re: Please let me control how many podcasts download at a time

G'morning all,

I do not have that great of a internet connection. It's a fixed-point wireless ISP, bandwidth is approx. 2Mb. I live out in the country so I don't have much choice, it's still better than satellite.

I listen to several dozen podcasts, so every day I'll have 5-10 new episodes to download. For whatever reason, podcast downloads fail ALL the time. The rest of my internet works fine, but when the Zune software is trying to download five podcasts at one time, the downloads are SLOW, and they FAIL. They time out. I don't know why, but the program doesn't give ANY information, so what am I supposed to do to fix this?

This ONLY happens with the Zune software.

I would love an option to limit the number of downloads at one time.

Thanks.

Ok, I’m going to give you two registry keys that you can edit.  All normal disclaimers apply:

• Editing the registry is risky, use the regedit tool at your own risk!
• Be forwarded - If you inadvertently change the wrong registry key you can break your software!
• If you’re not comfortable mucking around the Windows registry, then don’t try this at home!

Now that those disclaimers are out of the way, here are two keys:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Zune\GeneralSettings

   MaxSimultaneousDownloads     (DWORD)

   MaxBackgroundSimultaneousDownloads             (DWORD)

Defaults are 2 and 5, respectively. You can try changing them to 1 and 1, and see if that helps.  The value represents the number of downloads that can happen simultaneously.

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Tom
Zune Product Team 

This posting is provided as-is with no warranties, and confers no rights. 

G'morning Tom,

Thanks for taking the time to help!

Unfortunately there are no entries for MaxSimultaneousDownloads or MaxBackgroundSimultaneousDownloads. Should I just create them? For what it's worth, I'm on Vista 64-bit.

Thanks!

Well, I went ahead and created them anyway, and it's now downloading one at a time. Should work, thanks! :)

Good to hear! 

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Tom
Zune Product Team 

This posting is provided as-is with no warranties, and confers no rights. 

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

This wasn't an issue when I had my cable internet, but it definitely was with my EVDO modem.  I set Simultaneous Downloads to 1 and the MaxBackground to 0.  (the Zero was done to stop the podcast issue until it can be fixed)

Seems to be OK now.  :)

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My Zune 30 is not only still having a good run, but it's now grown up into a Zune 60 running for twice as long of a run..