I just download .MP3 or m4as of everything I add to my liked songs on Spotify. I pay for Spotify, but the offline functionality is bogus so I also keep regular copies of everything and don’t rely on whatever dumbass propriety offline format Spotify uses because it never actually plays anything when offline that way.
I kinda did last time I needed to download anything. Not sure if it’s still working though. I used an app that would find and convert the songs out of a playlist from YouTube and other sources. But even at that time, it was a pain finding what I used; plenty of things claimed to do this but most of them were defunct and didn’t function.
To everyone in here saying they download entire discographies, great! I agree. But the follow up question is how do you even find out about new (to you) artists that you might like? I’ve cross referenced the library I have (about 27k tracks) with the “similar artists” sections of Spotify, last.fm, etc, and I feel like I’m just going around in circles. All of the similar artists are just similar to each other and I have all of it already. How do you branch out?
I’ve never found similar artists to be helpful. Most of the time it’s just a worse version of the thing I like. I don’t really like stuff that sounds very samey though.
In previous years I’ve found new stuff using Pandora Radio, Youtube Music, and occasionally just by browsing music communities. Reddit’s listentothis sub used to be really good for finding relatively unknown bands a number of years ago.
Pandora Radio advertises that instead of doing a basic genre or artist comparison, each track they have is manually analyzed for specific aspects of the track like “call and response”, “wall of sound”, “excessive vamping”, so it makes connections crossing genre lines.
Depending on how diverse your taste is, you could always try to branch out to something outside of “similar artists”. Just look up genre names and start checking them out. If you find something you like, you can use the same " similar artists" approach on an entirely new search space.
I’m an old man. “Back in my day”, we heard by word of mouth, the radio, browsing at music shops, etc.
We can still do that in the digital age. When someone posts a random song, anywhere, check it out. Try checking out internet radio of genres you like (I’m finding a lot of Classical this way currently). Check out Bandcamp and IRL music store every once in a while just see what calls to you. Sometimes, let the cool album art guide you ;)
I go crate digging through soundcloud and bandcamp every so often, once in a while ill play a mix on youtube. Even if I only really like one or two songs on an album, i usually still download the entirety of it because sometimes i like just having songs on in the background if they fit a vibe i’m feeling. This is especially true for me with vaporwave, probably wouldn’t bump it on my commute for example but it can really make me drift mentally if i have it on in the background while say, browsing lemmy or something. And of course for my absolute favourite artists I tend to have almost if not the entire discography.
Whenever I get files in higher quality than you’d normally get from e.g. YouTube Music or Spotify. Currently I’m at a just 9.2 GiB library, but whatever, I don’t listen to music too often anyway
Lately ive been getting a lot of new music from rateyourmusic.com . I look up an album i like, find some themed lists featuring it that aound interesting (a lot of the lists are like “things i listened to this year”, i ignore those), and will hop from list to list as i see interesting looking albums.
Usually go for More obscure rare stuff like video game sound tacks and underground lesser known artists that I find. Eventually, the top ones that pique my interest I will end up buying physical copies or purchased digital files because I wanna show My support.
If I like it I download it, save the whole album or discography. Archive everything. Never delete. Same for books and movies and shows, though I find myself watching less of those lately.
Storage is cheap, and music (even in FLAC format) is small. You can fit tens of thousands of songs into a terabyte.
I download anything and everything. An artist I enjoy? Entire discography. I’ve only heard one song? Entire discography–there may be more I might enjoy! An artist in a genre I like but I’ve never heard? Entire discography.
I’m at over 125k songs, and I still feel like my collection is a sliver. I eventually want to reach 1m songs and truly become my own Spotify. Finding songs I’ve never heard before and that I end up loving in my own collection is a joy I can’t describe.
Noob here: How do you handle editing tags and album covers on that large amount of music? I recently started to experiment with learning how to use a batch script on mkv files to edit their metadata and was wondering if there was something similar with music files?
Depends. I tend to listen to whole albums, so I let LMS give me a random album if I wanna hear something new. If I’m in the mood for whatever, I do random mixes in LMS. LMS also has a music similarity feature (with plugins) that will play related songs after an album, too, so that also helps me find new stuff that sounds like stuff I already like
A single drive of that size goes for less than $100 USD (sometimes much less!). It’d actually be more economical to get an 8TB device for less than 2x the price. I’d suspect most folks in this community have far more than 3TB available…
Good on ya, with that much storage I would do that too :P
I’m about to build my first NAS, and intend to start with 8TB - for family backups, photos, music, TV shows, and self-hosted apps. That’s why the thought of dedicating 3TB, or ~1/3 of my entire storage, to music alone sounds nuts in the eyes of a beginner like me😂
But I guess it’s true what they say: Storage grows with time! Although I don’t wanna know how many songs you’ll have when I catch up to your current number…
I actually listen to music on Twitch a lot. I follow a handful of streamers who play music I like, and are always playing stuff that is new to me, and kindly list track IDs on the video feed.
