# 8Dio's Downloader - What's the Trick?



## robgb (Apr 6, 2022)

Does anyone know the trick to keep 8Dio's downloader from constantly stalling. Every few minutes I have to pause and resume to get it going again. This happens any time of the day. If I set something to download overnight, I'll come to it in the morning see that only about 1GB ofa 50GB files has downloaded. And I'm using a very high speed connection.

There HAS to be a solution, doesn't there? I would download the files manually from their website, but since there are so many RAR files, that would take forever as well.

Maybe a third party downloader that can grab all the RARs on the page? Does anyone have any downloader recommendations for Mac?

EDIT: I've concluded the problem is having VPN engaged. So I guess the solution is to turn that off...


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## Trash Panda (Apr 6, 2022)

Talk to their support team?


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## robgb (Apr 6, 2022)

Trash Panda said:


> Talk to their support team?


Yeah, haven't had much luck there, but I'm beginning to suspect my problem is VPN. Don't have one engaged when you download.


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## robgb (Apr 6, 2022)

rrichard63 said:


> You can bypass the downloader entirely. Go to 8dio.net/manuallink and enter your email address and product serial number.


Yeah, I mentioned that in my post.


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## thaeo (Apr 6, 2022)

If it's any consolation, I had the same issue and never found a solution. Just kept manually starting the downloads until they were all done.


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## bigrichpea (Apr 6, 2022)

I get exactly the same issue, regardless of whether a VPN is on or not. I gave up on the downloader and always use their manual links now.


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## Justin L. Franks (Apr 6, 2022)

robgb said:


> Yeah, haven't had much luck there, but I'm beginning to suspect my problem is VPN. Don't have one engaged when you download.


Doesn't matter for me, still happens even with no VPN.

If it really was a major issue, I'd just write a script to click the pause / play button twice every few minutes.


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## jbuhler (Apr 6, 2022)

robgb said:


> Yeah, haven't had much luck there, but I'm beginning to suspect my problem is VPN. Don't have one engaged when you download.


No, I have to babysit every download from 8dio and I don’t have a VPN.


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## robgb (Apr 6, 2022)

jbuhler said:


> No, I have to babysit every download from 8dio and I don’t have a VPN.


Huh. As soon as I turned off VPN the download proceeded nicely. As soon as I turned it back on, the download went for a couple minutes then stopped.


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## jbuhler (Apr 6, 2022)

robgb said:


> Huh. As soon as I turned off VPN the download proceeded nicely. As soon as I turned it back on, the download went for a couple minutes then stopped.


I find it usually doesn’t hang so long as I have the downloader in the active window, but as soon as I go do something else on the computer for a few minutes the downloading will stop and I have to pause and restart.


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## Braveheart (Apr 6, 2022)

Use it for years, never had a problem


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## Snarf (Apr 6, 2022)

Braveheart said:


> Use it for years, never had a problem


Same, no issues here.


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## AMBi (Apr 6, 2022)

I’m thankful I haven’t run into any issues either.
Especially during that 14 hour Century Strings Bundle download


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## Bovinator (Apr 6, 2022)

I also asked support about it and as with other queries with 8DIO, no working solutions from them. 
I did find though that if I start the downloads, then don't touch anything on the computer (ie. walk away), it stops much less often.


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## MartinH. (Apr 6, 2022)

robgb said:


> EDIT: I've concluded the problem is having VPN engaged. So I guess the solution is to turn that off...



I think it's possible your VPN provider is throttling the traffic because those huge downloads cost them money on the server traffic side of their business. Wouldn't be surprised if there is nothing 8dio can do about that. So maybe contact the support of the VPN provider to see if this could be the reason?


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## EanS (Apr 6, 2022)

I download directly, even if the old libraries are split into 90 rar files. The downloader (server) has an uneven bandwidth having drops making some rar corrupt, and if you are using the downloader, you will have to download all over again rather than the corrupted rar. Hence, better do it manually with time and patience. With Continuata the same, if download file links are provided, better.


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## parapentep70 (Apr 6, 2022)

Snarf said:


> Same, no issues here.


same for me. With their older software / server was good enough. In the last few months, limited only by my ISP (near 4Gb / min!).


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## jscheel (Apr 12, 2022)

So, here's what I do, because I'm a software engineer by day, and no-one has time for bad downloaders.

