townx - Downloading lots of stuff at once with Firefox - Comments

Good. Glad it was useful. Do

elliot — Fri, 18 May 2007 14:05:35 -0500

Good. Glad it was useful. Do you use Seamonkey rather than the separate components (Firefox, Thunderbird)?

Nice tip

Marc — Wed, 16 May 2007 18:20:37 -0500

Also works in Mozilla Seamonkey !

No, it doesn't work. eMusic

elliot — Mon, 07 May 2007 14:48:49 -0500

No, it doesn't work. eMusic are in the wrong here, not me. I am always right, as you know. But the download manager Ben mentioned (in other comments below) works brilliantly on Linux.

hello - i downloaded the

clux — Mon, 07 May 2007 04:03:31 -0500

hello - i downloaded the emusic download manager, it did it all for me. does that not work on your geeky thing whose name i am too stupid to remember? OPEN SOURCE! see not so stupid...

Brilliant, Ben, I hadn't

elliot — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 06:43:44 -0500

Brilliant, Ben, I hadn't come across that. A much better solution! Got it up and running in about 5 minutes. Can't test it too much at the moment as I've run out of downloads for this month, though.

EmusicJ

Ben Francis — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 05:19:23 -0500

I use EmusicJ for whole album downloads (.emp files) and a better download queue than Firefox
http://www.kallisti.net.nz/EMusicJ/HomePage

It's written in Java though and really I'd just prefer it if eMusic did album downloads in a zipped archive, I've suggested it to them a couple of times.

Downloading lots of stuff at once with Firefox

elliot — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 09:46:05 -0500

I use eMusic to satisfy my insatiable desire for music. It's great. However, you have to download each track individually: there's no way to get a whole album at once (at the moment). In Firefox, I found I could only download two tracks at a time; this meant it took quite a long time to download 10 tracks, say, as I could only have two downloads going at once.

I always thought this was down to eMusic, but it occurred to me today that it's probably a Firefox setting. Lo and behold, it is a Firefox setting. If you want to fix your browser to allow more than two simultaneous downloads over HTTP, do the following:

Open up the URL about:config by typing it in the address bar and clicking the green arrow. This shows you all your Firefox settings.
In the Filter text box, type connections to just show options relating to connections.
I've got four settings, so I set all four to 12. Might seem excessive, but better to be safe than sorry. (To modify a value, right-click on it, select Modify and enter your new value). Here are the properties I changed:
- network.http.max-connections
- network.http.max-connections-per-server
- network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy
- network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server

I can now have 10 or so downloads running concurrently (the first typically finishes before I've got round to starting number 11!). Much better. This might even speed up standard web browsing, as you can download far more files from a single server at the same time. (Though I don't know whether setting it too high might make it look like you're trying to launch a denial-of-service attack or something.)

To further improve your download experience, I recommend the Download Statusbar for Firefox. Peachy.