I started using RapidShare premium account about 4 months ago because I download a lot of stuff from RapidShare everyday. Actually I didn’t need to buy the premium account because I can always disconnect and reconnect my ADSL connection to obtain a new IP address from my ISP and continue downloading the next file. That is all right if I need to download only a few files but it will be a BIG problem if I need to download 50 files or more everyday from RapidShare.

So I decided to try out RapidShare premium for a month which cost only 6.99 EUR and I also get 8000 points. With 8000 points in hand, I can easily get another 2000 points to extend my RapidShare premium account for another 30 days. That’s a pretty good deal for testing out RapidShare premium account.

Once I got the RapidShare premium account, immediately I went searching for ways to automate downloading from Rapidshare. I found Orbit and it was able to act as a download manager for RapidShare without problems.

If already have a download manager installed (such as FlashGet) and don’t want to install Orbit, then here’s an alternative on how you can easily download multiple files from RapidShare.

gRapid allows premium users of RapidShare to automate downloading of files without having to attend to them. It relies on Java and GNU Wget to process downloads from a file containing Rapidshare links, one on each line. It can perform simultaneous downloads of any number you may desire.

A few things you need to have before using gRapid.
1. Java
2. RapidShare Premium account
3. RapidShare links input into a text file called in.txt

If you have all the above, you can start downloading rapidshare links by running the command line:
java -jar gRapid.jar PremiumLogin PremiumPassword in.txt 8

PremiumLogin is your RapidShare Premium username and PremiumPassword is your password. The in.txt file would be used as your downloads list (one rapidshare link per line). The last number “8″ is the number of simultaneous downloads you would like to queue. Simply put, if you have 10 links in “in.txt” and 8 as the last number, then 8 copies of Wget would be running simultaneously to service the downloads, and as soon as one finishes, the one of the remaining 2 would kick in. My download speed is only 1024KBps and one connection is already using up all my download bandwidth. Unless you have a very fast connection, you can specify more numbers of simultaneous connections.

To see the progress of the download, just check the log file “wget-log.txt“. It shows you the download speed, download percent and also the file size.

Downloaded files can be found in Downloads folder inside gRapid folder. Currently there is no way to change it because it’s hard coded. Another thing is gRapid doesn’t warn you if links provided in the input file (in.txt) are not present, i.e. not found on Rapidshare or deleted, etc. To check RapidShare-URLs for availability, just use RapidShare Link Checker.

Here’s a very important RapidShare configuration for gRapid to work. Even the author of gRapid don’t have this information on his website. You must make sure that RapidShare “Direct-downloads” option is being turned OFF / uncheck.
Disable Rapidshare Direct Download
By default Direct-downloads is uncheck. This option can be found by logging in to your RapidShare premium account and click on the Options button.

If the Direct-downloads is checked, you’ll get an error message saying “Exception in thread “main” java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space” after a few minutes of downloading.

Oh and by the way, gRapid is open source. Open Source = FREE.

[ Download gRapid ]

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