I just found out about Soulseek!

[Cammell]

Some random person on internet recommended me to try soulseek if I already know which music I want to listen to

I used soundcloud before, but this is great, you get full quality music, album cover... everything organized you just need to press play

We should get back to downloading music from the internet, streaming really sucks in everything else except convenience

They can change the music at will, you don't own shit, artist don't get payed much, they probably collect a whole lot of data but I didn't go into that

 

[SofaKing333]

Soulseek rules.
The Linux alternative is called 'Nicotine+'. What audio player are you using? MusicBee is a good one.

 

[SolidStateSurvivor]

I was pretty late to SoulSeek as well (family member and big time audiophile showed it to me in 2018) and it's a godsend for finding albums you can only find references to on Discogs. I remember people complaining that TikTok brought a lot of n00bs to it, but as long as you make sure to share some stuff yourself you'll be fine.

 

[Vitnira]

My advice for Soulseek is if you care about the aesthetics of your music library, get a metadata tagger like MusicBrainz Picard. There's a lot of improperly tagged content on there and it makes your library uggo. Don't go ham downloading, take your time and only download a few albums at a time. It gets tempting when you see a user has good taste in music and want to go nuts with the download button but don't. They can block you. (and uh, I've been blocked...)

Taking your time also means you can ensure everything is clean and tagged proper! Digital hoarding is a real problem man. But not if you keep it clean.

 

[Cammell]

Soulseek rules.
The Linux alternative is called 'Nicotine+'. What audio player are you using? MusicBee is a good one.

Windows media player up until now, but I will try out MusicBee and will switch to Nicotine+ when I finally figure out how to dualboot Linux

My advice for Soulseek is if you care about the aesthetics of your music library, get a metadata tagger like MusicBrainz Picard. There's a lot of improperly tagged content on there and it makes your library uggo. Don't go ham downloading, take your time and only download a few albums at a time. It gets tempting when you see a user has good taste in music and want to go nuts with the download button but don't. They can block you. (and uh, I've been blocked...)

Taking your time also means you can ensure everything is clean and tagged proper! Digital hoarding is a real problem man. But not if you keep it clean.

thanks for the recommendation I will be trying it out

 

[garret 427738]

soulseek is very cool, I've gotten lots of rare stuff there

and will switch to Nicotine+ when I finally figure out how to dualboot Linux

it runs on windows too fwiw
though of course it's still native to linux, and it shows (something something no thumbnails in file picker)

My advice for Soulseek is if you care about the aesthetics of your music library, get a metadata tagger like MusicBrainz Picard

yeah, people tag things in the most retarded ways, one has to wonder what their setups look like that doing eg "Surname, Given-name - Album {CATNO-123 16bit/44.1kHz}" in the tags makes sense
that's a contrived example but only a little bit, i've seen both of those strangenesses before, just not both at once yet

picard's auto-tagging can be a little retarded too i find - it just puts too much in there
no i don't need a sort order so specific it has to go in the tags, no i dont care about when that specific release came out (at least not enough to put it in the main date field), no i don't care what the barcode on the back of the case is
etc
but if that doesnt bother you very much then the autotagger is great, and it's a competent manual tagger either way

 

[MySpace Tom]

Soulseek is pretty great. Getting blocked or throttled is pretty common though. Generally, it's a good idea to look up the user info to see if they have any special preferences or rules about people requesting more than a single album at a time. Though it is pretty funny that a lot of the userbase acts like they're still on dialup connections with some of the tight rules they have on their clients

Soulseek also has probably one of the most useless features implemented into any file sharing platform, which is the ability to lock collections so that people can see that you have something, but not download it

Recently, I was downloading an album from a guy named VAULT. He manually blocked the download when it was half finished, then DM'ed me to ask me for money to continue. I told him to fuck himself and got a copy of the album from one of the dozens of other people who had it freely available

Maybe we should start an Agora chatroom on Soulseek

 

[LostintheCycle]

We should get back to downloading music from the internet, streaming really sucks in everything else except convenience

Convenient? I did streaming when I was young and it was horrible. I have to be connected to the Internet? At a time when I had a 2GB a month phone plan with bad coverage... I have to listen to ads? I don't want to listen to ads!
Even when I was 13 I quickly got onto downloading (YouTube to MP3 websites cos I was a tard) because of how inconvenient streaming was.

