Title says it. Is anyone still on the newsgroups? For reasons I need to amass a large collection of music in MP3 format, preferably full albums, and I’d like to do it somewhat quickly. Is there a better place to hunt before I buy news server access? I been on land for too many years.
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Usenet is all I use… highly recommend it.
Usenet is still very much a thing.
I use Eweka.nl (Usenet access) and NZBGeek (indexer). Works well.
How much does this setup cost?
9USD / mo for eweka.
I’ve only signed up in the last 24 hours. It seems incompletes are a thing, so that might mean I need another account with another provider as well.
nzbgeek cost 9 USD / year
Eweka is ~9 Euros a month:
Not sure where you got pricing for NZBGeek, it’s $12 a year:
According to my bank account:
Eweka runs about $16 USD a month (I also pay for the VPN), and NZBGeek runs about $12 USD a year.
DrunkenSlug is another great indexer, invite only and about $30 USD per year for their top offering.
I’ve been using them for a few years now. Smooth as butter.
A few months ago I needed a lot of music (flacs in my case) and while to can find almost anything on soulseek (including some amazing vinyl rips) some niche artists were missing.
So what I did is I made a free trial account on deezer, got everything I needed during the free month using this deezer scraper and cancelled the trial before it ended.
What’s a deezer?
Spotify competitor. Pretty decent in my experience, although it’s been years since I last used it.
for music theres also soulseek, or ripping from streaming platforms (deezer/tidal/qobuz)
I use it exclusively. I think it’s better than worrying about torrents. It almost feels obfuscated with the indexer.
I haven’t used usenet for 15 years or so. After nzbindex chucked it in.
What’s the situation with incompletes / DMCA’d releases?
Is one usenet subscription enough or do you have 2 monthly subscriptions? do you need a block account ?
I previously has a subscription last year (just one provider) and had sooo many incompletes. It was barely usable.
I recently set it all up properly and I haven’t had a single issue, even finding old movies with no issue. I have a provider, an indexer, and a cheap block account on a different backbone to fill the gaps. It works like absolute butter.
Sonarr, radarr, prowlarr, SAB and all that … do it right and it’s amazing.
Local public libraries may have CDs you can borrow and rip. If you have a CD drive.
I don’t have a single thing with a CD drive anymore and work says we can’t use Bluetooth anymore so I need to load up a bunch of SD cards for my speaker. I’m gonna try this soulseek I see a lot of suggestions for.
I’ve been using Nicotine+ as my Soulseek client and it’s been working great for me.
I had an old mp3 player so I took that music and used it as my first set of shareable files. It took some time but I have been able to build up my library.
Once you’re on soulseek, look for joaquim_149. A lot of it is lossless audio but there’s also some mp3 files.
Will do, thanks!
lots of people using Usenet.
I have 2 main servers on 2 different networks, plus some block accounts as backup and a couple of indexers.
But for music, especially if its anything unusual, rare, or otherwise difficult to locate elsewhere, get onto soulseek. I use N+ personally and have uploaded ~80TB this year so far and downloaded about 600Gb. I dont do torrents very often so SLSK is how I give back to the community.
Soulseek is an old school free file sharing P2P platform, like limewire, kazaa, winmx, ed2k etc. just like the good old days.
So I’ve wanted to try out soulseek as it seems awesome, but do you know if it’s useable using a VPN? IceVPN, to be specific. i Have it running an openvpn config since theres no native linux client.
That sounds like a great place to start! Many thanks, matey!
Daily.
What’s the benefit of usenet over torrents?
You get to sit through interviews, possibly get to pay for access and have to deal with gatekeepers.
Joking aside, theres some variety in the selection. In my experience, torrents have excellent selection of mainstream and well known artist, not so much with smaller, niche and local artists. Soulseeks fills that hole nicely. Some friends of mine who use usenet have reported that when you need to find that one EP from that one band that existed for 4 months in 1978, you have good chances of doing that there.
For me, its not worth the effort and trouble getting things set up and getting in to a server. Others will disagree and tell you its the best thing since recording C-cassette tapes for your friends.
Uses encryption so you can’t be dinged by copyright trolls, high speed downloads (usually), easier automation and higher quality control.
Only note is that it isn’t free.
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Generally don’t need a VPN with usenet because according to isp providers it’s general downloaded content with encryption so they don’t see what you’re downloading
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speed depends on your provider, not seeder counts, meaning that it’s generally much more consistant speeds and can easily reach multi gigabit
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don’t need to worry about seeding at all, instead you have two caps to worry about that reset daily for indexes, api hits and download counts. Generally you get a couple thousand api hits for third party apps or your Starr apps and a few hundred downloads per day.
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older content is generally easier to find on usenet because there is no inactivity deletion due to lack of seeders like on private torrent trackers. The only limitation is your providers retention time generally in the thousands of days range
The one major downside of usenet over torrents is that you pay for access either monthly, yearly, or lifetime for both the provider and the indexer.
And you do need both because the providers give you the ability to download the files and the indexers host the files. So if you have just an indexer you can see the files but not download them or if you have just a provider you have the ability to download the files but can’t find any files to download.
Hope this helps!
Thanks for the summary. How are usenet providers not sued into oblivion for storing copyrighted data?
It’s like any file storage site. They are only a web server. Users upload things. And the owner of the server, if requested, may take it down. It’s a game of wackamole.
It’s not significant enough for anyone to care.
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All the time!
Yes.
I get my music from slsk though, try nicotine+ (client for soulseek).
Thanks for reminding me to hunt for that one japanese album I can’t find anywhere on usenet though, that’s the only place I haven’t looked. Can’t even buy a physical copy (and would be willing, I’ve been looking so long).
E: OH but be warned, put some files in your slsk share folder before you download, and you can also re-share your downloads folder. Some losers have auto-ban scripts for people “not sharing” which is mostly new people (though they’re too dumb to realize that). Just throw a few albums in your “share” folder (and set that up in settings,) you’ll bypass them. Also, would VPN, preferably with port forwarding but beggars can’t be choosers.
I need some files to have some files, lol. I’ll see what I can do.
Yeah, that’s why I hate those people.
anything should work though, text files, videos, game roms, just anything to trick the bots.
Gotcha. Thanks for the tip!
Grab a couple of “pay what you want” albums from bandcamp and you should be good to go.
Perfect
After struggling previously to get it set up, I have everything set up with Radarr, Sonarr, and SAB and I have yet to not find something. It’s sooooo good. BUT, you need to set it up specifically.
I use soulseek for music full albums.
ever since i discovered soulseek has so many live radio recordings from the 70s and 80s i’ve been obsessed.
Yep. Exclusively.
i miss rec.sport.pro-wrestling.fantasy T_T
