this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2025
438 points (98.5% liked)

Technology

78121 readers
1737 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
L4s@hackingne.ws
438
Backing up Spotify (annas-archive.li)
submitted 1 week ago by JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org to c/technology@lemmy.world
106 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] arcterus@piefed.blahaj.zone 42 points 1 week ago (8 children)
  1. Over-focus on the most popular artists. There is a long tail of music which only gets preserved when a single person cares enough to share it. And such files are often poorly seeded.
  • We primarily used Spotify’s “popularity” metric to prioritize tracks. View the top 10,000 most popular songs in this HTML file (13.8MB gzipped).
  • For popularity>0, we got close to all tracks on the platform. The quality is the original OGG Vorbis at 160kbit/s. Metadata was added without reencoding the audio (and an archive of diff files is available to reconstruct the original files from Spotify, as well as a metadata file with original hashes and checksums).
  • For popularity=0, we got files representing about half the number of listens (either original or a copy with the same ISRC). The audio is reencoded to OGG Opus at 75kbit/s — sounding the same to most people, but noticeable to an expert.

Perhaps I'm reading this wrong, but is this not a little backwards? Since unpopular music is poorly preserved, shouldn't the focus be on getting the least popular music first?

[–] UltraMagnus@startrek.website 13 points 1 week ago

The politics of preservation is definitely an interesting one. I suppose one argument in favor of preserving more popular music is that there are going to be fewer popular tracks than unpopular tracks - and they're already at 300TB, which is nothing to sneeze at, especially since it's a third the size of their existing library of ebooks.

load more comments (7 replies)