Is music piracy dying?

And009@vlemmy.net to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 405 points –

Most of the discussion and sources of content talk about movies and series.

I've been recently looking for psy and techno music, finding FLAC or WAV with active seeders feels like striking gold. It's definitely been a while since I've looked for active torrent sites and it feels more barren than ever.

Edit: Thank you all for all that valuable information. The reddit group really wasn't this helpful and valued making fun over adding real use able knowledge.

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It's certainly alive and exists.

But access to music is easy and affordable. It's more inconvenient for me to pirate it than just use a streaming service.

I also listen to a lot of independent artists and rather buy their stuff to support them.

The only music I pirate is stuff that isn’t on Spotify, namely Nintendo game soundtracks

Expect a cease and desist order

Haha I mean it’s not like I share it with anyone else. I just have it on my Plex server in an enormous video game music playlist I shuffle through when I’m reading or working

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The thing is not every popular or moderately popular song is on any streaming site. I'm a fan of 90s and 00s trance music, and there are some notable songs that aren't available on any of the most popular paid services, or are available only in newer, re-recorded versions or remixes - some of them are available on Spotify, but not all. YouTube Music has such an advantage that you can listen not only to the songs uploaded by record labels, but also to countless additional songs available on YouTube, however most of the time they are in worse quality (AFAIK max audio bit rate in YT videos is 128 kbps). So while streaming services are now affordable and have very extensive audio library, they have some shortcomings that one can only fill with physical media or piracy.

I prefer there not being any lag in-between songs, which most streaming services have.

I usually use a streaming service like YouTube (through piped) to find new artists, then use soulseek to download their entire discography.

The problem with streaming is that the companies will eventually figure out new ways to squeeze every penny out of you. The once 'free' YouTube is now blocking adblocks, and Spotify requires DRM to be installed for it to function.

For me, piracy isn't just about convenience or price, it's mainly about control over the media I have.

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The soulseek network is still alive and well.

I agree, Nicotine+ and Soulseek is the way to get music these days.

And for those saying using streaming services is easy and affordable so they don't bother, I would remind you, it is... for now.

Look at what has happened time and time again with all these companies and how they just slowly squeeze their users over time or just flat out kill the service entirely. As someone that is really into selfhosting, and prefers to be in control of my data and privacy I would urge you to move away from those services. Setup Airsonic, Funkwhale, or some other streaming music service and control it yourselves.

You're not wrong and I'm happy that piracy communities exist in spaces where access is easily cheap and accessible if only for the days that those industries get greedier. But for now, I'm happy to pay when it's affordable and easy to access.

I half agree with what Gabe Newell said in regards to piracy being a service issue and not about price. I think it largely is a service issue. Access is the greater problem. Price is secondary as long as it's somewhat reasonable. I don't pirate video games because I can get them reasonably, but he is a smidge wrong insofar as I don't buy the outrageously expensive games. Steam's major success is having good sales that keep me away from pirating because the possibility of games I want going on discount at some point is realistic. It's telling that the only time I did dabble in video game piracy was to relive my childhood memories of Nazi Zombies from the Call of Duty video games. I dabbled in it then because Activision is selling their decades old games for outrageous prices considering their age and their "sales" are weak considering the already overinflated price. I refuse to pay for that. And so I sailed the high seas.

The music industry is still affordable and accessible, so I don't feel that pressure at all. Back when Limewire was around the pressure was there partially because I was a kid and didn't have much money and hunting down CDs I wanted for the obscure music I liked was challenging. It was mostly an accessibility issue that Spotify fixed. If their prices move beyond my means then that relationship will no longer benefit me and the sails will raise once more.

You can do both - pay for music when it comes from sources like Bandcamp, Qobuz, etc where you get to own the FLAC file. Don't pay for things like Spotify where the music you've "purchased" is not yours to keep.

Can’t. I’m addicted to the algorithms. Music discovery guided by AI is too much fun. If I was only using streaming services to listen to music I already know or the new albums from artists I already like them I’d be with you, but now I’m hooked on finding new stuff.

Funkwhale is federated. I have discovered lots of good stuff on there via other servers. Not algorithmic, but once you find a server that appeals to you, there's a lot to dig into.

There's also https://libre.fm and https://listenbrainz.org/ and https://openwhyd.org/

+1 to ListenBrainz. It's an awesome tool for tracking your listening habits (kinda like Last.fm). Combined with Pano Scrobbler, I can create collage pics of my most listened-to artists or albums of a given time period (per week/month/year). It's a great service and I want to donate to that project in the future, because I get so much value out of it.

"Guided by AI" I think you mean algorithms programmed according to strict music licensing contracts from the labels that say a service needs to suggest label-preferred "complimentary" artists over actual similar music that you would like based on a collection of characteristics in a given song/band's sound signature.

You have evidence this is happening on Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist?

Richard Stallman wrote a quick page on the shady things Spotify does (3 minute read not counting the linked articles). Although only loosely related to what you asked for. According to the info I found online, Discover Weekly should be safe from the kinds of sponsorships you talk about (the whole article takes about 8-15 minutes to read, but I quoted the important part below).

A representative for Spotify tells Vox that the user experience of Discover Weekly will not change — e.g., Nike can’t buy the playlist for the week and serve everyone a Frank Ocean song — and reiterates, “Discover Weekly is, and will remain, a powerful means of artists winning new fans.

If you close your eyes, you can metaphorically hear the tides changing on the music streaming industry. The fall of Netflix is such a stark reminder of how fast these convenient services can morph into user hostile experiences.

