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If you enjoy downloading
pictures, MP3’s or other binary files from newsgroups,
you are probably aware of the difficulties that can be
associated with downloading the files using conventional
newsreaders. It’s often difficult to locate the many
parts that make up much larger files as you filter through
countless messages, many of which are spam. If you
regularly download files and encounter these types of
problems, NewsBinarium may be something you’ll be
interested in.
Like most standard newsreaders, NewsBinarium offers the
ability to download pictures, MP3’s, shareware, video
clips or other types of binary files. The similarities
between NewsBinarium and most newsreaders end there. For
starters, NewsBinarium offers the ability bulk download
pictures and other binary files from Usenet binary
newsgroups in an automatic mode. This feature alone
separates it from most applications that do similar types
of functions. However, while important, it is not the most
important aspect of the software.
If you were to simply unleash the software to
automatically download files, you would have several
problems. For instance, if you download files from many
different newsgroups, you might download the same files
from many of them. While not a big problem, you would be
wasting bandwidth and hard drive space, not to mention the
time it would take for you to manually browse the files
looking for duplicates. NewsBinarium automatically handles
this situation as it will automatically skip over any
duplicate files of the same size, name and date if they
were successfully downloaded from a different newsgroup.
The ability to remove duplicate files from the download
list automatically is a nice feature, but without other
options, you’d still be forced to download the many spam
files that are so prevalent in many groups. So, in order
to handle this problem, NewsBinarium offers the ability to
use a filter to download only specific types of files,
thus bypassing the sometimes enormous amounts of spam. The
filtering aspect of NewsBinarium offers you many options
that you can set to control the files you’d like to
download. For example, you could set the software to
download only JPG files, choose several newsgroups from
which to search, the files must contain the word
“Sports", be larger than 100 Kb and are not from a
source that reads “spam.com". After setting the
filter, you could then save it to use over or in an
altered state with different file extensions, names or
different newsgroups.
If you use a commercial service such as Newsguy.com, you
probably have a large daily limit
of files (a minimum of 1 GB with additional bandwidth
available from Newsguy) you can download. In the case of
many standard ISP’s, you can only download one hundred
megabytes of data. If you have a broadband connection and
plan to download a large number of files, you can set the
software to stop downloading before its limit is reached.
It can then download the remaining files when you have the
bandwidth available.
NewsBinarium is available for just under $25. A trial
version is available from
www.binarium.net,
and if you are a frequent downloader of binary files, you
can certainly
put it to good use.
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"NewsBinarium"
