Usenet

Naturally you're not supposed to download music illegally. I'm not condoning or condeming it, but I aim to help you get started using usenet here for whatever you want. Newsgroups are so diverse you can find anything there, from groups about your pets, to images, to books, to music and movies.

Newsgroups are not like Napster. This is not peer-to-peer filesharing. This means that you will have to wait for what you are looking for to be posted. This is a smaller drawback than it may seem. Just about everything will be posted eventually, even the obscure music you like to think no one knows about but yourself.

Messages and files (or binaries) are uploaded, or posted to a newsgroup. They can then be downloaded by anyone. I prefer this to what I consider superficial and stuck up communities like ICQ where it is considered bad manners if you download without sharing. If you download here you are not required to post, but if you do decide to post, make sure you follow the etiquette of the group you are posting to.

Note: It is practically useless to try and utilize usenet for large files if you don't have broadband internet.

First of all you need to have access to a newsserver. If you have a cable modem it is likely that you have access to a newsserver as part of your service. For example, Charter's is news.charter.net. I would suggest giving your service provider a call to find out what the address of their newsserver is. If they don't have one, there are many newsservers you can subscribe to for a relatively low monthly fee depending on the service you choose. Most have a download limit per month and give you access to the newsgroups on their server. Make sure before subscribing that the newsserver offers access to the newsgroups you want. Here are links to a couple of services: Easynews

Next you need to go download a newsreader. If you were downloading an mp3 file for example, the newsreader would download all of the threads that make up the mp3 and put them back together into the complete mp3. Outlook is not an appropriate newsreader to download anything other than text messages. Other newsreaders are useful for downloading larger file types, but not so much for text files. Look around to find the best one for you. One popular and easy to use newsreader is Xnews (best of all it's free). Another good newsreader is Grabit. This is the newsreader I have grown to prefer (also free) and the one I will be using as an example on this site.

While installing Grabit, I believe it will ask you for your the address of your newsserver. If it asks for some sort of user name, just put anything. This is for posting only and doesn't apply to downloading messages. Now, click the update list button at the top of the window. This will download all the groups available on your server.

Once you have found a group in the list that you are interested in, for example alt.binaries.test you can subscribe to it. It will show up on a list to the left. Update the group and click on it to browse the group's contents. If you are looking for something such as music or films, these are called binaries and the groups you will be looking for are probably one of the alt.binaries.. groups.

Anyway, back to our example. We have chosen alt.binaries.test and have found something we would like to download. Highlight what you would like to download, and hit space bar to add it to the queue. You know your selection has been added to the queue when there is a little arrow to the right of it. A green arrow means it is being downloaded, a blue arrow means it is queued. You can regulate your downloads by clicking "batch" at the top of the list of newsgroups. Once you have added something to the queue, it will automatically start downloading.



Everything you download will be downloaded to a specified download folder. I don't remember if this is set up during installation, but if it isn't, you can edit which folders your dl's go to by going to edit->preferences and click on the Folders tab.

Some general tips:

• Before downloading make sure the post is complete. Symbols vary between newsreaders, but should be intuitive. Using Grabit, you can tell if a post is complete if the message icon to the left of it is yellow.
• Check the quality of a post before downloading. If it's not good, wait for someone to post a better one.
• When using a newsreader such as GrabIt make sure to update your groups. GrabIt doesn't do this automatically (which is handy because it can take a long time!) So just do this occassionally to make sure you're not missing anything.
• Before searching through seemingly endless newsgroups for what you want, visit a site such as newzBin to check out what's actually available in the newsgroups. This site also offers useful tutorials and information on posting and using usenet in general.
• It's probably not a good idea to hog the bandwidth at school or anywhere similar. Someone is going to notice and check it out.
• Play around with your newsreader. There's a lot more Grabit can do to make it easier for you to find what you want than I've described here.

I don't have anything else to say at the moment about usenet. It's pretty simple once you get the hang of it. I hope I've explained it well enough, if I haven't, feel free to ask me questions.