How I use Newsgroups on my Mac

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First things first, you need a newsgroup server account. I prefer Giganews which I find to have the fastest servers on the Internet.

For searching Newgroup Content, I use the Usenet Indexing website, Newzbin which does an outstanding job for searching for absolutely any content on the Internet news servers. The site reminds me of the early years of Yahoo! in its layout and design. Once you find something you want to download, you will receive a small text file from the Newsbin site in the format of .nzb , you then drop this file into the following software for downloading. after that its all automated…. very simple….

Software—————[ In order of usage for downloading ]——————-

Unison - newsgroup reader/downloader for the Mac, The absolute best you’ll find!

MacPar Deluxe - File repair/ error correction software for newsbin downloads.

(macpar deluxe includes .rar expanding capabilities for unpacking.)

Split/Concat - Rebuilds split files into single file from newsgroup posts.

Stuffit Expander - Unpack just about any archived/compressed format in existence.

(this is the Mac equivelent to winzip for windows.)

The last 3 packages are free, while the downloader software called “Unison”, by Panic software costs 24.95 after a 15-day trial period. It is well worth the cost and will pay for itself in the first day of use!

I enjoy using these packages on the Mac better than when I was using Newsbin Pro, Par2 and WinRar all on windows as I always had to manually use each piece of software on every download as things came in….

On my Mac, once each download is finished, MacPar Deluxe instantly checks it for missing data, repairs it if required, unpacks the .Rar archive and collects all the pieces into the final 1 file, cleaning up and deleting all the un-needed files once complete. This leaves me with strictly the content I meant to download, nothing more, nothing less.