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.
get the original cd/vinyl/non-remastered (there are exceptions) release flac from nicotine+ for my desktop, convert it to 96 kbps opus for my phone.
I buy loads and loads of old vinyl records from various discount bins, flea markets and thrift stores. If it’s 1 or 2 €: I often just buy blind if cover is somewhat appealing to me or because artists names ring a bell for me.
If I like what I hear, I obtain an mp3 copy of it (various sources) for my library. If I really liked it and can’t find it digitally (it happens): I record my own vinyl record to have a digital copy. My file preference is mp3 VBR. I think flac is overkill for most basic soundsystems and human ears and they are not worth the enormous filesize difference.
Jellyfin + Nicotine+
I get my music from discord servers and sometimes soulseek if I can’t find a song or album, and then play it using USB Audio Player Pro since I use an external dac. Symfonium is also another great player with a highly customisable interface that I sometimes use
Symfonium is a paid app. I use Tempus (which is free) and while it has fewer features, it’s more than enough for me.
It’s so worth it for the price (it was like $1.50 in my region) Tempus looks great, it Reminds me of Oto Music which is also another great free player that has the fastest library scanner I’ve found in any player I’ve tried which is very useful if you have a large music library like I do
It’s a lot more expensive in Europe, 9EUR. Not saying it’s not worth it, just that I don’t really feel like I need it.
Oto music also has a really good music tagger that also lets you edit metadata for entire albums in bulk, which is the only reason I use it for lol
I second the Symfonium recommendation - Feishin is a great desktop player as well. Click the now playing album on the bottom left for a full screen mode with visualiser/lyrics/up next screen present alongside the now playing info 👍🏼
I don’t pirate music, I buy it from Bandcamp. Then I download the files to my storage server and sync it to my phone, or play it with MPD.
I wish I could do the same with movies and TV shows…
You may like to check out Subvert.FM, a cooperative successor to Bandcamp, (the latter was bought by Epic Games, not a reputable company unfortunately). The platform is owned by its members: artists, labels, supporters and workers and runs on a democratic basis.
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.
fucking cassettes
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.
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
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 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.
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
I usually walk into a music store, fill up a box and scream “bye bitches” and leave.
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.
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.
