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
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.