Plus, there is the added philosophical discussion about what it means to allow a centralized corporate media conglomerate to curate your music for you. I'd imagine that their insentivisation structure over what should be heard is different than yours.

For serious though, I hypothesize that your library/playlist data (xml, maybe? somewhere? I'm just starting the journey of offloading.) is more valuable to users than the music itself. Next step is figuring out how to export Spotify's data.

Alive and well is doing some heavy lifting if you consider being a husk of your former glory "alive and well". Yes you can definitely find stuff there that can't be found anywhere else, even through conventional means. But it's certainly not the soulseek of yesterday.

Oh wow! I've exclusively streamed for a number of years now, but used to be pretty active on Soulseek (+10 years ago). Totally forgot the name until you mentioned it. Glad to hear it's still up and running fine.

Soulseak was king for screamo and emo rock in the mid 00s

Go on there and share some of your stuff, if you want. We'll be glad if people help keep the network alive. ;)

It's pretty amazing but I listen to a curated stream of Goth and EDM. I buy what I really like on Bandcamp.

why pirate when bandcamp has everything I want on FLAC for pennies

I buy on Bandcamp and pirate through Soulseek (specifically Nicotine+).

I also buy Vinyls.

Torrenting music has been pretty trash for me so I haven't bothered in ages.

bandcamp

I didn't know about bandcamp. I'm gonna buy some albums there. The music is drm-free? I think that what bandcamp and itch.io are doing should be the future of the industry.

Yes, the music there is drm free. Keep in mind it's not ALL music. It's mostly music from independent artists. But they are the ones that need the most support. So go all in!

Bandcamp is pretty great. I usually stream from their app but you can download music you buy in a bunch of formats.

I like their writeups they do sometimes (like a "best doom metal from Texas" deep dive)

They do Bandcamp Fridays sometimes where they yield their share of the sale to the artists.

I've also had artists write back a few times when I put a comment in the box when buying stuff. Most notably an invite to a show they were playing once.

They did get bought by epic though so they're not indie anymore. A bummer. But epic hasn't shit it up yet so far as I know.

Yup that's exactly why it has flourished in the past decade or so

IMO, Bandcamp is one of the best places to go if you actually want to support artists. Spotify and other streaming options tend to be the worst.

I bought music from several artists on Bandcamp and could not download some of it 12 months later. Artist unresponsive, Bandcamp support unwilling to help. And now Tencent has it's tendrils in the company so expect it to get worse.

what exactly is soulseek? is it p2p or download from a server? Is using a VPN recomended?

Soulseek is p2p. I prefer to use a VPN but it is not necessary. What is necessary is port forwarding if you want to share your own files. You can either set that up in your router, or through your VPN if you're using one (it must be a VPN that supports port forwarding)

its p2p download from other users, if you want to share your library you should probably use a VPN. You dont have to share your library but its kind of frowned upon to not do it.

It's p2p, and the protocol is not very secure. You should probably use a VPN, yes. The content shared is really good, even if it has slowly decreased along the years. Just be selective about who you tell about slsk to help keep it under the radar, please. First rule of the blue bird is : don't speak of the blue bird.

Is nicotine working good for you? Last time I tried it, it was missing some search results that were instead appearing in soulseek-qt client

Nicotine is working fine for me. Although I'll have to check out soulseek-qt myself to see if there is any difference in search results Up until now, I haven't had problems finding anything unless it was something that was released within the week (usually singles)(which I just rip from youtube)

Bandcamp is great. Fuck corporate labels who prevent artists from releasing their music privately on the platform. It's an abhorrent business practice.

This is exactly what I do, music is just too messy to find every song

Since Apple Music / Spotify I don’t find it necessary. Far more likely to pirate TV / movies because they’re spread out across so many different services and require so many different subscriptions.

Yeah except I use Spicetify on windows and some "premium unlocked" APK on android because the ads are (intentionally) annoying as hell

I'd recommend trying out XManager so you don't have to download Spotify apks from shady websites. I don't use Spotify so I don't know how often it updates, but I've heard good things about it.

Same. I would love for someone to create a real debrid - stremio equivalent for music instead of video.

I am working on just the thing! Hopefully will manage to have some sort of music suggestion embedded into it as well without the need of Spotify or whatever algorithm people use. Currently working on making it accessible for people to export their libraries from whatever streaming service they're using.

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I have Spotify through a family plan but I do download backups for when the enshitification happens to them.

I just use lidarr with the deezloader script. Sign up for a month of deezer premium every six months and just download my back log. For $30/yr I always have a relatively up to date, lossless quality, music library backup.

I'ma get hate for this but I'm not pirating out of principle but when I think something it's to expensive for it's price. I live in a country with good salaries and have to work less than one hour for one month of endless music. To me that is a good deal but I am aware that it is not to everyone especially those from other countries. I mostly pirate Movies and TV Shows because you would need to pay over 50€/month to get access to all services.

Nah, not happening. I used to buy stuff from play music because they used to let u download the mp3, flac, etc. Then i would use it for an old android 4 phone wich i use as player.

But since they kill it im not doing that anymore, i refuse to suffer a netflix 2.o now with more tears for all the money u invested and watching how it evaporates because a suit tough it was something nobody watches even when it's one of ur more popular shows, or worse, they block ur country and u end up in piracy once more.

If u wanna use the argument of "but we need to help the creators, bla, bla, bla", dude if u really wanna help them donate them directly, be it music or series, it has been more than proven that they only recibe the bare minimum by conventional means.

Those are cheap in my country and we don't have access to high quality service like tidal either

I have people download my files on soulseek/nicotine+ daily. Plus anyone that would pirate music probably already know how to rip it straight from streaming services.

