Hey gang, I am very new to usenet, I am still learning the basics so feel free to call me out
I have bought 2 indexers, nzbgeek and nzbnoob
I have bought 2 providers, torbox and thecubenet
Everything is set up with sabnzdb and prowlarr and lidarr and set max quality to 320 because I’m not an audiophile… but for the love of god I cannot download a single album. I keep getting errors that there are not enough blocks or download is incomplete or whatever.
I hate this. I am extremely disappointed. I have sinked so much time and money for this and this setup is somehow worse than yt-dlp. What the actual FUCK.
So now that the rant is over, am I doing this wrong? Is there an actual trick to get this working? Or is usenet just dead and I should cut my losses right now and move on?
Edit: Thanks for all the input. I changed the quality to allow FLAC and added a pp script to convert it down. It’s honestly not ideal but I guess it’s better than it not working
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In my experience, Usenet will have everything that’s being released now, and have it quick and easy, without depending on peers or seeding. It gets almost all of my automated download activity for new releases. But for anything old, it’s going to be spotty with ‘missing articles’. At that point I fall back to bittorrent and Soulseek.
Remove the quality filters entirely - it could be filtering out anything where the quality is just unknown.
Worst case, download FLAC and down convert it yourself if you don’t want to sacrifice the disk space.
Hmmm you make a compelling case. This is probably the best solution/compromise
https://www.freac.org/ is a nice program if you’re going to do that.
You probably need a block account. And it’s probably worth removing the 320kbps restriction until you get it working. In general you should try to run each step yourself, then let the automation take over once you know each step works. Manually review the logs etc. The first time I set it all up it took me a week! Now I can basically do it from memory in half an hour.
The thecubenet account is a block account. Should I look for another one?
Generally one is enough, I just wasn’t familiar with them. Personally I use blocknews, but before buying anything else figure out what is failing.
When I say manually I don’t mean literally, just run each component in the automated workflow yourself.Just to add to this, your block account should be a different backbone than your main. There’s no point in having a Highwinds account with a different vendor’s Highwinds block access, for example.
I’ve also just found Usenet to not be great for music.
All components seem to be working fine, I don’t know why but it downloaded a FLAC album once then trashed it because it was higher than the allowed quality…
What your looking for simply might not be available. Usenet tends to be kind of a back-channel for distribution, as such FLAC or WAV are more common than compressed formats.
Consider compressing it yourself. Or adding additional automation to compress into your desired format. I think Lidarr can do this, but I’ve never set it up.
I don’t have anything automated - I still peruse manually and download whatever I feel like. Usually just shows and movies and everything works fine for me.
I’ve tried nzbgeek before and a lot of their stuff was incomplete. I started using nzbplanet and they were downloading fine - using the same provider (xlned).
My main issue was music discovery so when I found Aurral and saw it fits the *arr stack I thought I would give it a try. Sounds like I just picked the wrong services
Compared to what it used to be in like the 80s, yeah it’s dead. But I still get plenty of movies and TV, though I haven’t tried music.
Lidarr shouldn’t be picking stuff that’s not available. If you search in lidarr or directly in your indexer, what do you get? If you add those items manually does it work?
It felt so futuristic, downloading movies from Usenet in the 80s.
I’d give soulseek a try for music.
My issue with soulseek is the etiquette. I don’t wanna be a leecher and I can’t seed properly
Get a seedbox instead of paying for usenet then? They aren’t cheap though.
Between soulseek and streaming sites, I haven’t even used torrents in over a decade.
Usenet honestly just sounds like a waste of time to get set up and pay for. It might be different if you’re mostly looking to archive stuff I guess.
I’m using nzb.life as my indexer and newsdemon as my provider. I very rarely have issues. SABnzbd Reports 99% success rate.
I’ve seen people recommend having a second backbone, even if it’s just for blocks rather than subscription, but I’ve never needed it.
Are you using that for music? Most people here who are happy with the service seem to be using it just for movies
Yup, music as well tv and movies. I do mostly get dance music though so maybe it’s not taken down as much as other genres.
Back in the day I used Easynews for my binary usenet access. Haven’t tried them in a while, but their retention appears to be excellent.
