Most of the discussion and sources of content talk about movies and series.
I’ve been recently looking for psy and techno music, finding FLAC or WAV with active seeders feels like striking gold. It’s definitely been a while since I’ve looked for active torrent sites and it feels more barren than ever.
Edit: Thank you all for all that valuable information. The reddit group really wasn’t this helpful and valued making fun over adding real use able knowledge.
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I buy on Bandcamp and pirate through Soulseek (specifically Nicotine+).
I also buy Vinyls.
Torrenting music has been pretty trash for me so I haven’t bothered in ages.
bandcamp
I didn’t know about bandcamp. I’m gonna buy some albums there. The music is drm-free? I think that what bandcamp and itch.io are doing should be the future of the industry.
Yes, the music there is drm free. Keep in mind it’s not ALL music. It’s mostly music from independent artists. But they are the ones that need the most support. So go all in!
IMO, Bandcamp is one of the best places to go if you actually want to support artists. Spotify and other streaming options tend to be the worst.
Bandcamp is pretty great. I usually stream from their app but you can download music you buy in a bunch of formats.
I like their writeups they do sometimes (like a “best doom metal from Texas” deep dive)
They do Bandcamp Fridays sometimes where they yield their share of the sale to the artists.
I’ve also had artists write back a few times when I put a comment in the box when buying stuff. Most notably an invite to a show they were playing once.
They did get bought by epic though so they’re not indie anymore. A bummer. But epic hasn’t shit it up yet so far as I know.
Yup that’s exactly why it has flourished in the past decade or so
I bought music from several artists on Bandcamp and could not download some of it 12 months later. Artist unresponsive, Bandcamp support unwilling to help. And now Tencent has it’s tendrils in the company so expect it to get worse.
what exactly is soulseek? is it p2p or download from a server? Is using a VPN recomended?
Soulseek is p2p. I prefer to use a VPN but it is not necessary. What is necessary is port forwarding if you want to share your own files. You can either set that up in your router, or through your VPN if you’re using one (it must be a VPN that supports port forwarding)
its p2p download from other users, if you want to share your library you should probably use a VPN. You dont have to share your library but its kind of frowned upon to not do it.
It’s p2p, and the protocol is not very secure. You should probably use a VPN, yes. The content shared is really good, even if it has slowly decreased along the years. Just be selective about who you tell about slsk to help keep it under the radar, please. First rule of the blue bird is : don’t speak of the blue bird.
Bandcamp is great. Fuck corporate labels who prevent artists from releasing their music privately on the platform. It’s an abhorrent business practice.
Is nicotine working good for you? Last time I tried it, it was missing some search results that were instead appearing in soulseek-qt client
Nicotine is working fine for me. Although I’ll have to check out soulseek-qt myself to see if there is any difference in search results Up until now, I haven’t had problems finding anything unless it was something that was released within the week (usually singles)(which I just rip from youtube)
This is exactly what I do, music is just too messy to find every song
why pirate when bandcamp has everything I want on FLAC for pennies and I get to send lewd messages to my favourite artists when I buy stuff
The album prices are pretty high sometimes and many artists are not on bandcamp
Yeah but fuck those guys.
why pay pennies when you can pay 0
Because I actually, you know, like the artists I like.
so you support them by giving them $0.000000000000001
Most of the proceeds from sales goes directly to the band for bandcamp sales. Roughly 82% apparently: https://bandcamp.com/about
I have Spotify through a family plan but I do download backups for when the enshitification happens to them.
I just use lidarr with the deezloader script. Sign up for a month of deezer premium every six months and just download my back log. For $30/yr I always have a relatively up to date, lossless quality, music library backup.
It’s certainly alive and exists.
But access to music is easy and affordable. It’s more inconvenient for me to pirate it than just use a streaming service.
I also listen to a lot of independent artists and rather buy their stuff to support them.
Yup, I buy what I like on Bandcamp.