Soulseek is still around? It's been like 10 years since I've used it

I use it daily, they even have a mobile version called Seeker which is pretty nice.

Omg you're amazing! I've been searching for an Android version of soulseek for ages, and somehow never got recommended Seeker. The only app I found was dead by the time I downloaded it.

Awesome, enjoy! I was in the same position and super happy to find it.

Soulseek is very much alive, try there. But please try to share your stuff too.

Yes for sure, I am seeder #2 for most of the gold I've struck in the past few weeks

Slow downloads. Downloads infinitely queued. No flac available. No thank you.

There's plenty of flac on soulseek, I actually filter them out of my search results

The one time I searched for something it failed me. That's not good.

What are you talking about i have tens of gigabytes worth of flacs from slsk

Of course there are flac. But not everything. And some are locked or very slow or just dont start downloading. Its a bad solution. Way better solutions exist

As the normies went to streaming it became more gatekept and toxic. I’m mainly familiar with the attitude of trades only or straight up selling tracks (eg groupbuys with kids paying thousands of dollars for some shitty Kanye mumble demo). The game didn’t used to be like that. The days of the blogs with mega/rapid share links are long gone

I mean you got all the stream rippers eg SlavArt which is super nice. Soulseek is still alright but getting taken over by traders. RED/OPS around but you can’t just waltz in and I’d argue they don’t compare to what.cd or even OinK. RuTracker still got stuff going on

But when you’re after actual rare stuff that you can’t just buy or stream it can be real tough nowadays. Scene archives can be nice but very hard to get access and it’s mostly mp3s.

Fuck traders, if you're on Soulseek do the right thing and blacklist them.

Traders are hardly just on Soulseek. Most probably aren’t since it’s so accessible. Most of the traders I’ve seen on Soulseek anyways are scammers who are just sharing RED repositories. Or they’re on dc++ hubs where you can’t have locked files anyways

The best thing good users can do is remain on the client for the long term, ensuring traders remain a small minority. The next best thing they can do is PM traders regularly with requests to share. Make their sessions a pain in the butt due to the private chat alert going off routinely. 'Hey trader, please open up to non-buddies temporarily, even at a crippled speed. I'd like two items from you. You know Soulseek is a sharing platform, right?' Some may realise the ridiculousness of their position and co-operate.

Don't stoop to their level by blacklisting, either. They will take that as endorsement of their behaviour. (Set 20kb/s down if it makes you feel better.)

'Hey trader, please open up to non-buddies temporarily, even at a crippled speed. I'd like two items from you. You know Soulseek is a sharing platform, right?'

Will try it, thanks. Seems more civilized.

Don't stoop to their level by blacklisting, either. They will take that as endorsement of their behaviour. (Set 20kb/s down if it makes you feel better.)

Thanks for the tip. That seems like a better punishment.

Spotify is very affordable and provides pretty much all music on earth. I'm not interested in jumping through hoops to download songs if I can just conveniently stream them all from one legit service.

Yep its basically like Netflix before it shit the bed.

The state of video streaming is hardly Netflix's fault. When every channel starts a subscription service and pulls it's content from the others everyone loses.

Music streaming on the other hand is a complete experience on every service. It's kind of a miracle tbh.

You can pay for any streaming service that serves FLAC and rip that. Very easy to do for Tidal and Deezer for example.

Soulseek is the goto piracy thing for music.

Streaming service ripping is alive and well.

Youtube scrapers like Newpipe and alternative frontend makes listening easy if you aren't quality obsessed. This has been adequate for my levels of listening.

Some private trackers have massive music collection dumps.

However, I'd say directly supporting artists through storefronts like bandcamp is the best way to go, where it's available. No DRM, no bullshit, the artist benefits. This, to me, is the best alternative to piracy.

Napster, Deezer, Tidal aren't terrible offerings either FWIW.

Sorry to ask a dumb question but how do I rip from streaming services? It's worth buying a subscription for this ability

youtube-dl has the ability to extract audio

And there are similar apps for my streaming services.

I don't want to link to anything directly, but it's possible to use ReVanced to get YouTube Music for free.

I've always wondered why today you would torrent music instead of just downloading the audio from another site like yt.

The only upside I could see to torrenting music is the better quality, which is fair I guess, if you want super high quality.

I guess it depends on how you listen music, most of the time it's nice to be able to torrent the full discography of a specific artist. Or just download an album you bought because you don't have time to rip it yourself (vinyls for example).

Some stuff is too obscure to be on Youtube, and IIRC the bitrate there is only 192kbps. It's acceptable as far as I care, but I would still look for better rips if available.

YT has opus files that are pretty good. Definitely enough for most

iirc for music opus starts being transparent (i.e where you or most people can't tell quality loss) at 160kbps

Makes it insane to store flac for anything else than archival purposes

YouTube quality is horrendous. Converted from 44.1k to 48k then compressed to shit in 128kbps Opus/AAC.

YouTube quality is horrendous. Converted from 44.1k to 48k then compressed to shit in 128kbps Opus/AAC.

YouTube quality is horrendous. Converted from 44.1k to 48k then compressed to shit in 128kbps Opus/AAC.

YouTube quality is horrendous. Converted from 44.1k to 48k then compressed to shit in 128kbps Opus/AAC.

I stream music off of YouTube a bit and I can tell you the poor quality is notable on good speakers for certain artists/songs. It is jaring enough at times it breaks my focus and I switch to my local collection.

YouTube quality is horrendous. Converted from 44.1k to 48k then compressed to shit in 128kbps Opus/AAC.

