I recently made a post asking about getting spotify cheaper via vpn.
My question to everyone: how do you decide what to download?
Do you just grab everything, do you use last fm, do you erase music that you never listen to?
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.
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.
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
You pretty much calculated spot on! ;)
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…
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?
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.
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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.
bandcamp is awesome.
Band camp Fridays are cool too when they give up their cut so artists get 100% of sales.
If i like it.
Honestly i mostly download songs on .mp3 format individually.
Unless someone has been kind enough to compile the entire album on a .zip file
I add stations to my radio app, like Ancient FM, Cosmo Vintage, Intergalactic FM, King Dub, Nightwave Plaza, Radio Nova. Tons of cool stuff comes up, most is tagged. If I really like it I soulseek it. I stopped downloading whole albums by default, good tunes end up in my assorted folder. I throw out stuff I don’t listen to as well, I’m not a hoarder.
“Now that’s what I call music” I’m embarrassed to say, I use those volumes a lot to keep in touch with younger generations, new music. Also, among the more popular torrents generally, so download fast.
I purposely went out and found every super adult and suggestive grunge song they covered with Kidz Bop because it’s hilarious hearing little kids singing Nirvana and Bush songs
You’d probably like Richard Cheese (vulgar rap and rock done as vegas style lounge music).
For less vulgar, but still fun genre switch up, Paul Anka’s album Rock Swings is nice. Similarly there’s Pat Boone’s album In A Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy.
I love Dick Cheese ever since Dawn of the Dead used his version of Disturbed’s Down With the Sickness 😁
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Paul Anka’s album Rock Swings is nice
Pat Boone’s album In A Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Baba Brinkman does rap music about science, evolution.
Dunno why, but your comment reminded of this:
That was some fire 🔥 🤣
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/2oRlBmwKzy4?si=NIg2ELZBkRCm_HzO
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I just set up lidarr with all artists I like listening to and tell it to download everything they’ve made. That’s how I have about 700gb of flac files
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.
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.
Download everything that would upset you if it were no longer available forever starting tomorrow.
When I buy something, I add it to my library. If I need or want to listen to something in more narrow a category, that’s what playlists & metadata are for.
For example, if I just want to listen to songs by Miracle of Sound, I go to Miracle of Sound in my music player app and click play or shuffle.
If I want to play a particular playlist that I’ve made, I just go to the Playlists tab and select which one I want.
The interface of course varies with the app.
+1 on Vinyl music player
afa music collection, I slowly shift things from folder to folder where I gradually cull tracks which I decide I no longer need to hear. I curate rather than hoard (although I see long term value in others opting to keep everything for the sake of all; so ‘hoard’ is not intended to judge those who do in this instance).
To find new music, I lean on Bandcamp. ofc they’re trying to sell the artist on the platform; but the blogs are often quite good, steering me to stuff I would’ve unlikely discovered on my own. If I identify a new genre that I’ve gravitated towards, I read up on it, e.g. on Wikipedia, to find other artists emblematic of the style
Yeah, Vinyl Music Player is awesome. Been using it for a a couple years now, and before that I used the app it was forked from (I can’t remember the name).
And yeah Bandcamp is fantastic! I use it all the time to discover artists I’d never have known about otherwise. :)