I hear a song I like by an artist I am unfamiliar with and then guess what…? Entire discography.
This. Just search for open directories and download entire music collections from the web to the download folder. Then dump them into MusicBrainz Picard and move whatever has proper tags into your music library. Finally, play the newly downloaded songs in random order.
The amount of stuff out there is amazing! I discovered all kinds of genres streaming services never would’ve recommended to me. Truly widens your palette.
You should check out last.fm (or musicbrainz, which I prefer since its open source). You connect your apps to it (Plex, tidal, Spotify, etc), they send over songs as you listen to them, you can rank them as love or hate (and some other stuff) and they curate playlists and artists that they think you’ll like based on your listening habits
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
deleted by creator
I just download .MP3 or m4as of everything I add to my liked songs on Spotify. I pay for Spotify, but the offline functionality is bogus so I also keep regular copies of everything and don’t rely on whatever dumbass propriety offline format Spotify uses because it never actually plays anything when offline that way.
Soggfy is great if you are paying for Spotify anyway.
This seems like double work, do you have this automated?
I kinda did last time I needed to download anything. Not sure if it’s still working though. I used an app that would find and convert the songs out of a playlist from YouTube and other sources. But even at that time, it was a pain finding what I used; plenty of things claimed to do this but most of them were defunct and didn’t function.
To everyone in here saying they download entire discographies, great! I agree. But the follow up question is how do you even find out about new (to you) artists that you might like? I’ve cross referenced the library I have (about 27k tracks) with the “similar artists” sections of Spotify, last.fm, etc, and I feel like I’m just going around in circles. All of the similar artists are just similar to each other and I have all of it already. How do you branch out?
I’ve never found similar artists to be helpful. Most of the time it’s just a worse version of the thing I like. I don’t really like stuff that sounds very samey though.
In previous years I’ve found new stuff using Pandora Radio, Youtube Music, and occasionally just by browsing music communities. Reddit’s listentothis sub used to be really good for finding relatively unknown bands a number of years ago.
Pandora Radio advertises that instead of doing a basic genre or artist comparison, each track they have is manually analyzed for specific aspects of the track like “call and response”, “wall of sound”, “excessive vamping”, so it makes connections crossing genre lines.
Depending on how diverse your taste is, you could always try to branch out to something outside of “similar artists”. Just look up genre names and start checking them out. If you find something you like, you can use the same " similar artists" approach on an entirely new search space.
Listen to independent radio stations. Usually can find a stream link online and plug into a music player app.
I’m an old man. “Back in my day”, we heard by word of mouth, the radio, browsing at music shops, etc.
We can still do that in the digital age. When someone posts a random song, anywhere, check it out. Try checking out internet radio of genres you like (I’m finding a lot of Classical this way currently). Check out Bandcamp and IRL music store every once in a while just see what calls to you. Sometimes, let the cool album art guide you ;)
I go crate digging through soundcloud and bandcamp every so often, once in a while ill play a mix on youtube. Even if I only really like one or two songs on an album, i usually still download the entirety of it because sometimes i like just having songs on in the background if they fit a vibe i’m feeling. This is especially true for me with vaporwave, probably wouldn’t bump it on my commute for example but it can really make me drift mentally if i have it on in the background while say, browsing lemmy or something. And of course for my absolute favourite artists I tend to have almost if not the entire discography.
If I hear a song and like it, that works, I’mma download it since shitty rural internet, I may not be able to listen to that song on demand.
Whenever I get files in higher quality than you’d normally get from e.g. YouTube Music or Spotify. Currently I’m at a just 9.2 GiB library, but whatever, I don’t listen to music too often anyway
Lately ive been getting a lot of new music from rateyourmusic.com . I look up an album i like, find some themed lists featuring it that aound interesting (a lot of the lists are like “things i listened to this year”, i ignore those), and will hop from list to list as i see interesting looking albums.
Usually go for More obscure rare stuff like video game sound tacks and underground lesser known artists that I find. Eventually, the top ones that pique my interest I will end up buying physical copies or purchased digital files because I wanna show My support.
