More than just ‘what app are you using’, but I do want that as well.
I want a good mindset for downloading music that has what I want and at least some of what I’ll probably like.
Currently, partially as a limitation of the app, I have every song in every album that contains something I like. This works well ish for discovery, but I know less than a quarter of my library, no matter how much time I spend listening to new music. This was with Lidar + tubifary (Tidal and Slskd only).
Currently I’m trying Downtify configured with slskd and yt as a backup, but it seems very slow to download and the app itself is very laggy.
I have a streaming subscription on qobuz, and use qobuz-dl to download anything that’s available to stream on qobuz. I tried using soulseek for a bit but it was sometimes a bit hit-or-miss with my searches, so the qobuz stream-rip option seemed like the best compromise. I’ve still got soulseek running, though, so whatever I get from qobuz is made available to the community.
I use Lidarr to manage my library. If you don’t mind running the plugins branch, there’s a qobuz-dl plugin that will let you utilize this method to download albums directly through Lidarr. Qobuz often has multiple versions of an album that can be hard to differentiate in the lidarr UI, so I often just end up downloading the specific version I want and then importing it into lidarr.
i used to download from deezer when public ARLs were extremely easy to get and use, but they got more restrictive recently. these days i just soulseek.
do you have any guides on how to use soulseek? is it safe to use on public wi-fi? (And will I get a letter from my ISP lol)
soulseek is very easy to use. everyone shares a folder on their computer, and one can query keywords on everyone’s directory listing and download off of them.
install the client nicontine+ (on desktop. if on android, use ‘seeker’. there’s none for ios), choose a nickname, set a shared folder, optionally fill it with some media you already have, and you can start using immediately. i recommend setting the shared folder the same as the soulseek download folder so you get to share what you download.
since soulseek is P2P and requires direct network connection, at least one of two peers need open ports. so if you have open ports you can download from everyone, but with closed ports you can only download from those who have their ports open. so, port forwarding is optional and not strictly necessary.
i haven’t ever heard of receiving letters from ISP because of soulseek, since it’s surprisingly quite under the radar for some reason. ISP letters are usually because of torrents. but still, soulseek protocol is unencrypted so it’s not impossible. because of this i don’t recommend usage on public wifi. use it through a VPN if you can.
I am on a music private tracker called Orpheus… I download everything I want from there. I also have navidrome, it automatically scans the folder for new albums and I have transcoding enabled so whenever I play music it transcodes to opus 162kbps. That’s if.
fucking cassettes
For streaming/discovery, custom cli application that scrapes Bandcamp ‘recommended’ albums to get associations between them and considers what I’ve liked and disliked for probability weights determining what to play next, playing them with mpv.
For actually downloading stuff I like enough to want to save, I have a dedicated button to take the url in my clipboard and save audio files from it to my music folder with a script that uses yt-dlp
yubal to grab stuff from yt, then some scripts smashing Claude and beets together for more intelligent automation, then navidrome for serving. Occasionally I’ll use slskd for more obscure stuff. Tempus is my current Android player of choice.
Personally I just use Nicotine+ to grab whatever I want as a .flac, then use beets to organize them.
I’ve tried beets. Very manual. I like Nicotine
I usually walk into a music store, fill up a box and scream “bye bitches” and leave.
Torrent search ‘discography’ + ‘flac’
Yea I do this in Prowlarr and it works ok, it’s a great starting point. When that fails, I use slskd or Nicotine+
You only listen to discographies? Do you go back and redownload new artists? Private tracker?
I check out CDs from my local/county library system and rip them to my hard drive. I use XLD and Picard. Then add it to my Jellyfin server.
I have Lidarr setup to track album and singles releases from a handful of artists and bands that I am really, really into so I don’t miss something. Mostly, though, I acquire new music the same way I always have, something catches my ear somewhere and I go looking for it.
Discovery is kinda all over the place, but lately Youtube has been pretty good at suggesting new artists and tracks to listen to, though, it is occasionally hard to actually acquire said track or album. Other places have movie and tv show soundtracks, ListenBrainz recommendations and occasionally an actual radio station…
For the most part, I’ve moved away from pirating music and audiobooks as it’s generally pretty easy to find an above-board source that is either DRM free or can be cracked easily. When I do pirate something for whatever reason, I’ll usually go back later and purchase a copy. I would rather support the artists since I usually have the means at present and most of the artists I’m into aren’t really all that big. I really wish that ebooks, tv shows and movies would get the damned hint and do the same…
Soulseek. On Linux I use Nicotene.
On a similar note, I’ve been curious if that’s a tool that one could feed a playlist into and have it return another playlist, based on the former’s genre, tone, bpm, lyrical theming, etc. I’m not even sure how to begin searching, though. 🤷🏼♂️
Also, I have the slimmest idea of what to recommend here, sorry. 🙇🏼♂️
You can kinda use audiomuse? Scans your local library and by way of a plugin can generate songs that sound like a given song.
Doesn’t work on a whole playlist, but this is a start
Generate, as in list them, yes? I’m somewhat amenable to LLM use in such a search, but “AI” “music” is worse than TJ Maxx in the 90s.
I don’t know all this fancy stuff. Like, yesterday, I wanted to listen to the songs from the anime The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya so I grabbed them from nyaa, moved them from the “Downloads” directory to the “Music” directory and then played it with VLC.🤷♀️
If it works, it works. Don’t fix what ain’t broken.
When you run into issues of scale, hopefully the ecosystem is a little more forgiving
I download albums (through piracy or not) and add them to my modest mp3 collection the same way I used to buy CDs — once in a while when it seems like a good idea. If there’s an album I don’t think is worth listening to again, I delete it.
