Guide to using 'Free Download Manager' for downloading
A few people have got in touch over the last few months telling me how they can't seem to download 100% of some the mixes on my site. They've contacted me saying that that the downloads keep finishing at odd amounts, anywhere between 30% to 70% of the original file size. The mp3's seem to play fine they just haven't download 100% of it. The best solution I've found to solving this problem is here in this guide which is using a another program to control the downloads instead letting your browser control the downlooads.
'Free Download Manager' (or FDM for short) is download manager which I've been using for nearly 5+ years now. It's a really nice free bit of software that comes in handy for a lot of download tasks. Its open source software as well which means it doesn't try installing a ton of other crap when your setting it up nether does it come bundled with loads of adware, spyware or other nasty shit which might slow down your PC. The main reason i use and why im recommending it for grabbing the mixes off this site is down to one particular feature it uses which is 'Resuming broken downloads'. 'Resuming broken downloads' is a really handy feature especially when your dealing with large singular files like the mp3 mixes on this site.
Resuming broken downloads. When the downloading process is interrupted, you needn't start from the beginning again. Free Download Manager can resume broken download from where it was interrupted saving your time. It also means you can pause your downloads as well.
Anyway lets get on with how to use it......
The Guide
1. First grab yourself a copy of the program by click here
2. Install the program and you should end up with a blueish translucent box which sits in the bottom right of your desktop (near the taskbar). I've highlighted it with a red box in the example below.
2. Once you've installed it open your browser and go to the place where you want to download a file or files from. In my example im going to download a mix from my site.
3. All you need to do to start a download is to drag and drop your desired link into the blueish translucent and it will start. See the below picture picture for more details.
In this example i dragged the download link from my site into the FDM box.
4. Once you've dragged a link into the FDM box the following window should pop up.....
5. Just click 'ok' to start the download. Once clicked you will see the following window.....
This is just the information/progress bar. You can click 'hide' to get rid of it. FDM will be quietly running in the back ground downloading your file if you do this. It wont stop your download.
Thats all you need to do to start a file downloading. Its that simple.
6. If you want to stop, pause, slowdown the download, etc you can do this by accessing FDM's control panel. To do this just click on either the blue translucent FDM box or the small icon in your taskbar. I've highlighted them in the picture below...
7. If you click any of these to icons in the above example you will then have access to FDM's controls and stuff. Once clicked you should be looking at something like the following picture
This is the FDM actual program. This is where you can set everything or manage your downloads, etc. You can also control FDM by right clicking on small FDM icon in your task bar.
8. FDM will inform you when a download has finished by means of a little pop up which will appear in your taskbar (bottom right of your screen). This should appear once the file has reached 100% or has encounted a problem.
To access your downloaded file simply go to 'My Computer' then to 'C: Drive' then to the 'Downloads folder'. You should find your file or mp3 there. See below for an example.
Thats it your done...
Hope thats of some help.
Using FDM to manage your downloads has a fair few advantages here's a just few;-
Download acceleration. Free Download Manager splits files into several sections and downloads them simultaneously, allowing you to use any type of connection at the maximum available speed. With FDM download speed increases, or even more
Smart file management and powerful scheduler. With FDM you can easily organize downloaded files by their type, placing them in predefined folders. A smart scheduler allows you to start and pause downloading files, as well as perform other actions (launch other applications, establish or hang up connection, etc.) at the set time.
Adjusting traffic usage. There are several traffic usage modes. You can adjust traffic usage for browsing the Internet and downloading files at the same time.
For more examples see FDM features page on there site which can be found by clicking here.
Pleae note that there are various other 'Download Managers' available to do the same job. But this one is my personal favorite.
