The Mac Pirate’s Toolbox, aka “Essential Apps For The Digital Junkie”.


Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system which in recent years has been used increasingly for file sharing. Users read and post public messages and files to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. So a newsgroup called alt.binaries.mp3.jazz would probably have jazz mp3 files for download.

Unison is a Usenet client for OS X which allows access to these newsgroups. Unison must be configured with the details of a Usenet server. While free Usenet server access is sometimes available through your ISP, access to certain file sharing newsgroups is often blocked. Moreover the amount of time an ISP newsgroup server caches the data for is small compared to a premium Usenet server like Giganews, and the download speeds are typically slower.

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The Mac Pirate’s Toolbox, aka “Essential Apps For The Digital Junkie”.



‘X Lossless Decoder: Lossless audio decoder for Mac OS X’. A truly superb app that allows the mac pirate and digital junkie to encode/transcode/compress/decompress a veritable cavalcade of different audio formats.

XLD is the best and most sophisticated CD ripping tool for OS X and should be used by any self-respecting pirate. Artwork and track names can be pulled from freedb and other sources. Useful for digital junkies with iPods is XLD’s ability to losslessly convert flac files into apple lossless files. XLD also includes an audio player that decodes anything a pirate can throw at it! The app is regularly updated and well maintained.

From the XLD site: “X Lossless Decoder(XLD) is a tool for Mac OS X that is able to decode/convert/play various ‘lossless’ audio files. The supported audio files can be split into some tracks with cue sheet when decoding. It works on Mac OS X 10.3 and later.”

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The Mac Pirate’s Toolbox, aka “Essential Apps For The Digital Junkie”.



A digital junkie or pirate will often stumble across rar archives. Files in rar archives end with a .rar file suffix. Rar is like zip, a form of file compression. Unlike zip however OS X supplies you with no apps to open these archives (CLI tools are provided).
From the UnRarX site: UnRarX is a Mac OS X Cocoa application that allows you to expand rar archives and restore corrupted or missing archives using par2.

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