Rutracker.org maybe. I find pretty much every music I want on it. Though i mostly listen mainstream so maybe it is easier to find it.

Not for me, I'm pirating tons of songs in these days. Try Soulseek it's a gold mine of good music with great quality

Soulseek has been great since I found it. I've been able to replace so much of my CD collection that I ripped 2 decades ago in 256 MP3 with flac.

Music is hard to find on public trackers. RED and ORP are awesome private trackers that have basically anything you can think of. And if its not use the deezload telegram bot and send it a link to the song on deezer

Or you can you soulseek. That's still very viable even today

Good leads, the bot sounds interesting

Soulseek has most of what you need. 3ost has pretty rare stuff and rutracker as well

Finally someone else that uses Soulseek. It's been around for years and is the best place to download whole albums or discographies in high quality.

The thing about it is that Spotify premium to me isn't that expensive and has everything I need

Spotify has basically nothing I've ever tried to actively listen to. It's also missing tracks of larger artists. It's also still subject to licensing which means what you have saved isn't guaranteed to be there forever (unless you're using a spotify downloader, I guess. I don't know why you would if you feel comfortable enough paying for it but not enough that you won't still download them?). Personally, to me it seems crazy to pay $10 a month for music I'm probably going to listen to for each month for the rest of my life? People always say it's great for discovery but I don't see how it's any better than any other avenue of finding new artists and releases. The convenience of an online app isn't very convenient for me, it being streamed is something that affects me on road trips and I'd need to have the foresight to download something, vs permanently having the songs on my phone (or a step further, microSD cards filled with music.) Like it was before? Just like Google Photos, if I can host my own photo backup on my computer why am I paying someone else an exorbitant fee? I can take this even further, I have Plex setup (and other music servers) and use Plexamp which is essentially my curated Spotify. Bonus: I have my core music on my phone, I have extra music streaming to me.

It also doesn't seem to be sustainable, each yeah Spotify operates at a loss while artists get very little payout from it. More than if you pirated from them, sure, but much less than if you just buy the album directly from their options be it physical or digital, or buy just one concert ticket and one merch item.

All this said, as with most things these are subjective case by case freedoms. Many get what they need from it and that's good enough and they're happy. Others just like to rip it all themselves and setup bubbleuPnP servers, and some probably are still just only playing CD's through their car that doesn't have AUX or bluetooth. If your decision to listen to an artist with the intent to give them your money, you probably should buy things from them instead of listening to them exclusively on Spotify you pay for. If your decision to listen to music is to just hear stuff, discovery, and it has even just 60% of a catalog of songs you'd listen to, the convenience is probably worth paying for. Especially given that technically the alternatives I've mentioned have an upfront cost of a computer and hard drives - for what it's worth only the cost of 2 years of Spotify and ~2 to 4 hours of setup time, but still a larger cost nonetheless.

That's worth it for some, they just prefer having it all physical/digitally stored and accessible for sampling and playback, the discovery and library probably aren't as deep as what they're looking for.

while artists get very little payout from it

This! I've seen people claim they like Spotify because it's legal and you support the artist that way, but the actual money they get from each song-listening is comically miniscule compared to the profit from the traditional mediums (vinyl/CD).

I was watching an interview with Norwegian musicians Tellef and Sigrid Raabe last week and this question came up. Tellef had a pretty good explanation of the problem with Spotify (and related streaming services) as he sees it.

Yes, that sounds very much like the other descriptions of the issue that I've come across.

For me, the daily playlist mix alone is worth the entry price.

Before Netflix started sucking there was even a brief moment in time when people thought movie piracy was dying.

Then the industry went ahead and shot itself in the foot by trying to compete by making the competition worse (pushing for exclusive content) rather than themselves better (developing a more appealing product).

quite a bunch of services that can pull high quality music directly from streaming sites. straight up lossless stuff as well

I still use soulseek, been using it for nearly 20 years at this point

For music from artists that don't exist anymore I mostly use ddl. If the artist is still there and offers a decent way of giving them money, I usually do that.

god, there's lot of telegram bots which can download music from services like deezer/spotify/soundcloud/etc

from my perspective, music piracy is not dying anytime soon

God, I need to start using Telegram.

Telegram is a shitty messenger apart from having a big file upload limit, which makes it good for piracy. Anyway, those bots just scrape song titles, go to youtube and download songs from there, no magic involved

The audio quality pales in comparison. I have no idea if Dezer scrapping is still working but you can get flac from scrapping it. YouTube music is junk

Why would you say it’s a shitty messenger though? As far as privacy goes, they haven’t ever complied with authorities for takedowns etc and I think for many countries its so useful in terms of protest organization like in HK. Not to mention the polish. No need to subscribe to Telegram Premium either its kinda just a way to support server costs.

I personally like being able to use Spotify as my front-end, but it doesn't support flac. So I personally pay for Deezer's Flac option, I use xManager for listening to music on Spotify, and I have a script setup to automatically download all my liked Spotify songs from Deezer in lossless flac. It's not free by any means, but is the best/easiest way to download music I've found.

https://github.com/jbh-cloud/spotify_sync

So you pay for Spotify and deezr? I also want a flac Frontend..

No, I just pay for Deezer Flac. xManager lets you use Spotify ad-free so the listening experience there is still 320 Kbps but I like the recommendation system better. it's basically free Spotify premium. If I like any song a Spotify, spotify_sync will automatically grab it and download the flac file to my server. If I want to listen to lossless music, I just listen to my stored music using my Jellyfin server as a front-end. I never actually touch Deezer's front-end at all.