The only music I pirate is stuff that isn’t on Spotify, namely Nintendo game soundtracks
Expect a cease and desist order
Doug Bowser will be at their doorstep shortly
Knock knock, open up the door, it’s real
The thing is not every popular or moderately popular song is on any streaming site. I’m a fan of 90s and 00s trance music, and there are some notable songs that aren’t available on any of the most popular paid services, or are available only in newer, re-recorded versions or remixes - some of them are available on Spotify, but not all. YouTube Music has such an advantage that you can listen not only to the songs uploaded by record labels, but also to countless additional songs available on YouTube, however most of the time they are in worse quality (AFAIK max audio bit rate in YT videos is 128 kbps). So while streaming services are now affordable and have very extensive audio library, they have some shortcomings that one can only fill with physical media or piracy.
I prefer there not being any lag in-between songs, which most streaming services have.
I usually use a streaming service like YouTube (through piped) to find new artists, then use soulseek to download their entire discography.
The problem with streaming is that the companies will eventually figure out new ways to squeeze every penny out of you. The once ‘free’ YouTube is now blocking adblocks, and Spotify requires DRM to be installed for it to function.
For me, piracy isn’t just about convenience or price, it’s mainly about control over the media I have.
Soulseek is the goto piracy thing for music.
Streaming service ripping is alive and well.
Youtube scrapers like Newpipe and alternative frontend makes listening easy if you aren’t quality obsessed. This has been adequate for my levels of listening.
Some private trackers have massive music collection dumps.
However, I’d say directly supporting artists through storefronts like bandcamp is the best way to go, where it’s available. No DRM, no bullshit, the artist benefits. This, to me, is the best alternative to piracy.
Napster, Deezer, Tidal aren’t terrible offerings either FWIW.
Sorry to ask a dumb question but how do I rip from streaming services? It’s worth buying a subscription for this ability
youtube-dl has the ability to extract audio
And there are similar apps for my streaming services.
I don’t want to link to anything directly, but it’s possible to use ReVanced to get YouTube Music for free.
Would you be able to DM me?
Spotify is very affordable and provides pretty much all music on earth. I’m not interested in jumping through hoops to download songs if I can just conveniently stream them all from one legit service.
Yep its basically like Netflix before it shit the bed.
The state of video streaming is hardly Netflix’s fault. When every channel starts a subscription service and pulls it’s content from the others everyone loses.
Music streaming on the other hand is a complete experience on every service. It’s kind of a miracle tbh.
Still no word on the hifi tier though
We share our spotify account with friends and halve the cost.
You can pay for any streaming service that serves FLAC and rip that. Very easy to do for Tidal and Deezer for example.
Not accessible in my country
VPN?
I know deezer doesnt allow vpns on their site
Soulseek has most of what you need. 3ost has pretty rare stuff and rutracker as well
Finally someone else that uses Soulseek. It’s been around for years and is the best place to download whole albums or discographies in high quality.
I don’t think it’s dying at all. Check out private music trackers like https://redacted.ch/index.php or https://interview.orpheus.network/
OiNK -> WHAT.CD -> RED
Not for me, I’m pirating tons of songs in these days. Try Soulseek it’s a gold mine of good music with great quality
Soulseek has been great since I found it. I’ve been able to replace so much of my CD collection that I ripped 2 decades ago in 256 MP3 with flac.
For music from artists that don’t exist anymore I mostly use ddl. If the artist is still there and offers a decent way of giving them money, I usually do that.
I personally like being able to use Spotify as my front-end, but it doesn’t support flac. So I personally pay for Deezer’s Flac option, I use xManager for listening to music on Spotify, and I have a script setup to automatically download all my liked Spotify songs from Deezer in lossless flac. It’s not free by any means, but is the best/easiest way to download music I’ve found.
Xmanager + spicetify is the way
So you pay for Spotify and deezr? I also want a flac Frontend…
No, I just pay for Deezer Flac. xManager lets you use Spotify ad-free so the listening experience there is still 320 Kbps but I like the recommendation system better. it’s basically free Spotify premium. If I like any song a Spotify, spotify_sync will automatically grab it and download the flac file to my server. If I want to listen to lossless music, I just listen to my stored music using my Jellyfin server as a front-end. I never actually touch Deezer’s front-end at all.
