In the pre-streaming days I used to have a large collection of ripped and downloaded music. However as my taste in music is extremely wide and it became easier and more fun to use hacked streaming services (i.e. Youtube Music Vanced) to play music especially on the go, I decided to let my music collection go years ago. Plus… it was a big mess due to undiagnosed ADHD so let’s be honest it wasn’t a huge loss.
Now with the streaming ecosystem degrading and me now capable of keeping my things in order, I find myself wanting to start rebuilding a local music collection for the coming post-streaming era.
Wondering if there are any places I could find huge collection torrents that could be pared down to what I want, rather than spending my life downloading single albums or discographies? I’m ideally talking torrents that would be like 20GB of funk, but not just a shitload of tracks in a root directory with no tagging.
One of my favourite things about streaming services is getting to hear tracks or artists I haven’t even thought of in ages, and it’s hard to build a collection when you can’t think of exactly what to put in it!
Not exactly what you’ve asked for but you can download something like lidarr and plug it into your spotify recommendations and let it go. you’ll wind up with a huge library of everything you like to listen to.
Thanks, this sounds like a great way to start building a library and might actually be more effective than downloading massive torrents, especially as it claims to handle metadata and tagging effectively. Definitely will give it a try!
Lidarr is definitely worth a try (and also worth figuring out docker containers for).
Lidarr can be very effective at building a library, but be prepared for it to grab a bunch of stuff you maybe didn’t know you wanted and sometimes struggle to get that one specific album you need to go complete a set. It takes quite a bit of fiddling to get it going on it’s own. I’ve never really let it have free reign. I make it add torrents paused so that I can approve them individually and I don’t let it touch the part of my collection that I consider final and good. For example, I’d never want it to over write the stuff I ripped from my personal collection of physical media. So far as I can tell Lidarr is still also not the right tool if you have or want a bunch of live recordings or bootlegs.
I still buy a bunch of music, but now it’s almost all purchased as directly from the artists as I can reasonably manage; like live show merch tables, band websites, Bandcamp, etc. It wouldn’t be odd for me to grab a rip from Lidarr at the same time I buy a copy in my preferred physical format from the artist. Don’t forget to add that new stuff’s metadata to musicbrainz.org if it doesn’t already exist. Past me has definitely saved present me some hassle by doing this when I wanted to reorganize my library.
Another recommendation for soulseek here.
I also rip a lot of stuff from Spotify using soggfy, I’ll make long playlists and just leave it running over night ripping everything. It requires a bit of sorting out afterwards into respective folders for artist / album etc but that is a price I’m happy to pay for the saved money of not having to buy all the releases.
Anything I can’t find on either of those but still really want I will usually buy on bandcamp.
For downloading music Soulseek is my main source. I might grab a torrent here and there for a specific release or when it’s just a mess to get with Soulseek (like the Final Fantasy OSTs).
For managing the library and listening to it, Foobar2000 all the way. It can get a while to set it up properly but it will be tailored to your liking. It’s the most advanced player out there. And there are plenty of add-ons (called components) to add features and basically do anything you could need : play MIDI or old consoles music files, play music from Youtube, get tags from Discogs or MusicBrainz, get lyrics, UPnP server… The interface is highly customizable as well. And you can create shortcuts for almost anything, components included (although shortcuts would need a revamp).
Oh and I didn’t told you about queries. That makes tag fields as variables. So now you could make a query on a genre, a codec, an artist… “%codec% IS FLAC” will output only FLAC files. Very, very handy to manage your library. These variables can also be used to rename or move files. You can also use queries to create autoplaylists. These playlists are auto-updated based on the query, you don’t have to maintain them. I have made a bunch for 60s to 2020s music, my favorite artists, or mixed compilations.
A few components to install right away : Playback Statistics and Enhanced Playback Statistics, they will no only give you better play stats (duh) but also new query fields. Masstagger to make batch modification on tags, this will save you a lot of time. Also for now install the 32bits version, many components are not available on the 64bits yet.
So yeah Foobar2000 takes a bit of time, but it’s great, highly customizable. It has saved me dozens if not hundreds of hours to manage my library. And it’s free. It’s my favorite piece or software and I could talk about it all day long.
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Whaaat Soulseek still exists? Thanks, will check it out
Not only it exists, but it is the best option alongside downloaders that use streaming services like Deezer. Maybe there are private trackers for music, but I have never found torrents to be great for music, never knew about what.cd before it went down.
Finding someone in Soulseek with good internet speed and music you like and downloading parent folder might be the best option in your case.
Another great source as some have mention is just random blogs, there are quite a lot such blogs on blogspot.com for example. Have occasionally found great stuff there
I love to browser users files, not so much to see what they have I could be interested in, but mostly to check out how they manage their music folders. Every person does it differently.
For software I would recommend a combination of
- musicbee for library and music management and sync playlists over wifi locally
- maybe combine with mp3tag if you don’t like the built in tagger in musicbee. Only reason for me to use mp3tag is to include the style tag from Discogs into the genre field. Not possible with musicbee. If this is not in your interest musicbee’s tagger is amazing.
- there are two private trackers focusing on music only. Insane collections. One is very hard to get into. The other is way easier.
- rutracker is also a great source for music
1337x is good for flac discographies
Noob question
Whenever I search for 1337x or any other site someone recommends, how do I know which one is reliable? Because if I search in Google, DuckDuckGo, or any other search engine, I get results with domains ending in .is .to. .tw .skin .net etc.
Are they all just different proxies to the same thing or is there a list of reliable links?
I use 1337 for discographies, random blogspot websites for flac concert bootlegs
Deemix with a Deezer free trial for good quality, free is 128kbps.
You can also find ARL cookie strings for premium accounts around. Eventually they go down, but there always seem to be some available
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Deezloader is still a thing and pretty comfy.
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