Interesting, thanks! I'll have to take a look

I pay for family spotify - we all use it a lot and the Daily Mixes, Release Radar, Discover Weekly playlists are unbeatble. I've used Tidal, Deezer, Youtube music before but their playlist creation is nowwhere near as good.

However I do download from Deemix as a backup . For me 128kbp is totally fine for what I need - yes its not the highest quality, but through bluetooth speakers in the car or bluetooth headphones it sounds absolutely fine for me. It might not be CD quality, but its better than broadcast radio, which is perfectly good enough for me.

128kbp

You must love AM radio

People have different tolerancies for these sorts of things. I bet @plexnose is quite happy with the relatively lackluster bitrate of their audio, however others may whince at the quality and declare it unlistenable (is that a word?)

Like, I have a few years old 55" 4K HDR TV, its not OLED, but it was good at the time. However a lot of my archived content is 720p, and I really don't mind. In fact I don't hardly notice. Sure if I switch to a 4K Bluray, its better, but I enjoyed the 720p show just as much and it wasn't like jarring or anything.

128 is perfectly fine / it’s What you are getting most movies you download and way better than FM and most DAB.

320 is noticeably better with not much of a size bump. FLAC for archiving.

Yeah but for blur tooth in the car it’s no problem for me

My Spotify generated playlists are still only about 50% of what I actually want to hear. Release Radar is a complete joke for me, almost nothing is remotely new. It's just "new" versions of old songs. Been using Spotify for music almost exclusively for a few years too. I still miss the playlist creation from Google Play Music, haven't really used YouTube Music enough to know if it's the same after the switch. On Spotify I generally just find playlists I like that were created by other people.

I used to be like that. Most of my music was 128kbps MP3, even going down to 32kbps AAC with one particular song. What's worse, many of those were multi-generation re-encodes.

One day I got the taste of real FLAC. No going back. Maybe with 320kbps MP3, but anyway. Hearing HIFI quality for the first time, I remember the song, Gazebo - I Like Chopin, that was awesome! "Holy flying fridge with tomato salad, I can feel the music coming inside of me!"

Pandora slowed a lot of my music collecting. Spotify and an unlimited data plan on my phone all but stopped it.

Don't need to dedicate 500+gb on my phone to my music if I can just pull up whatever I want. The only stuff I keep on my phone now is Dwelling of Duels and some game remixes.

Music is a weird subject for me. I download practically everything else to have a copy of it on my hard drives. 30+TB of anime, movies, tv shows, manga, audiobooks, etc but music is the one thing I dont really download or listen to very often. I have a modded Spotify app that I use for the times I do listen to music. I do this so i dont have to pay for a subscription, but that is as far as my music piracy goes.

What is the modded spotify app and how does it work?

So I use an apk from a private forum but Im pretty sure you can find some on mobilism (I cannot vouch for them as I dont specifically know if that apk I use cam from there). The modded app pretty much just remove ads and allows unlimited skips and stuff of that sort. It pretty much gives all the perks of the paid subsciption but free. You can find many of them around but the thing is just making sure its not spyware or adware (this is where knowing where/how/who modded the app is important). I looked at mobilism, there are a few on there, but I have never used apks from mobilism before or knoq anything about how well/safe they run

Someone mentioned spotube, maybe revanced also has ytmusic.

Somehow free-mp3-download.net has every Song i've asked for until now, with both 320kbp/s MP3 and even flac Downloads. apparantly Just transcoded 128kbp/s Files

I checked a few files at random, and most of the FLACs had a sharp cut off above 16 kHz. Most likely they're just transcoded 128 kbps MP3s - can't recommend.

That's exactly what I'm using for downloading songs from Deezer. It's really good. Slider(dot)kz is also a good alternative.

fuckin aye. This is more complete than the majority of the usenet indexers I've seen.

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You can pay for any streaming service that serves FLAC and rip that. Very easy to do for Tidal and Deezer for example.

And you don't need to pay. Just google Deezer premuim ARLs and plug that into Deemix and profit. Full FLAC quality

I don't like using other people's hacked account. Keeping music data after my licensed agreement (which is still going, actually) seems like a crime no one actually loses from. Using someone else's hacked account seems highly, highly unethical to me.

It's usually not a hacked account. Most of them are free trials from binned credit cards. There are groups out there that will share bins that work for certain services like Tidal/Deezer/Qobuz. Once you get the free trial, you use it for a month and then you start the next one

I've paid monthly for Deezer HiFi in the past like 3 years, I don't consider it unethical to store the FLACs on my PC so I can use my own local music player to listen to them as long as I keep paying for the service.

I do consider it unethical to scam Deezer into giving me new trials every month. I'm not one to tell you what to do or not do, but I don't personally want to do that.

Fair enough, but you are also commenting this on a community for piracy so....

Yeah but there's piracy that creates "lost opportunity cost" (which is just companies complaining) and piracy that actually uses servers/services without paying for them.

You can have your opinion and I can have mine. It just baffles me that you're talking about lost opportunity costs and "hurting corporations" on a community dedicated to Piracy

you’re talking about lost opportunity cost

I explicitly said that I think this is not problematic. I don't see how that is weird in a piracy community

I think you can be an ethical pirate. As long as companies can not see your existence by any measurement (server cost, bandwidth allocation), whatever you do is ethical in my eyes.

If you didn't exist the company would be in the exact same state, so why should your existence on this planet mean they deserve anything more?

