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


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.