Alternative to Usenet Explorer (Win)

[Killerbob]

Hi,

I am almost done migrating to Mac entirely, but I can't for the life of me find a good OSX alternative to "Usenet Explorer". This is a multitasking newsreader for text and binaries.

The author gives you a search service, bundled with the standard license, which covers the whole alt.binaries.* hierarchy.

Is there such a SW available for OSX?

KB

 

[quang62381]

hi there,

I think that Unsion can do the treat.

http://www.panic.com/unison/index.html

 

[Harry Bosch]

Unison gets mentioned often. I use it, but only because I haven't found anything better on OS X. It's got a few problems that keep me from loving it, and it doesn't appear to be under active development. But it just might do what you want. If you try it, I'd be interested in reading about your experiences with it, especially as it compares to other newsreaders you've tried.

For a search service, I've been using www.binsearch.info, which has worked well for me.

 

[Killerbob]

OK, a combination of Binsearch and Unison will of course work. However, is there not a newsreader that solves this by building it all into one solution? Like Usenet Explorer?

 

[antihero]

sabnzbd+ is a good alternative, it's a unix app though and runs from terminal. i've been in contact with the nzbdrop and unison developers and given them a few suggestions/bugfixes/improvements and they both seem to be in active development

nzbdrop 1.3 was just released which is an improvement, but still has alot of bugs. there are no decent clients which are osx native sadly and sabnzbd+ seems to be the only good alternative. its because of this i've actually been thinking of switching back to windows!

 

[Killerbob]

I actually find that the combinatino of Binsearch and Unison works beautifully. I find a movie, music, or whatever, on Binsearch, create an NZB file, and I have got that to start up in Unison, and download to the DLs folder. It is much much faster than in the ol' days with Win Vista and UE Explorer. I also think Unison is a faster download engine. And for sure UnRarX is faster than UnRar.

 

[CTechKid]

Hellanzb is without the best IMO.

Hellanzb + Newzbin = Usenet heaven.

Everything else is subpar.

 

[antihero]

unison is ok, however it lacks multiple server support. my isp provides a giganews feed and i also have an astraweb feed. with unison i can only use one at a time. the other bad thing about unison is that it lists all the files contained in the nzb group. some of these developers need to take a queue from a torrent client developer or even the sabnzbd+ guys and only show the nzb group instead of cluttering up the app screen with each file. i have alot of nzb's in my queue (over 400) so having all the files displayed in that would be a nightmare.

the only thing that sucks about hellanzb is that it doesnt rate limit properly. every other app limits your speed to whatever you want, hellanzb averages your speed out .. so if you have a limit set of 100KB/s, it'll goto 100KB/s, allow itself to goto 200KB/s, but then goto 0KB/s for the next 2 seconds or whatever. in the end because of all the stopping/starting it turns out to be slower.

sabnzbd+ is still unfortunately the best client for osx

 

[Stormbringer]

There's also NNTPGrab.

It's faster than Unison, it's using folders (instead of the huge list of files), and you can see for example "time remaining" and more. It also has an automatic PAR2 repair, but that doesn't seem to work with me. I use MacPar for that.

But, NNTPGrab crashes on startup sometimes, and your whole download list is missing that case. And the interface is far from beautiful.

So I'm using Unison again, I can live with the huge list of files and the slower download speeds...