Does that not qualify me as a pirate? Lol

Under Article 8 for Deezer's T&C's - https://www.deezer.com/legal/cgu

"Any use for a non-private purpose will expose the Subscriber to civil and/or criminal proceedings. Any other use of the Recordings is strictly forbidden and more particularly any download or attempt to download, any transfer or attempt to transfer permanently or temporarily on the hard drive of a computer or any other device (notably music players), any burn or attempt to burn a CD or any other support are expressly forbidden."

You're talking about ethical and unethical piracy. As far as the company whose product you're subscribing to is concerned, you are breaking the terms and conditions that you agreed to. To me, that sounds pretty unethical, but to you, it only makes sense that you should be able to freely download and store the content that you paid for.

There's no reason ToC has any correlation with an ethical framework, just like laws against gay marriage don't make gay marriage unethical. They're merely corporate decisions made by men in suits. Being ethical and being against ToC or against the law are nowhere near the same thing.

My ethical framework is about driving the world towards overall happiness of all people.

If I, instead of loading the file in FLAC 200 times from Deezer's servers, locally save it and replay it in my music player, all the while paying for the service so I could actually stream it 200 times if I wanted to - I don't see who's being hurt by this.

Does that make sense?

Now if the ToC says "don't do this, instead use our bandwidth as we want you to use it, but don't save our file" then instead of blindly accepting that, I read between the lines of why they don't want that.

Which seems fairly obvious: they want you to keep paying for the service monthly to keep your access to the content. And thus I keep paying monthly, as I have for years now.

If I stop paying and don't delete the content? Yes, then it does become unethical. I'm not planning to do that. But I'd still argue it's not nearly as unethical as using their servers without paying for access - because you're not inducing any costs for the company.

If your ethical framework is about "respecting corporate ToCs" yet don't mind making people use fake credit cards then I don't really know what to say anymore.

While youtube vanced is falling apart, vanced music is still running just fine for me :D

You mean vanced or revanced? For me latest revanced version works fine? What are the issues?

I mean vanced. I was too lazy to set up revanced and instead tried out NewPipe. I hate how I don't have my really optimized suggested page on NewPipe but I get around that by using vanced to browse and then opening the video in NewPipe via the share button. A nice plus of NewPipe however is how my subscriptions now really are just the channels I really care about and not the 1000 random ones I've subbed to over the last few years.

Try revanced and that additional package recommended by them that allows it to use google account - I forgot the name - micro g perhaps? It works quite well for me at least. There are some discrepancies between homepage at home pc and phone, but it's better than nothing or ads. Process was quite simple, download youtube apk, install revanced patcher and apply patch to the app.

Sounds very similar to the vanced installation. I might do this and keep NewPipe for subscribing to the really high quality channels and if google actually goes through with banning accounts that block adds I won't be nearly as impacted :D

I use satclubbing for electronic music and metal tracker metal. Something else I've started doing is getting second hand CDs. They are going really cheap right now and will likely become vintage and sought after in a decade odd. I basically buy them and rip them and keep them in storage.

I consider myself a rookie audiophile. I must have my music files in flac format and they must be directly on my hard drive. I buy a bit of stuff from bandcamp and qobuz, but for my methods, there's a few routes I can take to get the majority through piracy.

The one I've chosen is called slav art, and it basically rips directly from streaming services and zips it in a downloadable file. It used to be on discord but got chased away, and it used to be on matrix after that but left there too for some reason. Now it's on its own revolt instance.

Not for me, I don't like to have my music online, I download every song that I like and keep it stored on my drives. I mostly download from Youtube

I download music from Deezer, 90% of what I want is there. For the remaining 10% I use SoulSeek.

As long as it works, it's all good.

I was downloading videos from youtube with Safefrom(aka ssyoutube) until I discovered youtube-dl a few days ago

I remember using SaveFrom for a few months after ClipConverter.cc banned downloading music and music videos from YouTube. However like you I then discovered youtube-dl (now yt-dlp) and I haven't even looked back since. It's truly the best out there.

Does ViMusic/Spotube count? They're alternative youtube music/spotify front ends with no ads. If so, then I'd say piracy is still going strong!

I am subscribed to streaming services. Just want offline files in slightly higher quality. I find 768kbps+ to be perfect on high end gear. Streaming is great for 320kbps equivalent.

It doesn't matter on the go because even a slight outside noise would mask any kind of pseudo or real gains in sound quality.

Dying is an overstatement, I'm sure the scene is there.

But it's not as popular as most people are generally able to easily access all the music they want legally for reasonable prices.

I've been meaning to start a music collection for a bunch of old goth music from small bands that risks being lost to time. Thanks for this post I'm gonna get my ass moving on it.

I only dig for music on discogs.

#vinyllife

Hello, fello discogs user!

Think I've spent more this year on vinyl collection than games!

I don't want to say I am better because I listen to vinyl, I am better because I actually care.

Music piracy is doing just fine, it's just that the balance of opinion seems to be that M4A is fine. You can even download M4A files from YouTube nowadays.

I just find the music theme that I desire to have on Spotify or YT, and then I ripoff from there. Pretty easy.

I would recommend this website: https://free-mp3-download.net/ which is also listed in the megathread.
It takes music from Deezer in HIFI quality (FLAC 16/44). You can either download it as FLAC (lossless, but also large), MP3 320K or MP3 128K. Even the same bitrate will give you better quality since you're not re-encoding from lossy source.
From my experience, it doesn't accept characters like apostrophes in the search box. Hyphens are fine.

That domain is ugly as fuck, but the site looks nice. Thanks for the tip

I use a modded spotify on ms smartphone but also downloaded some playlists with onthespot and that's all I need

How did you mod the Spotify app? 🤔

There's ton online, but I wouldn't trust them, you can try something like xManager or you can find a apk mod from somewhere like modyolo or smthing.