1. Install aria2 (see: https://aria2.github.io/)

2. Go to your 8dio account and choose manual download next to the product you want to download

3. Click the "get links" button so that the links appear on the page

4. Open up a js console in your browser (see: https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/232313848-How-to-open-the-developer-console)

5. Run this in the js console

```
copy($('.manualDownloadLink').toArray().map(n => n.href).join("\n"))
```
 which will copy the links into your clipboard

6. Paste copied links into a file called downloads.txt and save

7. Run this in your command line

```
aria2c --input-file=/path/to/downloads.txt  -d /path/to/save/downloads --max-concurrent-downloads=10
```
 (update the paths and concurrent downloads to whatever works for you)


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## Leslie Fuller (May 26, 2022)

Having just experienced problems with the Sonokinetic Manager on my Mac which necessitated using the manual links, I now have a similar problem with the 8Dio downloader?

Twice tried to download Century Ostinato Strings in the past few days, and after it starting fine and seemingly doing it’s thing, I go away and leave to do the job. I come back a couple of hours later to find it is barely over 10% done!

Don’t think I ever had problems with the Windows versions of 8Dio and Sonokinetic managers!


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## gamma-ut (May 26, 2022)

One thing I noticed about the 8Dio Downloader in the past when it stalled (I haven't used it for a while as I haven't got around to the latest round of updates) is that it would report some ridiculous transfer speed just before it stopped dead. So my guess is that a burst of packets confuses it or data arrives too quickly into a buffer that can't contain it, which means an acknowledgement doesn't get sent. That then means the process stalls until it's paused and restarted.

Similar to the Aria trick, if it's really playing up, using the manual links and putting a download manager like Folx on the job (heavily throttled to stop it creating six-zillion download streams) seems to work well enough.

This is all on Mac - it may well be an OS-app interaction that's at the root of the issue.


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## parapentep70 (May 26, 2022)

Braveheart said:


> Use it for years, never had a problem


Same for me. Always. Huge downloads (including Century Strings), doing other things at the same time, no problem at all. In fact with a quick connection it takes more time to decompress and write the files to disk than the time to actually download. Windows 10.


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## wwwm (May 30, 2022)

8Dio's downloader? The trick? Manual downloader links - their downloader is absolute garbage.


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## rrichard63 (May 30, 2022)

gamma-ut said:


> ... it may well be an OS-app interaction that's at the root of the issue.


Yes. That would account for the variety of experiences reported in this thread, ranging from always reliable to always unusable.


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## Leslie Fuller (May 30, 2022)

Updating my previous post, after using the manual links, I ended up with an incomplete download which was missing the Resources and Instruments folders? I emailed 8Dio support explaining the problem and was provided with another personalised download link. Putting this into the 8Dio downloader and letting it run was fine, and the library downloaded & installed without any further problems?


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## Michael K. Bain (Nov 29, 2022)

I join you who are frustrated with both 8DIO's downloader and manual installation. Both products I bought during Black Friday are giving me problems, as has the other product I bought from them previously. If I had remembered how much trouble it is, I wouldn't have bought this time.


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## Michael K. Bain (Nov 29, 2022)

jscheel said:


> So, here's what I do, because I'm a software engineer by day, and no-one has time for bad downloaders.
> ...
> 7. Run this in your command line
> 
> ...


Thanks much for providing this info!


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## parapentep70 (Nov 29, 2022)

Michael K. Bain said:


> I join you who are frustrated with both 8DIO's downloader and manual installation. Both products I bought during Black Friday are giving me problems, as has the other product I bought from them previously. If I had remembered how much trouble it is, I wouldn't have bought this time.


Just curiosity, what OS? I never had a problem, the old downloader was good. The new is usually capable to saturate my Internet connection... at 600Mbps (~70MB/s ~1 GB every 15 seconds). I have downloaded more than 1TB in recent times. Last time was during this Black Friday (ISW). I suspect
rrichard63 is totally right.​​


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## Michael K. Bain (Nov 29, 2022)

parapentep70 said:


> Just curiosity, what OS? I never had a problem, the old downloader was good. The new is usually capable to saturate my Internet connection... at 600Mbps (~70MB/s ~1 GB every 15 seconds). I have downloaded more than 1TB in recent times. Last time was during this Black Friday (ISW). I suspect
> rrichard63 is totally right.​​


Windows 10. They have given me the new downloader, I will see how that works.


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## robgb (Nov 29, 2022)

I may have said this before, but my issue turned out to be my VPN.


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## Michael K. Bain (Dec 1, 2022)

robgb said:


> I may have said this before, but my issue turned out to be my VPN.


Thank you. I don't use a VPN


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## Michael K. Bain (Dec 6, 2022)

Well, since I complained, I need to update and set things straight. Turns out that it was not an issue with 8Dio at all. My external drive was having an issue copy and pasting files. 8Dio was very helpful to me this entire process.


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