I’ve been building up my digital music library again after giving music streaming the boot. I was going to attempt to digitize my CD and vinyl collection, but I frankly don’t have the time for all that. So I thought I might turn to file-sharing and download digital versions of my physical collection. I prefer FLAC or WAV if the former isn’t available. Can you recommend good places to get started?
Nicotine+, a soulseek client
Dumb question since its peer to peer that means you’ll need port forwarding if using nicotine+ over a VPN right?
the megathread has good sources, i personally use lucida
Lucida is great especially from Qobuz !
My list in order of desperation, lowest first
- Soulseek
- Public torrent trackers
- Private torrent trackers
- Spotify rippers (they come and go like waves on a beach)
- yt-dlp youtube rip (please god have mercy on my bit-crushed soul)
I’m late to the party since it is a well-known site but rutracker is quite good for FLAC content.
seconding this, rutracker and rutor are my go to’s
what.cd and a time machine
redacted.sh, no time machine needed
Ugh, knife to my heart
I use Deezer. You pay for it per month like Spotify, but they have API to just download the songs straight up. I think the open source UI I’ve been using for that is on the rocks a bit, but do far still been working for me
https://www.reddit.com/r/deemix/comments/zlswiz/last_update_is_now_out/
This doesn’t sound like what I’m asking for. I’m not interested in paying Deezer for music I already own.
Sure sure! Just a fallback to consider if you have trouble locating elsewhere, as I did. Spotify rippers were noticably bad quality, and torrents for music were very scarce compared to other media types. But maybe I missed something or there’s better options now. Dropping $10 for a month to mass download everything at crisp quality isn’t too bad an option, imo.
I appreciate it. I always thought Deezer was just a streaming platform like Spotify.
Also, dang, surprised so many downvotes for my original comment lol.
Not gonna lie, I’m considering paying for Deezer to move back to this.
You can automate downloads with Lidarr. I’m set up to download every song by every artist that Last.FM recommends.
Currently, I’m using Soularr, but it’s really slow and not always FLAC and not always full albums and the metadata is not always perfect.
Ah, nice. I gotta do the reverse and check out Soularr a bit. I imagine my Deezer setup will eventually implode, so I’ll need a fallback haha
At the very least, be sure to put your current library out on soulseek.
I use nicotine+ to download my music and it’s great! I can find almost everything I want to hear in flac. Maybe not the best choice for playlists but for downloading albumns is awesome
only thing I would add to this thread is occasionally usenet can be handy if you’re looking for music that’s fairly mainstream. If you’re looking for some weird 7” that was self released with 50 copies that’s obviously not gonna work though
I’ve been using lucida to download from Tidal. It works very well.
Not exactly what you’re looking for in terms of being free, but you could get a Qobuz subscription then use Qobuz-dl to snag what you want to download in lossless quality.
This is what I do. The streaming subscription isn’t that much, and I can download a single album or a txt file with multiple album links with just one command. Only downside of the streaming subscription is you will occasionally run into albums that are or have purchase-only tracks that you can’t download without buying the album, but I don’t seem to run into those too often.
Managed to get my entire library in FLAC except for one album - “I Love You Because,” the soundtrack to what is apparently an obscure musical based on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”.
Other than file-sharing or xdcc, where you can search for FLAC,
squid.wtfallows you to download FLACs from select providers.It seems to consistently throw a WebAssembly is not defined error.
A while ago when I last used it one of the two services worked while the other didn’t. Have you tried both?
Or are you using a webbrowser with no WebAssembly support or WebAssembly disabled?
Soulseek via slskd on my NAS to fill in the missings from Lidarr works really well. Gluetun with a VPN and sharing everything as it grows