They probably used xManager or a modded apk from modyolo or a other place.

why did you answer like 4 Times?? 😂 Thanks anyway

I'm seeing a lot of this. I wonder if the server is overloaded and failing to send the ack response for a successful post.

They probably downloaded a modded apk from modyolo or used something like xManger.

They probably used xManager or a modded apk from modyolo or a other place.

They probably used xManager or a modded apk from modyolo or a other place.

Nicotine and Deemix(you need to pay for hifi for flac quality) is the way to go. I've struggled to do the same and now i am working on a gui app that sort of manages all of these sources together.

Psychedelic trance is an awesome, but absolutely niche genre. It's enjoyed by only a handful of people on earth, and made by even fewer. With sites like rupsy and psy-music going dark this sort of stuff is getting really hard to find. Having said that, it's one of the few genres I don't mind paying the money for a good release - it's niche as fuck. The real problem lays with identifying what IS a good release.

Last time I checked there were still new psy releases popping up on rutracker from time to time. Streaming basically sucks for psy, and most mainstream trackers absolutely suck for psy and techno.

There might be some cool new site that the doofers are hiding out on and we're out of the loop ;p

I could find psytrance parties every weekend around here (if I still partied regularly). I wouldn't call it that niche. Out of the mainstream, sure, but not exactly niche. The Boom festival gets 50,000 visitors.

Where I live every party gets shut down these days and many participants arrested. It's pretty sad. Very very niche where I live.

Do you have any recommendations in the genre?

Absolutely. I'll take you on a very brief journey through the years. I will forewarn you: most people don't gel with a lot of this stuff unless they have had a head full of psychedelics on a packed dancefloor a few times to figure it all out so we start gentle. You don't really dance to the beat...it's the rolling bassline you've got to jump on ;)

Medicine Drum - Suraya Mela E.P from 1996 is pure psychedelic: something approximating a distillation of goa trance mixed with tribal rhythms. If I'm not mistaken, all of the synths are analogue. It has a super organic vibe and is one of my favourites for hosting a mushroom session.

Taking a wild leap forward in time and intensity: Raz - Twisted Fairytale (2007) Purest of Israeli psychedelic trance IMO. There's not much else to say - as far as the Isra style psytrance of this period, this is the pinnacle in my humble opinion.

Day Din - Speakers Corner (2007) Beautiful album

Tuk - The Laws of Nature (2010) This my favourite type of psychedelic release: one that is meant to be listened to as an album. This is not a dancefloor banger compilation, but a skilled DJ can string together some of the purest searing acid basslines ever recorded into a set using nothing but two copies of this CD if they wanted. It is one of my all time favourites.

Now for some proper bangers:

Nights of the Psychedelic Order Compiled by Panayota (2012) There's not much to say. It's fat, it pumps hard from start to finish and any given track on it could fill a bush dancefloor.

My finger has not been on the pulse the last 10 years. There's been some really great releases but I've no idea where they fit in; someone else can probably give you some great recommendations for newer stuff.

If you are after something a little slower, check out:

Tetrameth - Psychological Pyrotechnics, pretty much anything by Terrafractyl, god there's so much!

Hope you find something you like in there.

Thanks for this list, gonna check these out. I am mostly into old school goa trance the likes of Hallucinogen, Doof, Astral Projection, Darshan, Green Nuns of the Revolution, Blue Planet Corporation, etc.

So it sounds like I’ll like the Medicine Drum EP since goa seems to have a more organic sound than the more “digital” sound of more modern psytrance.

I appreciate the in-depth response, checking out the music now!

Side note you may enjoy the game everhood, your music is reminding me of that game's soundtrack and I played the whole thing on mushrooms it was a magical experience.

I used yt-dl for downloading, but since I have a decent flat, I switched to just using yt music with adblocker or revanced.

What benefits do torrents of music provide over just downloading from yt?

Theoretically youtube doesn't offer as high a quality as flac or wav files do.

Practically for most people it probably doesn't matter

Pretty much it,streaming is so convenient too

At some point I wrote a docker container (with some help from a friend) which regularly executes yt-dlp to download my youtube playlists to my media server.

I mostly do that because I have limited mobile data and want offline copies of music

Being able to download a full discography in one go, not just songs.

I think a subscription to Spotify, Apple Music, etc is that one subscription most are willing to pay and never give up because it's so convenient, and fairly cheap. I'd rather give up every other subscription before I even considered giving up Spotify.

Music piracy is still there, but it's just not as convenient these days.

For me it's pretty much dead. Since I've got YT music subscription I don't download music anymore, except some rare, obscure bands from past. Because modern, rare obscure I can support via Bandcamp and the likes. For real gold mine of music checkout soulseek. If it's not there, you can assume it doesn't exists

Yep. I'm paying like $11 a month and I can play nearly any song I want at anytime from anywhere I am. I haven't pirated music in years. On a side note, I would happily pay some reasonable dollar amount to do the same with TV and movies and never pirate anything again!

Yep, if we could go back to having 1-2 streaming services that charged a reasonable fee, I feel like TV and movie piracy significantly drop. It was so nice being able to just, like, fucking watch a movie and not have to check which of the eleventy-billion streaming services it's on.

That's what I can't wrap my head around. If it's possible with music and work well for all parties, then why not to do the same with movies. All I read are some bullshit non answers about different laws applied to music and movies. Even if it is so, same companies who lobbied for those laws should now lobby to change them again, problem solved. Instead they wade further in this sunken cost fallacy

I feel like it's easier than ever. I just rip official album playlists from Youtube Music. Quality should be on par with what you get from Spotify or iTunes. Personally, I've never found any official sources for music that doesn't use lossy compression, so I don't feel like it's possible to miss much by doing it like this.

