Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

What Usenet provider/s did you end up using?

For Lidarr I use Lidarr on Steroids (there is also Lidarr extended and a plug in script but I couldn't get those going). Probably on me because I can't get nginx going either.

I connected Deemix to it (you need a Deezer account) you can get MP3 for free, and with premium Deezer you can get lossless. All the music you want there.

There is also Soulseek for rare stuff but it's manual and I cant find a way to connect it to Lidarr.

The main issue with Usenet is retention. I don't mean that you should worry too much about retention on your particular providers, but just as a general concept the idea that after 10-15 years files go away means that it can be tough to find older media, especially media that is not popular enough for people to reupload.

People always talk about needing multiple servers but I just use Astraweb and I have been fine. I have a block plan on another server somewhere but I honestly didn't even set it up when I reconfigured nzbget.

Movies and TV shows have been super easy to find on Usenet, but even with a couple private indexers I have found music and books to be hit or miss. I use Tidal with Plex and the $10 per month has been worth it to me simply because I listen to a ton of different music. That said, probably 80% of what I listen to has been available on Usenet.

I read a lot of nerdy books (fantasy and sci-fi) and that's been easy enough to find, but my wife's more mainstream tastes have actually been trickier.

As someone who lived with awful 4G internet for 8 years, I strongly recommend getting a Blu Ray drive, MakeMKV, and A Library Card.

Unfortunatly I have the same experience as you regarding Readarr and audiobooks. I think one of the bigger issues is that audiobooks aren’t indexed a lot on usenet. Both indexera I use get close to no matches when I’m searching for even slightly more niche books (I find epubs all right, but no audiobooks). To solve the issue of finding stuff you would probably need a myanonymouse (private torrent tracker) invite or something, which has focus on audiobooks.

I also find that it syncs my library incorrectly to books (book A as book B, book B also as book B), which then are almost impossible to sort out, and even when it does find books that are monitored I need to manually import them nine times out of ten.

My somewhat best experience was to just DL audiobooks normally and dump them in a ”black hole” directory, and let readarr import them like that.

However, the other issues got to me and I jumped ship.

Hopefully it will become a more mature product in the future, but for now I’m staying to manual handling.

5G mobile network connection which means zero opportunity to have port forwarding or open ports at all. This rules out private torrent trackers (tried a couple, no luck in getting any ratio ofc).

So is this why nobody leeches from me in private tracker downloaded torrents? I use a 4G mobile sim on a router that support sim cards.

I mostly download freeleach series' from torrentleach but need a way to get away from hit and runs