Maybe we should start an Agora chatroom on Soulseek

Not a bad idea! #agora-road

 

[garret 427738]

Convenient? I did streaming when I was young and it was horrible. I have to be connected to the Internet? At a time when I had a 2GB a month phone plan with bad coverage... I have to listen to ads? I don't want to listen to ads!
Even when I was 13 I quickly got onto downloading (YouTube to MP3 websites cos I was a tard) because of how inconvenient streaming was.

well you see you didn't have money, if you had money you could pay for a phone plan with 2 gazillion GB and all the premium streaming services you could ever want!

and then you wouldn't have money any more but shush

 

[Ashman]

From my exprience Soulseek chatrooms are populated solely by chatbots

 

[MySpace Tom]

From my exprience Soulseek chatrooms are populated solely by chatbots

^ILLUMINATI^awareness has been the most active one that I found, but it was all insane ramblings and jerks. Been a while since I visited it though

 

[pupok]

check out bandcamp downloader too

GitHub - Otiel/BandcampDownloader: A Windows app used to download albums from Bandcamp.

A Windows app used to download albums from Bandcamp. - Otiel/BandcampDownloader

github.com

 

[Vitnira]

check out bandcamp downloader too

GitHub - Otiel/BandcampDownloader: A Windows app used to download albums from Bandcamp.

A Windows app used to download albums from Bandcamp. - Otiel/BandcampDownloader

github.com

Good find and all but this seems like a huge dick move to me. Never seen a larger artist on bandcamp that I'd feel justified ripping from.

The only exception is The Midnight charging full price for the instrumental versions of their albums.

EDIT: Can't read, it only rips free stuff:
"but offers only what is already freely available on Bandcamp."
EDIT 2: My point stands. "Freely available" does apparently mean ripping straight from the page.

 

[abraKadabra]

Even when I was 13 I quickly got onto downloading (YouTube to MP3 websites cos I was a tard)

Ironically enough, I used to find(and still do sometimes) an awful lot of MP3s of albums on Youtube, the quality of which ended up being substantially better than even some of the equivalent FLACs on Soulseek or Rutracker. This phenomenon reaches a truly comical scale when we talk about obscure one-album bands from late 60s or some early folk tapes, because most of the times YT is the ONLY place on the whole Internet you can find this stuff on, and the users who upload it usualy keep their video feeds/playlists more organised than many of the people from the "tracker scene".

Here are some examples:

https://www.youtube.com/@ahones2255/playlists
https://www.youtube.com/@ThebestdreamIhad/videos
https://www.youtube.com/@jeremiah.ledbetter/videos

It's actually crazy how much information you can pull out of channels like these. And the best thing is: there are hundreds of them littered across the site, just waiting for you to find and download the crap out of them! If you only knew how much dopamine pumps through my brain when I come across another channel of this type, randomly hiding in plain sight. Literally feel like a piligrim, whose pick has finally stumbled upon a large chunk of gold. Using Youtube for music is actually fun and not cringe at all, it feels like treasure hunting more than anything else. Try it as well, you'll like it!

 

[Orlando Smooth]

Soulseek also has probably one of the most useless features implemented into any file sharing platform, which is the ability to lock collections so that people can see that you have something, but not download it

This seriously pisses me off, and the people who do it can go to hell. One of the primary reasons I got back into file ownership after like a decade of streaming is because so much of the live music that I love is not available on any streaming services. In particular, the stuff that's officially released and high quality coming from nugs.net. But nugs is way too fucking expensive and the fact that their live streams go down with frequency shows they don't give a fuck about their PAYING customers. So screw 'em, I'll download the shows from SLSK, right? Wrong. Whenever I find someone that has a big collection of shows from the artists I want (mostly Billy Strings, but also some Dead & Co. and others), they're all locked up! They'll have something in their profile about "If you want something, just message me" but I've yet to ever receive a response. You'll find a random show here and there, and I appreciate that, but I would love to be able to download entire tours.

