Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I use soulseek and the FMHY list of sites for acquisition. As far as discovery, no idea really. I'm still working on getting my Spotify favorites downloaded for now. I have kinda gotten back on last.fm for scrobbling and hopefully some discovery, but honestly I connected mpdscribble and haven't looked at it since.

Navidrome has been on my radar for unifying mobile access instead of syncthing duplicating everything, but I keep putting off setting up a home server.

slsk! When Audiogalaxy got shut down, that’s where we fled to. Not as much these days since I have a Deezer sub, but every now and again the completionist in me wants the flacs for offine. Have a large repository that goes back to the late 1990s when EMusic accounts were being shared and there were no gates to stop that. Was like backing your pickup truck to the Amoeba Records loading dock and filling er up!

Soulseek is kinda weird now. Wasn’t always full of gatekeepers and the stuffy folks. Time changes things, I suppose. Some of my old slsk friends are still on there.

Lidarr for discographies and keeping up with releases, deemix for downloading singles direct from deezer. I often only like one song from a release and hate having to filter through full discographies to find the one thing I like, so this works great for me. Deemix is also blazingly fast.

This all goes to jellyfin and i play it on my phone with symphonium.

I tend to look for specific songs. If I can't find something on Bittorrent, I'll look on all the p2p networks, and if it's not there either, I'll settle for downloading audio-only off of YT.

nicotine+ also I make playlists in Spotify and download them with onthespot, and then finally use old school forums for niche bits.

get the original cd/vinyl/non-remastered (there are exceptions) release flac from nicotine+ for my desktop, convert it to 96 kbps opus for my phone.

Jellyfin + Nicotine+

I don't pirate music, I buy it from Bandcamp. Then I download the files to my storage server and sync it to my phone, or play it with MPD.

I wish I could do the same with movies and TV shows....

I have a streaming subscription on qobuz, and use qobuz-dl to download anything that’s available to stream on qobuz. I tried using soulseek for a bit but it was sometimes a bit hit-or-miss with my searches, so the qobuz stream-rip option seemed like the best compromise. I’ve still got soulseek running, though, so whatever I get from qobuz is made available to the community.

I use Lidarr to manage my library. If you don’t mind running the plugins branch, there’s a qobuz-dl plugin that will let you utilize this method to download albums directly through Lidarr. Qobuz often has multiple versions of an album that can be hard to differentiate in the lidarr UI, so I often just end up downloading the specific version I want and then importing it into lidarr.

fucking cassettes

i used to download from deezer when public ARLs were extremely easy to get and use, but they got more restrictive recently. these days i just soulseek.

I am on a music private tracker called Orpheus.. I download everything I want from there. I also have navidrome, it automatically scans the folder for new albums and I have transcoding enabled so whenever I play music it transcodes to opus 162kbps. That's if.

For streaming/discovery, custom cli application that scrapes Bandcamp 'recommended' albums to get associations between them and considers what I've liked and disliked for probability weights determining what to play next, playing them with mpv.

For actually downloading stuff I like enough to want to save, I have a dedicated button to take the url in my clipboard and save audio files from it to my music folder with a script that uses yt-dlp

yubal to grab stuff from yt, then some scripts smashing Claude and beets together for more intelligent automation, then navidrome for serving. Occasionally I'll use slskd for more obscure stuff. Tempus is my current Android player of choice.