cross-posted from: https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/726542
I have ~100 users downloaded ~1000 of my files in the last week alone. Music piracy is still alive and kicking. I encourage everyone to download and install SoulseekQT/Nicotine+/Seeker-Android and share whatever kind of music you have for everybody to download. Let’s bring back music piracy!
I really don’t feel the need to. I pay fair prices for my music and get it how I want it when I want it where I want it.
Im not pirating to shaft people out of money
I buy music on bandcamp/directly from artists all the time. I just dislike streaming services, as I always want to have the files, and the money artists get from them is abbyssmal anyway.
Especially for smaller/indie artists I wait for Bandcamp Fridays so all of the money goes straight to them (Fuck Epic). Buying even one album for $5-10 is more than they would earn from thousands of Spotify listens from you.
This is the way.
I’ll be sticking to spotify personally out of convenience, and the fact that I’m paying for a family plan but to be fair paying that money directly to the artists you like will be much more effective while not supporting platforms that pay them very little for their work.
If you want though, using spotify adblock has been quite effective in my experiance. That way you have the convenience and you don’t pay spotify shit
Spotify is literally the only subscription service that I haven’t cut ties with, because as much as I hate its horrific data harvesting, I’m running it on GrapheneOS with legitimately next to zero privileges in a sandbox, and for what I’m paying, I truly do feel I’m getting my money’s worth. I use it every single day, and while I have all my music stored locally (as in legitimately scraped and downloaded, not ‘downloaded’), I only did so as a precaution just in case Spotify decides to fuck things up and I also choose to cancel it as well.
Try vimusic, from what i’ve seen its just spotify without the data harvesting (and the api’s taken from youtube music, shouldn’t change much though)
That actually sounds fantastic, cheers for the recommendation!
I wouldnt count on it working for long. vfsfitvnm hasn’t touched the repo since december with several PRs left untouched.
Seems abandoned to me. https://github.com/vfsfitvnm/ViMusic
If you’re up for another recommendation, I suggest trying out Innertune [Link to Github repo]. It has been discussed on the GrapheneOS Discussion Forum as an alternative to Spotify for music streaming. Also, Innertune’s dev released an update recently (2 days ago from the time of this post) that includes a major UI rewrite and other improvements to the app [Link to latest stable release].
Spent the day recreating my Spotify playlists on Innertune. Thank you SO much for this recommendation, it is exactly what I’ve been looking for in an alternative. There’s even a heap of shit available that I can’t find on Spotify.
Aye, no problem!
this
Where can you legitimately buy music these days? I’ll be happy to pay if the artist gets their fair share. I used to buy from Amazon but that has gone completely to shit recently. Like they really don’t want you to buy stuff from them any more. And I cannot bring myself to give a cent to Spotify when they paid 100 million to Joe fucking Rogan.
Bandcamp my friend!
Very fair point - Spotify does shaft a lot of their artists from what I’ve heard. As the other user mentioned, bandcamp gets brought up a lot. Try reachin out to some bands over email maybe and see what they say!
Bandcamp (indie)
Qobuz, 7digital, artists website directly (general stuff)
NativeDSD (audiophile)
I generally run Spotify with the XManager version on Android and SpotX on PC. Works great.
when they paid 100 million to Joe fucking Rogan.
Why do I care who they paid money to to have some random podcast on their service?
Yep. That’s why I pay Spotify but stopped paying netflix. Fuck this need to subscribe to countless streaming services.
If you aren’t going to shows and buying from the merch table, or buying directly from bancamp etc you aren’t supporting artists.That’s where the majority of their money comes from.
I am supporting the artist to some extent. Stealing Spotify content would be adding insult to injury imo
If you primarily consume content through Spotify or streaming you are supporting office with fractions of a penny per stream.
With millions if not billions of streams everyday 24/7/365
Agree to disagree on this one
That’s fine, just know that this has already been looked in to and reported on with rough numbers on what artists earn and artists themselves talking about it, and you have extremely rose tinted glasses on how all of that actually plays out and the amount of money musicians earn from streaming.
If you have any sources handy for these claims I’d love to see some real figures
Same here, while I do have the time to chase around pirated movies/games/software, I want my music to just be there with me without all the hassle.
Spotify’s algorithm is just great!
Spotify shareholders say thanks. The artists, not so much. Keep your spotify money to go to concerts or buy albums on bandcamp. Spotify is the worst.
