Later edit (2025) – from ProZilla MacOS to aria2

ProZilla is a download accelerator which gives you a 200% to 300% improvement (or possibly more depending on your connection) in your file downloading speeds.Features:

  • Supports FTP
  • Supports HTTP including redirection.
  • Proxy servers supported.
  • Resume Supported.
  • Improved error checking and correction.
  • Complete acceleration: The file will be downloaded as fast as possible as your more…
WHAT’S NEW

Version 2.04:

  • Now the downloads are ALL to a SINGLE file. There is no downloading to individual files as was done previously.
  • Multiple server based downlaoding is supported based on ftpsearch and ping results obtaines for a URL prozilla will attempt to make multiple connections to different servers and try to speed up the download even more.

REQUIREMENTS
Intel, Mac OS X 10.6 or later

Download: prozilla-macosx-snowleopard

Later edit (2025) – from ProZilla to aria2

Over time I stopped recommending ProZilla, because the project is unmaintained and outdated, which can lead to security issues on modern systems. As a replacement, I now use aria2, an actively maintained command‑line download tool that supports HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, SFTP, BitTorrent and Metalink, and can download from multiple sources in parallel.​

Installing aria2 on macOS (Homebrew)

This assumes you already have Homebrew installed; if not, follow the instructions on the Homebrew website first.​

  1. Open Terminal.

  2. Install aria2 with:

bash
brew install aria2

After that, the main binary aria2c is available in your PATH and ready to use.​

Basic aria2 usage

Some simple examples that cover the typical “download accelerator” use case:

  • Straightforward HTTP/HTTPS download:

bash
aria2c https://example.com/file.iso
  • Download with multiple connections to maximize throughput:

bash
aria2c -x16 -s16 https://example.com/file.iso

Where:

  • -x16 sets up to 16 concurrent connections to the server.

  • -s16 splits the file into 16 segments.​

  • Resume an interrupted download (if the server supports it):

bash
aria2c -c https://example.com/file.iso

The -c option tells aria2 to continue an existing file instead of restarting it.​

  • Download multiple URLs listed in a text file:

bash
aria2c -i urls.txt

Each line in urls.txt is treated as a separate download.​

Minimal recommended configuration

You can create a config file, for example ~/.aria2/aria2.conf, to store your preferred defaults.​

Example:

text
max-concurrent-downloads=4
split=16
min-split-size=1M
continue=true
dir=/Users/USERNAME/Downloads

With that in place you can simply run:

bash
aria2c https://example.com/file.iso

aria2 also supports BitTorrent, Metalink, a JSON‑RPC interface and daemon mode, but for a modern, safer replacement of ProZilla as a general download accelerator, the commands above are usually all you need.

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