" popup warning) as a safety mechanism to prevent accidents. To me, it's just plain common sense that ANY major irreversible changes - such as mass deletions - should require at least two separate user actions (such as 2 separate mouse-clicks separated by a "do you really want to. I think I accidently touched the "clear all" button with my coffee cup, and everything I had in the queue - about a dozen downloading files - simply vanished! It didn't ask for verification as it should have (and no 'undo' either ) so I instantly lost it all. I say this because some of the standard features, demanded by users, and found in virtually every mainstream news client - such as the ability to selectively pause certain files in the download queue (such as samples, pars, or extra CDs from a multi-CD set) - these "must-have" features are inexplicably missing. I suspect one reason why might be because the developer has perhaps received little feedback from users (there is no user forum) and may not be an avid usenet downloader himself. Both NewsbinPro and Newsleecher are much more polished clients, and even free NZB-downloaders like Sabnzbd or Altbinz (v0.25) are more advanced.Īpparently SuperNZB has been out for 5 years, but somehow it feels more like a new-release beta software. (Most newsreaders won't let you do this, but a few will)īut other than that, I'd give it only an average rating as a free news client, but for $40 I think you could find many better things to spend your money on. No other 'NZB checker' application (that I'm aware of) can do this.Īnother feature I really like is the ability to add or subtract connections on-the-fly as a file downloads. Hxxp://SuperNZB has one *outstanding* feature: (rapidly) checking completion on Readnews servers. That feature alone makes the free version a very worthwhile installation. However, the one notable feature that SuperNZB has is an NZB article completion checker that (unlike most other completion checkers) works very fast with Readnews servers. And some pay-newsreaders also have many additional features such as (compressed) header support, bandwidth throttle, scheduling, playing partially-downloaded xvids, extreme configurability/tweaker settings, and various other frills. (I have a bad habit of installing trial software, spending a few minutes trying to figure it out, and then getting hit by the 15-day expiration before I even get a chance to go back a second time and fully try it out.)Īlthough OK as far as free software goes, in my opinion, there are just far too many things that SuperNZB lacks as an NZB downloader to make it a worthwhile $40 purchase - especially considering all the other free and low-priced binary-newsreaders/NZB-downloaders currently available. I like the fact that the software is free without any time limits - though the unregistered version is limited to only two connections. However, the lack of fill-server support is a real deal-breaker for me, since a lot of MP3s get posted without any pars, and completion on older (500+ day) posts is often quite poor these days. When I grabbed a few old NZBs (of unknown age) I had lying around, and nothing happened, I had no easy way of knowing if this was because they were older than the server's retention, or some other reason. To take one example, there is no column listing for the file's age. Most of the things on this list are just small annoyances. * a few small bugs (like a NZB's percent completion listed as over 100%) * Changing Settings requires shutting down and restarting client * No 'server disconnect' button (you can only wait for all currently-downloading articles to finish) * No way to pause specific files (like PARs) in queue But it's not that being eccentric is necessarily a bad thing - I get tired of seeing all the cookie-cutter copies of software (Ultraleecher/Newsleecher comes to mind). And oddly, no right-click menu items here. It reminds me of a lot of software applications from the 1990s, when the GUI fashion was to have multiple free-floating pop-up windows - a common feature before 'tabs' became the de facto standard for juggling multiple screens. I was just looking at an NZB downloader client called SuperNZB for the first time.
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