Guess what, it’s not only the small musicians who suffer, it’s everyone who falls into the “small” category.
Speaking as an IT professional, who has worked at smaller agencies, where new technologies arise and make our work more efficient. Do you think our bosses let us enjoy the free time that we gained from these advancing technologies? They don’t! Instead they put even more workload onto us, up to the point where we burn out even faster than before. It’s huge difference wirking on one task for five days (bc of limitations) vs. working on 10 tasks during the same period.
Spotify sucks, but the whole music industry has sucked like that for literally a hundred years - A very very few artists make bank, about 5% make a little, everyone else makes zero.
Oh indeed, I dont’t think it was better before. But technology should be about making things better, shouldn’t it?
Spotify probably is the only algorithm I use that just gives me stuff I would enjoy, other services try to push bs I don’t want. While I use soulseek and buy from Bandcamp when possible I still use Spotify for discovery.
Hell I wouldn’t be pirating movies and shows if publishers allowed me to pay lol. Unlike Netflix, Prime Video etc, Spotify really gives me pretty much all music
Streaming sites are convenient up until you want to listen to that mildly obscure artist from your country your parents used to listen to back in the early 50s. Then it’s absolute bollocks.
Not even old music.
Architecture In Helsinki is missing the third album on Spotify. There are plenty more, but that’s always the first that pops in my head whenever I’m listening to Indie playlists, Of Montréal comes on and I realise I haven’t heard Places Like This in a long time. Then I remember why, and I either have to dig through my old CD collection or download it.
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Or if you live outside of America, the number of albums that don’t let you play some of the songs is insane.
Just as the other user said, using YouTube Audio for this stuff is the way to go.
Just look for
<Artist Name> - Topicchannels and check the playlists (not the uploads). You should find full albums uploaded directly by copyright holders. Use a VPN if you don’t find anything. Sometimes stuff from your region will not be available in your region, but available if you appear to be somewhere else ;)Also, if we are going old style P2P, and not using torrents for some reason (RuTracker deserves a special mention), then DC++ should come before SoulseekQT/Nicotine+ anyway.
Mostly lossless grabs from torrents + YouTube Audio (edit: using
yt-dlp), and you have a selection with guaranteed high quality*. Definitely better than whatever scattered MP3s in SoulseekQT/Nicotine+* Opus@150kbits/s is transparent, except for some killer samples heard by a trained ear.
I’ve found DC++ public hubs garbage. The private ones are amazing but near impossible to get into if you’re not already familiar. What hubs are you recommending that are better than Soulseek?
What hubs are you recommending that are better than Soulseek?
I hardly use DC++ anymore. I mentioned it because I didn’t find anything unique about Soulseek when I tried it last a few years ago. But I did grab plenty of classical music in lossless format from DC++, using public hubs.
So, it’s the “are better than Soulseek?” part of the question that intrigues me. What’s good about Soulseek? For lossless collections, it doesn’t (didn’t?) have much. For lossy stuff? There are better (in selection, availability, and quality) places to grab lossy files from (e.g. YouTube). And Torrents (with or without DC++) would probably have you covered there too anyway.
That is/was my experience with all these platforms/networks. I’m open to learn something new if I’m missing something.
Better chance to find that on Youtube honestly
That’s why I pay for YouTube Music. YouTube has a pretty good collection of obscure tracks and it lets you upload your own files to access anywhere.
YouTube has a pretty good collection of obscure tracks
This is because current Youtube policy effectively bundles ContentID and YouTube Music. Basically if a rightsholder wants to put audio into ContentID, they are forced to also publish it on Youtube Music (topic channels).
My parents favourite music artists finally popped up on Spotify about 5 years ago. It was a dry run until then - I was PISSED when my brother lost my CD of a band I liked when we went back home on vacation.
Music piracy isn’t dead but it’s a shell of what it was. You can see even here most people would rather just stream
Soulseek needs more users though as the proportion of locked file users keeps increasing
Tbh, why pirate music when I can listen to a new album within 5 seconds of its release? I don’t have to wait for downloads, don’t have to deal with mistaken metadata, I don’t have to worry about physical storage sizes.
I fully support piracy for basically everything, but we should count ourselves lucky that music streaming went the way it did and not the way movie and series streaming has gone.
You don’t own the music so it can be edited/taken away as desired by the DSP
Also me personally very little of what I listen to is on DSPs and a lot isn’t even on YouTube but I recognize this as an extreme outlier
If a band is popular, albums get ripped/downloaded from streaming services and put on private music trackers within hours of release.
