How to get started with pirating music (mp3s)?

Algernon , 4 hours ago

I’m always curious why people do this. Music is the one item where it’s easier to just sub to something like Apple Music… literally $110/yr for all the music that exists. They gave us the solution we asked for and it’s super-cheap.

I pirate the shit out of movies and tv since those guys are gouging me, but musicians barely get by in the streaming era.

Hopefully this triggers nobody. I’m making no judgements.

madeindjs , 3 hours ago

my two cents,

I personally buy some music from Bandcamp, and I’m pretty sure those songs don’t exist on the Apple Music catalog. So I don’t want to handle multiple apps to listen what I want.

Also, streaming platforms have the internet constraints. Sometimes, like when I’m driving, I don’t have a stable internet connection

Deceptichum , 2 hours ago

I’ve used Spotify for like 20 years now, and I’m finally going back to pirating.

They started “innovating” and adding shit I didn’t want last year to justify fee increases.

I can’t trust businesses to not enshittify, so might as well continue on with where I left my library all those years ago.

Plus: So much music isn’t available on there. I have a huge collection of Japanese Rock, Pop, Visual Kei from the 90s and 00s that you just can’t find easily.

anothermember , 1 hour ago

Can you save it DRM-free? That’s all I ask for.

doesntfuckingmatter , 6 hours ago

The OG

Deceptichum , 2 hours ago

https://quokk.au/pictrs/image/4aff45e6-c4d4-46b0-bf25-b88c4753c06e.jpeg

wildbus8979 , 6 hours ago

Do I use a website to download songs off of YouTube or Spotify?

Soulseek and/or private trackers, both with a VPN.

Where should I store the music?

On a hard disk?

I’m running GrapheneOS

Android isn’t well suited for this. It’s fine for playing either by transfering your files or streaming them with something like subsonic, mod, etc.

Maybe sync with SyncThing?

This could work yeah.

What’s the best way to compress mp3 files but still retain the quality (even possible)?

By design MP3 is a lossy format, so no you cannot. What you want is FLAC, a lossless compressed format.

Inui , 6 hours ago

Depending on if they actually want local music only on their phone and not on something like Navidrome, Seeker is a good soul seek client for mobile.

ElectricAirship , 5 hours ago

FLAC is best if space is no concern. But when your collection starts getting very big, there are better options like AAC (which I use). It’s a lot less space than FLAC and mp3, and higher quality than mp3 as well.

primesound.org/audio-file-formats/

Maxy , 5 hours ago

To add to the audio compression: it isn’t possible to further compress an mp3 file without losing any quality. You can either:

1. Recompress to a lossy codec (mp3, aac, opus). This will lead to smaller file sizes if you set the bitrate lower than that of the input file, but it will always worsen the quality, no matter the bitrate.
2. Recompress to a lossless format (flac easily being the best one). Going from a lossy to a lossless format will increase the file size (sometimes by quite a substantial amount), while keeping the same quality. There is very little reason for you to do this
3. keep the original files (my recommendation)

If you’re willing to spend some extra time learning about audio compression, you can download lossless files and compress those directly to whatever format and bitrate you want. The quality will be better than option 1 above, as the audio is only lossely compressed once instead of twice.

madeindjs , 3 hours ago

Recompress to a lossless format (…) There is very little reason for you to do this

I though there are no reasons at all to do it. What could be a valid use case for this ?

Maxy , 3 hours ago

It’s possible for a certain hardware/software setup not to support a certain codec. For example, my jellyfin client (Finamp) uses the iOS native decoders (afaik), which means opus files are practically broken. My music library (8000+ songs) contained exactly 1 lossy file, which just so happened to be an opus file. I decided to spend the extra ~20MB to standardise my entire library to flac files, ensuring I could play every song on all my devices.

Edit cause I posted too soon: you are generally correct; only in very specific circumstances will you encounter compatibility issues like this one in the modern world. This is 100% apple being apple, and you can expect pretty much every other (reasonably modern) device to support all codecs you might encounter in the wild.

downhomechunk , 4 hours ago

Upvote for soulseek / nicotine

gramgan , 4 hours ago

As far as where you get the music from, you’ll have to determine for yourself what audio quality you require.

To test this, use something like Soulseek to get a high quality version of a song you are very familiar with, and then get the same song off of YouTube with yt-dlp (better yet—do this for a few songs). Then, open both songs in separate media player windows, randomize the layout of said windows so you don’t remember which is which, plug in your favorite headphones and see if you can guess which is which.

For me, I found the difference between a lossless or 320kbps download from Soulseek and a 128-196kbps download from YouTube to be negligible (or outright nonexistent) in most cases, so I mostly download off of YouTube, which is very simple to do.

Depending on where you get the files, you may need to add metadata yourself. For this, I recommend MusicBrainz Picard.

clay_pidgin , 3 hours ago

Is there any program that downloads from youtube without me needing to find the URL I want? Ideally I would like to search a catalog of genre/artist/album and click the download button. It ought to maybe find the biggest youtube channel with the artist’s name in it and then find the song.

6FingerJoe , 3 hours ago

Spowlo and soundbound are essentially the same app that you just paste links to Spotify lists, artists, albums, playlists, whatever, then it’ll find matches on YouTube to download as mp3.

Desktop zotify, you can downloaded the “high” quality level with premium account credentials.

averyminya , 5 hours ago

Lidarr is all you need.

You can do other methods, but this one is simple and effective. Set it up, tell it what bands you like, wait a day and you’ve got the entirety of your childhood favorites and nearly every discography you can think of. All for maybe an hour of upfront work.

Versus remembering every band/song you ever liked, tracking it down, downloading each individually… Like yeah, you can do that. It’s what I do for shows and movies for curation. But for music, I have so much and so many that curating like this just isn’t as worthwhile as checking off a band in Lidarr and having all of their stuff in a few hours.

LilacLobotomies , 5 hours ago

rentry.org/firehawk52

Check this website out, there’s lots of options for obtaining music. I personally use Murglar on Android for high quality Deezer rips. Telegram bots work well too.

LaGG_3 , 6 hours ago

What’s the best way to compress mp3 files but still retain the quality (even possible)?

If you’re not starting from a lossless format (like FLAC), you shouldn’t really be compressing anything. When compressing from a lossless format to MP3, it’s totally subjective. When I was more into ripping CDs, I’d do V0 or 320 - there’s probably plenty of internet arguments by people more knowledgeable than me if you need a breakdown in different MP3 compressions.