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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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?
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
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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 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.
Rather the DAB/DAB+ radio in UK: https://youtu.be/27w3quNTP84
128 is perfectly fine / it’s What you are getting most movies you download and way better than FM and most DAB.
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!”
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.
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.
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!
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.
You can pay for any streaming service that serves FLAC and rip that. Very easy to do for Tidal and Deezer for example.
And you don’t need to pay. Just google Deezer premuim ARLs and plug that into Deemix and profit. Full FLAC quality
I don’t like using other people’s hacked account. Keeping music data after my licensed agreement (which is still going, actually) seems like a crime no one actually loses from. Using someone else’s hacked account seems highly, highly unethical to me.
It’s usually not a hacked account. Most of them are free trials from binned credit cards. There are groups out there that will share bins that work for certain services like Tidal/Deezer/Qobuz. Once you get the free trial, you use it for a month and then you start the next one
I’ve paid monthly for Deezer HiFi in the past like 3 years, I don’t consider it unethical to store the FLACs on my PC so I can use my own local music player to listen to them as long as I keep paying for the service.
I do consider it unethical to scam Deezer into giving me new trials every month. I’m not one to tell you what to do or not do, but I don’t personally want to do that.
Fair enough, but you are also commenting this on a community for piracy so…
Yeah but there’s piracy that creates “lost opportunity cost” (which is just companies complaining) and piracy that actually uses servers/services without paying for them.
You can have your opinion and I can have mine. It just baffles me that you’re talking about lost opportunity costs and “hurting corporations” on a community dedicated to Piracy
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
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.
The soulseek network is still alive and well.
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If you close your eyes, you can metaphorically hear the tides changing on the music streaming industry. The fall of Netflix is such a stark reminder of how fast these convenient services can morph into user hostile experiences.
Plus, there is the added philosophical discussion about what it means to allow a centralized corporate media conglomerate to curate your music for you. I’d imagine that their insentivisation structure over what should be heard is different than yours.
For serious though, I hypothesize that your library/playlist data (xml, maybe? somewhere? I’m just starting the journey of offloading.) is more valuable to users than the music itself. Next step is figuring out how to export Spotify’s data.
Can’t. I’m addicted to the algorithms. Music discovery guided by AI is too much fun. If I was only using streaming services to listen to music I already know or the new albums from artists I already like them I’d be with you, but now I’m hooked on finding new stuff.
“Guided by AI” I think you mean algorithms programmed according to strict music licensing contracts from the labels that say a service needs to suggest label-preferred “complimentary” artists over actual similar music that you would like based on a collection of characteristics in a given song/band’s sound signature.
You have evidence this is happening on Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist?
Richard Stallman wrote a quick page on the shady things Spotify does (3 minute read not counting the linked articles). Although only loosely related to what you asked for. According to the info I found online, Discover Weekly should be safe from the kinds of sponsorships you talk about (the whole article takes about 8-15 minutes to read, but I quoted the important part below).
A representative for Spotify tells Vox that the user experience of Discover Weekly will not change — e.g., Nike can’t buy the playlist for the week and serve everyone a Frank Ocean song — and reiterates, “Discover Weekly is, and will remain, a powerful means of artists winning new fans.
Funkwhale is federated. I have discovered lots of good stuff on there via other servers. Not algorithmic, but once you find a server that appeals to you, there’s a lot to dig into.
There’s also https://libre.fm and https://listenbrainz.org/ and https://openwhyd.org/
+1 to ListenBrainz. It’s an awesome tool for tracking your listening habits (kinda like Last.fm). Combined with Pano Scrobbler, I can create collage pics of my most listened-to artists or albums of a given time period (per week/month/year). It’s a great service and I want to donate to that project in the future, because I get so much value out of it.
You’re not wrong and I’m happy that piracy communities exist in spaces where access is easily cheap and accessible if only for the days that those industries get greedier. But for now, I’m happy to pay when it’s affordable and easy to access.
I half agree with what Gabe Newell said in regards to piracy being a service issue and not about price. I think it largely is a service issue. Access is the greater problem. Price is secondary as long as it’s somewhat reasonable. I don’t pirate video games because I can get them reasonably, but he is a smidge wrong insofar as I don’t buy the outrageously expensive games. Steam’s major success is having good sales that keep me away from pirating because the possibility of games I want going on discount at some point is realistic. It’s telling that the only time I did dabble in video game piracy was to relive my childhood memories of Nazi Zombies from the Call of Duty video games. I dabbled in it then because Activision is selling their decades old games for outrageous prices considering their age and their “sales” are weak considering the already overinflated price. I refuse to pay for that. And so I sailed the high seas.
The music industry is still affordable and accessible, so I don’t feel that pressure at all. Back when Limewire was around the pressure was there partially because I was a kid and didn’t have much money and hunting down CDs I wanted for the obscure music I liked was challenging. It was mostly an accessibility issue that Spotify fixed. If their prices move beyond my means then that relationship will no longer benefit me and the sails will raise once more.
You can do both - pay for music when it comes from sources like Bandcamp, Qobuz, etc where you get to own the FLAC file. Don’t pay for things like Spotify where the music you’ve “purchased” is not yours to keep.
Oh wow! I’ve exclusively streamed for a number of years now, but used to be pretty active on Soulseek (+10 years ago). Totally forgot the name until you mentioned it. Glad to hear it’s still up and running fine.
Go on there and share some of your stuff, if you want. We’ll be glad if people help keep the network alive. ;)
Soulseak was king for screamo and emo rock in the mid 00s
It’s pretty amazing. Everything I had wished Limewire was.
Alive and well is doing some heavy lifting if you consider being a husk of your former glory “alive and well”. Yes you can definitely find stuff there that can’t be found anywhere else, even through conventional means. But it’s certainly not the soulseek of yesterday.