If you don’t have space, like recommendations from streaming services, or their app, or not wanting to catalog your music (or setup services that do that), then I would recommend a streaming application.
Yeah fuck those traders and scammers. Soulseek isn’t created for that shit.
Convenience can win over piracy. Music and videogames proved that
Maybe I’ll publish my 3 TB FLAC collection soon.
Yessir
Maybe also, but 1/4 of it is live torrents already so 🤠
Nicotine+ is such a wild name for a piece of software.
Support your favourite artists directly. That wasn’t an option in the Napster days.
Bandcamp is an excellent option, I often try to get releases from their when possible.
I do when I can afford to, but you can’t really buy every song you listen to, can you?
Have you heard about Spotify?
Spotify doesn’t do shit for the artists.
More than pirating
Yeah I’m sure artists enjoy their 0.003 cents per stream a lot.
More than 0.000 cents. ;-)
With Spotify, both you and artists are still screwed.
If you have Spotify free you will be interrupted by ads breaking all immersion in your albums. Artists will get paid barely anything.
If you have Spotify Premium, you will have to pay money, and most of that money won’t even go towards the artists. The artists will get paid a little more then barely anything.
I absolutely do where I can but when a lot of stuff gets released within the scene I am into on a dead inferior format (vinyl) exclusively then I am absolutely going to pirate that shit if I can.
Heyyyy it’s my fellow dubstep enjoyer! Yeah those vinyl exclusive is such a pain.
Don’t forget stream ripping. I used to rip internet radio direct to MP3 with no quality loss and then go back and manually edit the files for playback gaps, keeping the best in case of duplicate recordings. If you have really niche interests it sometimes was literally the only way to get copies of some tracks, especially rare remixes.
Soulseek is great for finding and sharing music. I would strongly recommend Nicotine+ over the old SoulseekQt
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The thing is, you barely support the artists you’re listening to when you use spotify.
Fuck spotify. Unlike video which poses some infrastructure challenges, musical files are tiny and bandwidth costs are ridiculous. Internet should allow us to give money to the artists directly, not to some greedy evil corp that makes billions without giving artist their fair share. Bandcamp is the closest we have to that. Related: https://neurodifferent.me/@clowncollege/109994297731928004
Interesting feedback
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I’m not advocating piracy as a way to support artists, but a way to fight against the big corps/streaming platforms/the system that just take the majority of revenue for themselves while hurting both the consumers and the creators. As I replied to other comments, I try to look for ways to directly support artists individually whenever I can.
There’s no way to directly support artists unless you’re buying merch from their specific site or at a concert
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YouTube has audio in Opus format@~150kbit/s. Opus is a much better format than MP3. Almost all audio is completely transparent at that bitrate, where with MP3s, there are cases where audio is not transparent without using non standard >320kbit/s bitrates (a lot of content is transparent @320kbits/s though).
Now, sites/tools like the one you mentioned take the Opus (or AAC) file/stream from YouTube, and lossily re-encodes it again, probably to a file that is larger than the original, with at best the same quality, but probably worse quality. You obviously can’t get better output than the input in lossy compression.
So, the disk space argument is weird if you can play Opus/AAC (should be playable on every device nowadays).
This is the valid part for why you shouldn’t use YT-to-MP3 converters.
But there are also invalid reasons why people will tell you it’s shit:
- They think all MP3s sound like the shit ones from a decade (or two, or three) ago, using low bitrates and/or created with shit encoders. In reality, not all MP3s sound like shit, but vigilance is needed at every encoding step, as is the case with all lossy conversions.
- They are conflating the quality of the conversion, with the quality of the source, and think the bad quality of some user-uploaded YouTube content is due to the lossy conversion done by YouTube, and/or the MP3 converter re-encoding from YouTube. Content uploaded by the copyright holders (assuming basic competence) does not have that problem at all.
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Soulseek is an old-style P2P network. It has nothing to do with my parent comment. I personally don’t use it (see my other comments in this thread).
If you want to grab a non-reencoded file from YouTube, you can use a tool like yt-dlp
# see what formats are available for a YT vid yt-dlp -F <youtube-url> # format 251 is usually available as the highest quality Opus format yt-dlp -f 251 <youtube-url>That last command should grab you an Opus stream in WEBM format.