If I like it I download it, save the whole album or discography. Archive everything. Never delete. Same for books and movies and shows, though I find myself watching less of those lately.
I do the same. If i like them i download the discog. Gotta do something with 200tb nas
https://github.com/RandomNinjaAtk/arr-scripts/tree/main/lidarr downloads automatically. I don’t really decide. I add artists when I see one missing.
It’s more important to contribute to musicbrainz than to my library. If musicbrainz has it, I can dosnload it, if not, I can’t download it either.
So far I really haven’t had musicbrainz be missing any artists or songs, idk if its different if you listen to indie or niche music though
Honestly i mostly download songs on .mp3 format individually.
Unless someone has been kind enough to compile the entire album on a .zip file
Storage is cheap, and music (even in FLAC format) is small. You can fit tens of thousands of songs into a terabyte.
I download anything and everything. An artist I enjoy? Entire discography. I’ve only heard one song? Entire discography–there may be more I might enjoy! An artist in a genre I like but I’ve never heard? Entire discography.
I’m at over 125k songs, and I still feel like my collection is a sliver. I eventually want to reach 1m songs and truly become my own Spotify. Finding songs I’ve never heard before and that I end up loving in my own collection is a joy I can’t describe.
Noob here: How do you handle editing tags and album covers on that large amount of music? I recently started to experiment with learning how to use a batch script on mkv files to edit their metadata and was wondering if there was something similar with music files?
Interesting. Do you just listen on Random all the time, with maybe favorites or whatever?
Depends. I tend to listen to whole albums, so I let LMS give me a random album if I wanna hear something new. If I’m in the mood for whatever, I do random mixes in LMS. LMS also has a music similarity feature (with plugins) that will play related songs after an album, too, so that also helps me find new stuff that sounds like stuff I already like
Hol’ up: Let’s say the average size for a song (in FLAC format) is 30MB. 125k × 30 = 3’750’000 MB, or 3TB+!
Thas a lot of storage. O.o
FLAC is good, but not necessary for background listening. At 192k the average song is ~ 5Mb. 100k x 5 = 0.5 TB.
A single drive of that size goes for less than $100 USD (sometimes much less!). It’d actually be more economical to get an 8TB device for less than 2x the price. I’d suspect most folks in this community have far more than 3TB available…
36 TB usable space on my NAS… Music doesn’t even make a dent
Good on ya, with that much storage I would do that too :P
I’m about to build my first NAS, and intend to start with 8TB - for family backups, photos, music, TV shows, and self-hosted apps. That’s why the thought of dedicating 3TB, or ~1/3 of my entire storage, to music alone sounds nuts in the eyes of a beginner like me😂
But I guess it’s true what they say: Storage grows with time! Although I don’t wanna know how many songs you’ll have when I catch up to your current number…
You pretty much calculated spot on! ;)
How do you decide what to listen to? I assume you don’t listen to multiple entire discographies
Whatever I feel like listening to that day. In that regard it’s no different than having a massive Spotify/Apple music library
If I wanna listen to something and I don’t know what, I just let LMS give me a random album and see what I get!
I actually listen to music on Twitch a lot. I follow a handful of streamers who play music I like, and are always playing stuff that is new to me, and kindly list track IDs on the video feed.
I hear a song I like by an artist I am unfamiliar with and then guess what…? Entire discography.
Random works pretty well, but PlexAmp has a lot of ways to curate playlists, and that’s what I’ve been using for my local collection.
This. Just search for open directories and download entire music collections from the web to the download folder. Then dump them into MusicBrainz Picard and move whatever has proper tags into your music library. Finally, play the newly downloaded songs in random order.
The amount of stuff out there is amazing! I discovered all kinds of genres streaming services never would’ve recommended to me. Truly widens your palette.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
deleted by creator
Like other people, whole discographies. Artist URL straight into deemix and let it do it’s thing.
For finding new music, I mostly rely on radiostations such as Kerrang! and YouTube subscriptions or recommendations.
MP3 320 is what I go for, I don’t have the equipment to benefit from FLAC.
I set and forget too, never delete. You never know when it’ll become impossible to get that data back if you want it.
You should check out last.fm (or musicbrainz, which I prefer since its open source). You connect your apps to it (Plex, tidal, Spotify, etc), they send over songs as you listen to them, you can rank them as love or hate (and some other stuff) and they curate playlists and artists that they think you’ll like based on your listening habits
Download everything that would upset you if it were no longer available forever starting tomorrow.