SABnzbd v0.4.8 was released a week or so ago on their official site. The list of bug fixes includes:

Fixed various par2-repair problems for OSX

Solved long queue display problem for OSX

Fixed news-group and newzbin-category to SABnzbd-category conversion

The only real issue I have experienced with this app is the long queue display problem in OSX. With an NZB queue of over 400 items Safari would become somewhat unresponsive when changing the post processing script and Firefox would become pretty much unuseable. With 0.4.8 those issues seem to have disappeared and once again the universe is correctly aligned.

With Unison and NZBdrop seemingly lacking development there doesn’t appear to be much competition out there for SABnzbd who are making the best app right now. Unison hasn’t released an update to 1.8.1 in over a year and the NZBdrop developers are somewhat unresponsive to emails, don’t approve posts on their blog etc. Check out SABnzbd 0.4.8 if you’re looking for a new NZB app on OSX. I can tell from the apache logs on this web server that alot of you are!

Being a user of Mac OSX for a while now (coming from a windows & unix backgroound) I have been trying to do things “the apple way” instead of resorting to using unix or windows (via crossover) apps to get the job done. On windows for usenet (mainly NZB) I would use either newsleecher or altbinz to get what I wanted, on linux it has been hellanzb and sabnzbd+. On OSX there are not too many choices for usenet, and what choices there are seem to be lacking in features quite heavily.

hellaNZB and SABnzbd+ on OSX work fine, however these are run from the terminal. Both have a web interface available (hellanzb’s is optional, although managing downloads from the cmdline is daunting when you have 100-200 in the queue) however with alot of NZBs loaded both become a hog of system resources. Firefox on OSX will repeatedly hang or crash when browsing the SABnzbd+ queue. Safari will work, however leaving the browser open for 15-20mins will cause your macbook to sound like a jet  engine is inside.

This brings me to the NZB/Usenet apps available on OSX, which are NZBDrop and Unison. Both will download articles from Usenet fine, however they lack the features of NZB clients on the other OS’s (altbinz, newsleecher, hellanzb, sabdnzbd+). After using both for roughly a week, the issues I have with the clients are:

1. Settings are sometimes reset to defaults and need to be reconfigured (NZBDrop)
2. Articles in the NZB file are loaded individually, not displayed as one (like hellanzb, sabnzbd+, many torrent clients). If I have a download running, I do not want to see all of the individual files only an indicator of the overall progress). (Both)
3. Configuring multiple connections for a download will download multiple files, instead of using multiple connections for one file (Unison)
4. Download rate limiting is per connection, not overall (Unison)
5. No option to automatically check par files (Both require MacPAR Deluxe for this task)
6. No option to automatically extract files from archives (As above)
7. No option to automatically delete .nzb file once download is complete
8. Multiple windows for each NZB. If you have multiple NZBs loaded it becomes a hassle to manage (NZBdrop)
9. No download scheduler (Both)

Any client which has all of those features I would gladly pay a bit of money for. Until then, i’ll keep looking!