If you’re not a CLI guy, others should be able to give you a good GUI recommendation.
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FLAC isn’t too bad on disc space.
You don’t get high quality mp3s from that.
I use deemix for 320kbps, I originally had FLAC but as almost 100% of my listening is remote from my server I found 320 to be great.
I’m no Hi-Fi listener, but YT rips suck.
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I’m pretty sure they can, they just don’t know it. It’s extremely obvious.
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Keeping FLAC is such a hassle, it’s not even worth.
I mostly listen to jazz, blues and classical. I use rutracker which has everything I want and in lossless formats. Mp3s too but I’m more interested in lossless.
yt-dlp is the way my friend, I got a command to download a specific playlist of mine every once in a while:
alias youtube-dl-playlist-guardar="yt-dlp -x -f bestaudio --external-downloader aria2c --external-downloader-args '-c -j 3 -x 3 -s 3 -k 1M' --ignore-errors --continue --audio-format mp3 'https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=_______'"deleted by creator
You are very welcome! I use it with aria2, it’s opcional but recommended, in case you don’t want it you can strip the --external-downloader and -args part :)
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That’s exactly it, I use aria2 pretty much for parallel downloads (also to be able to resume them).
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using Spotify is much easier… until they delete a few tracks from your playlist.
i feel this.
though have gigabytes of pirated music in my hd, but i cant transfer that all on my phone that’s wy i have spotify
Have you heard of “Navidrome”? you can be your own Spotify. It also supports transcoding. For instance, if you are on a phone connected to data, you can set the bitrate to 128kpbs to save some data.
No, I haven’t heard of it. I’ll look it up. Thanks.
I waffle on whether I should use my VPN or not with it.
Support your favourite artists directly. That wasn’t an option in the Napster days.
I like to have the older versions of songs before they “Remaster” and change them and if they stop selling everything but the remasters, it’s time to fire it up.
It use P2P network so I don’t think you need VPN for it…? IDK I’m not an expert.
Well torrenting is also P2P but people generally recommend VPNs for that.
Yea but with torrenting it’s multiple peers you are connected to. Soulseek only connects you 1-1 so it’s generally lots safer.
Ah, I see.
I’m really happy with just downloading directly from youtube
I guess that will do if the kind of music you listen to doesn’t need to be high quality.
You know, I don’t even comprehend what that means. Quality? you mean 720p?
As long as I can hear it, that’s fine to me, I’m not an audiophile so I really can’t tell the difference and I have cheap $20 headphones and $4 earphones, idk man.
Same concept as 720p vs 1080p but not exactly. Audio can be compressed in the same way that video can; certain flavour gets lost for the sake of smaller file size. In video, that means loss of colour spectrum, visuals aren’t as sharp and even artifacting when pushed too far. In audio that translates to loss of range so certain instruments can completely disappear from a song, other instruments aren’t as crisp and so on. Depending on those $20 headphones, you might be able to make out a difference. The earphones, it’s much less likely. There are some $20 earphones such as KBEars which are far better than they have any right to be and make being an audiophile more accessible, if it ever tickles your fancy.
Two simple facts of good audio: 1: Good audio stays good so no need to worry about age so long as equipment hasn’t been abused. 2: You can only spend so much before you get diminishing returns.
And what is the difference between YouTube and other platforms?
Does YouTube “compress” the audio more or something so it loses detail?
Youtube compresses the beejeezus out of everything and has a low bitrate for the sake of keeping cost down because of the insane amount of people it provides content to. The low bitrate is why you see artifacting on videos (that’s when it gets weirdly pixelated without having dropped a quality setting). All streaming platforms do it to some extent or another for the same reason but some have what is called “lossless” audio on their paid tiers. Ones that I know of are Tidal and Deezer. I’ve heard Spotify offers it too on their HIFI service but I don’t know the details of it.
That’s good to know, I’ll try out those other services.
I’ve got slskd and lidarr set up with jellyfin and FinAmp on my phone and honestly I don’t open Spotify except to discover new music
Are you saying you can use slskd as a source in Lidarr? If so, I’d love some details on how to set that up.
Not possible yet, but lidarr integration is one of the milestones of slskd. There’s a nice thread about it on the github project. Can’t remember if it is lidarr’s or slskd’s though
Oh man I wish no it’s a little more manual but still a lot nicer for me than a desktop client then uploading to the server
I share a pretty good size collection of music and fonts on Soulseek.
