloads, and most imporantly, for FREE!

Next we see what my expectations were out of a good RapidShare Downloader >>

Step 1 Free Rapidshare Downloader Review

I absolutely love benchmarking. I love it because I know that after I'm done, I will have optimised the efficiency of said task, thus saving my time in the future and extending my life expectancy :) Using this instructable I hope to save some precious time out of your lives, just as various other instructables have done for me.

My pass / fail requirements that I came up with off the top of my head were simple:

(a) Program must support free rapidshare users,
(b) Must be capable of standalone operation (i.e. no install necessary so I can use it at work :),
(c) Should be able to accept a .txt file of rapidshare links or monitor the clipboard',
(d) Be stable / reliable,
(e) Be free to use / donationware.

I reviewed about a half a dozen "free" Rapidshare downloaders. Long story short, after 4 days of testing and almost loosing patience, I ended up with a little jewel of a downloader that goes by the name of FreeRapid Downloader, Current version is FreeRapid Downloader 0.81, released on 16th January 2009.

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(update) In the interest of fairness, these are the rejected RS DLers:

Other programs rejected and why:

RapGet: seemed ok at first, then reported errors on every connection attempt

jDownloader: Worked for a bit then would freeze. Couldnt get it to start again. Restarting program would cause it to loose all of the links!

Rapidown: Needs too much tweaking. Used router reconnect method to refresh your IP and get another patch. Other torrent downloads suffered, as well as common browsing.

Rapidshare freeuser multiple file downloader Avast gave trojan warning. Didnt risk it.

Rapidshare Direct Downloader: Also uses router reset method. I dont like this approach at all and I certainly dont mind a program waiting for 15 minutes to donwload the next RapidShare file! So why go through the trouble?

Rapidshare Leecher: Just sucks. Frustrating. Lost links, kept trying to download multiple RapidShare files. Made my computer bluescreen - first time in... maybe a year! REJECTED!

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Next we briefly go over the installation procedure for FreeRapid 0.81 >>

Comments

[luarawak]

hi ,i found Sharing Max new software more powerful ,it can download more than one link ,and waiting for rapidshare time automatically and then continue download ,and can also download from megaupload without writing the captcha word ,and download from youtube too 
and this the link  http://www.softwaremile.com/download/smhx.exe

[ravindra1012]

hi

i have installed this but it is not supporting to rapid share files but it is working with MU files.

[ravindra1012]

hi ,

i am very new to this site i installed.83 version.i am getting file error while i am downloading please help me.

[dove60]

thanks for u

[Diclonius]

 thank you saves me so much time and with megaupload links it gave me speeds twice as fast than normal now i can download anime fansubs faster 

[blakeredfield]

Me neither. If you just queue the files and hit the hay you'llhave what you want in the morn.

[dev6862]

anyone who wants to resume the next download from rapidshare wothout waiting for 15 mins just restart your internet connection or type "ipconfig/flushdns" on command prompt of your windows.

[jacobjordan]

That doesn't work for me

[duskonjc]

Man i still have to wait 15 F..king minutes :( done all like here

[blakeredfield]

Yes, you still have to wait the 15 minutes, but you dont have to do it manually. As I said, load up your rapidshare links (or megaupload, etc) and go to sleep or take lunch :)

[Tyler W. Cox]

I've been running FreeRapid for the past 3 days and I've had zero problems. It has saved me a considerable amount of time and it has worked exactly as advertised. Thanks again for this top notch instructable!

[lowercase]

now we just need a mac version

[blakeredfield]

Mac Version Can Be Found Here.

[lowercase]

hey! many thanks!

[Notus Incognitus]

thanks for doing the work for us :) this is definitely appreciated ! no more babying the downloads, at least with RS

[Tyler W. Cox]

Thanks for the info. I was sure someone had already written a program to do this, but I didn't relish trying all the options to find the best. You're information is well presented and you reasoning is clear. Thanks for saving me several hours of hunting.

[Kaelessin]

Nice! i should have guessed that there were tools out there to do this! I (and my fellow anime nuts) can't wait to try a few out! Good idea to add the cruddy ones into the list to save us a fair amount of trouble! Thanks for that

[blakeredfield]

You're welcome. Since the time I wrote up this program, I went back and tested the others again on other computers, just for fairness and ... they still suck. Also, FreeRapid will always give up some of those temporary downloads shown in Step 4, but yeah. just delete them.