Also, get Plex and PlexAmp. It's absolutely worth the cost to essentially have your own streaming service that you can share easily. I have more files than could ever fit on my phone, and by a lot. The ability to manage things like playlists from different devices, access the entire library anywhere you have internet, and remotely download whichever albums, playlists, etc., you want is truly fantastic.

 

[MySpace Tom]

check out bandcamp downloader too

GitHub - Otiel/BandcampDownloader: A Windows app used to download albums from Bandcamp.

A Windows app used to download albums from Bandcamp. - Otiel/BandcampDownloader

github.com

Not bad. Thankfully, Bandcamp makes it trivial to grab the free MP3s. Even yt-dlp can grab audio from Bandcamp

Good find and all but this seems like a huge dick move to me. Never seen a larger artist on bandcamp that I'd feel justified ripping from.

Not all artists on Bandcamp charge money for their work. It's usually easier to use a tool to grab an artist's discography than to download each zip file manually. Plus, I'd suggest doing this anyways because some artists have suddenly decided to delete their entire accounts out of the blue

But also, how is grabbing a freely-available MP3 that the artist themselves put up for free considered to be ripping them off?

 

[Vitnira]

Not bad. Thankfully, Bandcamp makes it trivial to grab the free MP3s. Even yt-dlp can grab audio from Bandcamp


Not all artists on Bandcamp charge money for their work. It's usually easier to use a tool to grab an artist's discography than to download each zip file manually. Plus, I'd suggest doing this anyways because some artists have suddenly decided to delete their entire accounts out of the blue

But also, how is grabbing a freely-available MP3 that the artist themselves put up for free considered to be ripping them off?

Cause I didn't read:
"but offers only what is already freely available on Bandcamp."

I assumed this was using the audio player interface to rip the audio file from album pages without purchase.

 

[garret 427738]

I assumed this was using the audio player interface to rip the audio file from album pages without purchase.

it is
but if they're available on the pages, for anyone to stream, for as many times as they want- downloading them seems fair game to me, tbh

anyway, people will rip no matter what, only way to really stop it is to say
"no streaming at all ever, if you want to listen then buy the cd/download/whatever other physical media"
which is, fair enough, their right to do
but does cut them off from a segment of their audience
and then someone buys it and uploads it to torrents/slsk and you're back where you started

my favourite artist did physical-only until very very recently, due to the quality/lack thereof of streaming etc (+ also it not existing yet at the time)
dangerously based
though now it seems he's been dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age...

 

[Vitnira]

it is
but if they're available on the pages, for anyone to stream, for as many times as they want- downloading them seems fair game to me, tbh

anyway, people will rip no matter what, only way to really stop it is to say
"no streaming at all ever, if you want to listen then buy the cd/download/whatever other physical media"
which is, fair enough, their right to do
but does cut them off from a segment of their audience
and then someone buys it and uploads it to torrents/slsk and you're back where you started

my favourite artist did physical-only until very very recently, due to the quality/lack thereof of streaming etc (+ also it not existing yet at the time)
dangerously based
though now it seems he's been dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age...

...No? Wtf is wrong with you, this is why we get DRM.

If every small musician I ripped from youtube/soulseek had a page where I could directly give them money for the music for digital download and know no other fluffy bs was getting in the way (I do Bandcamp Fridays whenever possible) I would do it. Because they don't, yar har.
Most of my media isn't available for direct purchase. If it was, I'd buy it.

 

[Ashman]

If I want to supoort an artist I would just buy their physical releases.