Newsgroups

[WoodPeckr]

Used to use www.giganews.com with my ISP. They allowed 5GB free DL/month.

They cancelled this perk a few months back, so now you have to be a paying subscriber to use them. Newsgroups used to be great for music, along with anything else you could imagine. Far better than torrents. Used to DL an entire 320 bitrate music album in 1 or two minutes back then with perfect quality. You could find every and all types of music up until a few months ago when the RIAA started getting on them to remove much music content.

Was thinking about trying them out again but was wondering about the content available now.
Is it still heavily culled of content or has it gotten better?

 

[Mao Tse Tongue]

Why would anyone bother with newsgroups in this day and age, what with torrents and empornium and all the rest. ??

 

[i am one]

Why would anyone bother with newsgroups in this day and age, what with torrents and empornium and all the rest. ??

With torrents you have to maintain a 1:1 ratio if you're on a good site and want to keep your status. Also, because you're both downloading and uploading at the same time this hurts your available bandwidth (if you're uploading something, that'll directly affect your download speed) to do anything else like browsing the web. Also, while torrents can max out your available download speed, this isn't a sure thing all the time.

With newsgroups, assuming you subscribe (~$15) to a usenet provider, you can download all you want (depending on whether your usenet provider and ISP have any monthly usage caps), you can max out and maintain your available speed (I get ~525 kbytes/sec on my DSL), files are usually there for 90+ days (depend on your usenet provider's rentention), you don't have to upload anything (ISPs hate when you upload a lot) and there's a lot less worry about downloading malicious files.

Fortunately, I still have uncapped usage with my ISP (Teksavvy also offers this but I'm not with them) and gladly pay the $15/mo to Usenetserver for usenet access.

 

[WoodPeckr]

Why would anyone bother with newsgroups in this day and age, what with torrents and empornium and all the rest. ??

No ratio worries, no bad files and fast download speeds. I was getting full 320 bitrate albums in a minute or two.

On torrents I got my first bad album from Mininova last week. It took 40 minutes to DL, would have got it in a minute on the newsgroups. It was a classic 30+ year old Miles Davis album that while all the tracks timed out right, there were 'breakups' in every track every 20 or so seconds! Guess they found a way to fark up torrent files. This was the first bad album I ever got off torrents but I haven't been DL much lately.

 

[IraHayes]

Can anyone fill me on good ways to navigate newsgroups. Like if I wanted to search for an album is there an easy way to do this?

I have a newsgroup subscription but find it a bit difficult to use

 

[WoodPeckr]

Can anyone fill me on good ways to navigate newsgroups. Like if I wanted to search for an album is there an easy way to do this?

I have a newsgroup subscription but find it a bit difficult to use

I used GrabIt newsreader for Windows which has a search feature for finding specific artists or albums, etc.

Pan newsreader for Linux also has a similar search feature and comes by default with Ubuntu.

Newsgroups are massive. The more you use them, the easier it gets to navigate through them.

 

[tboy]

Man I remember when newsgroups were free......

With newsleecher, do you still have to pay to access the newsgroups?

And I agree 100%: torrents are great but slower than a turtle on xanex......

 

[bsi]

Yes, you pay but it does not have to be a lot. Astraweb has 90G for $25 which is a LOT of downloads.

 

[WoodPeckr]

Newsgroups are still free in the states.

Not anymore. Used to get 5Gigs/month free from Adelphia for years. That ended when Time Warner took over. Years ago a few ISPs gave limited free access to newsgroups but that era is over.

They don't even give you a free month anymore. Now you just get a few days free Trial with a 10 gig cap. 10 gigs is great for music, it's comes out to about 100 albums but 10 gigs is nothing if you want movies.