Interesting, thanks! I’ll have to take a look
I pay for family spotify - we all use it a lot and the Daily Mixes, Release Radar, Discover Weekly playlists are unbeatble. I’ve used Tidal, Deezer, Youtube music before but their playlist creation is nowwhere near as good.
However I do download from Deemix as a backup . For me 128kbp is totally fine for what I need - yes its not the highest quality, but through bluetooth speakers in the car or bluetooth headphones it sounds absolutely fine for me. It might not be CD quality, but its better than broadcast radio, which is perfectly good enough for me.
128kbp
You must love AM radio
People have different tolerancies for these sorts of things. I bet @plexnose is quite happy with the relatively lackluster bitrate of their audio, however others may whince at the quality and declare it unlistenable (is that a word?)
Like, I have a few years old 55" 4K HDR TV, its not OLED, but it was good at the time. However a lot of my archived content is 720p, and I really don’t mind. In fact I don’t hardly notice. Sure if I switch to a 4K Bluray, its better, but I enjoyed the 720p show just as much and it wasn’t like jarring or anything.
128 is perfectly fine / it’s What you are getting most movies you download and way better than FM and most DAB.
Rather the DAB/DAB+ radio in UK: https://youtu.be/27w3quNTP84
320 is noticeably better with not much of a size bump. FLAC for archiving.
Yeah but for blur tooth in the car it’s no problem for me
My Spotify generated playlists are still only about 50% of what I actually want to hear. Release Radar is a complete joke for me, almost nothing is remotely new. It’s just “new” versions of old songs. Been using Spotify for music almost exclusively for a few years too. I still miss the playlist creation from Google Play Music, haven’t really used YouTube Music enough to know if it’s the same after the switch. On Spotify I generally just find playlists I like that were created by other people.
I used to be like that. Most of my music was 128kbps MP3, even going down to 32kbps AAC with one particular song. What’s worse, many of those were multi-generation re-encodes.
One day I got the taste of real FLAC. No going back. Maybe with 320kbps MP3, but anyway. Hearing HIFI quality for the first time, I remember the song, Gazebo - I Like Chopin, that was awesome! “Holy flying fridge with tomato salad, I can feel the music coming inside of me!”
Pandora slowed a lot of my music collecting. Spotify and an unlimited data plan on my phone all but stopped it.
Don’t need to dedicate 500+gb on my phone to my music if I can just pull up whatever I want. The only stuff I keep on my phone now is Dwelling of Duels and some game remixes.
While youtube vanced is falling apart, vanced music is still running just fine for me :D
You mean vanced or revanced? For me latest revanced version works fine? What are the issues?
I mean vanced. I was too lazy to set up revanced and instead tried out NewPipe. I hate how I don’t have my really optimized suggested page on NewPipe but I get around that by using vanced to browse and then opening the video in NewPipe via the share button. A nice plus of NewPipe however is how my subscriptions now really are just the channels I really care about and not the 1000 random ones I’ve subbed to over the last few years.
Try revanced and that additional package recommended by them that allows it to use google account - I forgot the name - micro g perhaps? It works quite well for me at least. There are some discrepancies between homepage at home pc and phone, but it’s better than nothing or ads. Process was quite simple, download youtube apk, install revanced patcher and apply patch to the app.
Sounds very similar to the vanced installation. I might do this and keep NewPipe for subscribing to the really high quality channels and if google actually goes through with banning accounts that block adds I won’t be nearly as impacted :D
Yep, it’s Micro G.
Revanced MicroG to be specific. MicroG is the free reimplementation of some if the Google APIs.
If “building” is not your jam, you can try https://github.com/j-hc/revanced-magisk-module/releases, which does builds that is ready to install.
They’ve got revanced for twitter and tiktok? Not like I’m going to use those trash platforms but that’s still pretty cool. Thank you for the link!