I actually built a stereo system that can play CDs recently and have stared buying used CDs to play on it.

I don't really mind paying the equivalent of a drink or two from a vending machine for an album from a band that I like. And I get a neat physical thing that I can look at.

Yeah, I’m old enough to have grown up buying vinyl records. I want to buy a physical copy of the music I like.

The idea of depending on a streaming service to keep something available has always mades me uncomfortable, and given the recent removal of content from some of the studios’ services, it looks like my gut feeling was correct.

Deemix is how I get access to .flac downloads. Yea, I still am paying for Deezer, but it's also technically still piracy. I have 345.7 GiB of music downloaded currently on my NAS and I play it with DeadBeeF or foobar2k if I'm on Windows.

I love Deemix. With slskd as a backup. Plus all my music from Deemix becomes available to slskd. Which is always nice.

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Spotify is dirt cheap for me(Less than a dollar per month) and I really like the recommendations.

But if they pull a Netflix then I'll just leave.

Music piracy is definitely less healthy but I doubt it'll ever die. Streaming services cant seem to make their services as easy as free options. I left spotify because they dont have the catalog of youtube. And i didnt even get past the free trial of youtube music because their app wouldn't play half the songs on my already made playlists for unknown reasons. Why pay for a lesser experience when I can NewPipe for free and it works great.

finding FLAC or WAV with active seeders feels like striking gold

Not if you're on the right tracker(s)...really should try and get into RED and/or Orpheus.

I'll look into those, is there any interview like what.cd used to have?

There is, but I never got response in like 1 week of trying. Got invite from another private tracker at the end.

Tracker is rly good, website was down couple of times, but real problem is that I cant keep up with ratio, its so freaking hard, at least for me lol

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I feel there is room for improvement over the soulseek network, though that's about the best there is right now. It doesn't take advantage of downloading from multiple peers (like torrents), quality is good in practice but hard to be sure until you listen, and is missing rare / non-western music.

While streaming apps offer a decent value, I don't like the level of lock in. I have music from CDs and other sources that are a first class part of my library, and using only a streaming app would make them harder to access.

I really like Apple Music. Actually supports lossless, unlike Spotify, and it just feels much more music focused. Spotify has become too bloated, and I view it more as a "sound" app than a music app.

I like both, but Spotify has far more tracks available these days. I've found songs on Spotify that just aren't on iTunes at all.

I personally download YouTube videos, convert them to MP3 and then add metadata to them.

All tools I know support downloading mp3 or ogg directly. You could streamline your process there a bit.

I have streamlined and automized my entire process with a Python program I made. It allows me to select a video, select the corresponding song from Spotify, select certain parts that have to be cut off (such as intros and outros) and then it will automatically download the video, transcode it, cut off any segments, merge the metadata.

Oh, props to you then. You streamlined the whole "what's that song" process then.

not really a good solution, cuz it's not gonna be a nice quality audio, but just acceptable, nothing more...

I think it's still going. At the least, patched spotify is well.

MP3 0Day on private trackers covers everything.

For most people there are good enough solutions for music without piracy.

Locating, storing, labelling, and potentially hosting pirated music is just not something people wanna do. Plus music streaming isn't a fragmented mess like video streaming is atm. I never stopped pirating tv and movies except for a brief window of time when Netflix was king, but music so easy and complete on every platform it isn't worth it.

I have stopped caring about artists and instead focus on sets, on Soundcloud.

I'm commenting to come back to this (am dumb, don't know how to save posts through wefwef)

There should be some kind of save/bookmark option. I've found souldseek to have most of what I was looking for

If it's on Deezer https://free-mp3-download.net is your friend.

Think OP said FLAC, not deezer rip

It can download FLAC through deezer. There's a HiFi plan that supports FLAC on deezer.

It's probably not the absolute highest quality possible but it's still better than normal 128kbps MP3. (it also supports 320kbps MP3).

Die somebody have any problems with this site? I’m using it and so far I have not.

I even read that this is considered legal/gray area in some countries (I think France was mentioned).

I used Apple Music before and the experience is really bad. Before that I used Spotify which was way better but still not worth for how I am using it.

When I was younger I had no income so pirating was how I got music. Now that I have income I buy vinyl records and subscribe to a streaming service.

One thing I've noticed over the years of pirating though is frequently the metadata for the classical music is a mess - relevant information such as conductor and orchestra performing are completely omitted, and these days I just don't want to spend my free time fixing it. Plus, finding pirated lossless tracks remains a challenge, so I just pay my monthly bill and use Idagio.

I think music & movies are widely available than ever before through the telegram app... There are so many apps for movies and music.. what's the point of using torrents then ?..

I just stream whatever I want with newpipe audiophiles are delusional

You can pay for any streaming service that serves FLAC and rip that. Very easy to do for Tidal and Deezer for example.

You might want to delete the repeated comments. I will be honest I caused the same when my app was saying that the comment didn't succeeded to submit I kept retrying and it seems it published multiple time.

You can pay for any streaming service that serves FLAC and rip that. Very easy to do for Tidal and Deezer for example.

Honestly, I kind of Agree I'm just using spotify with ads honestly it doesn't bug me that much.

You can pay for any streaming service that serves FLAC and rip that. Very easy to do for Tidal and Deezer for example.

You can pay for any streaming service that serves FLAC and rip that. Very easy to do for Tidal and Deezer for example.

You can pay for any streaming service that serves FLAC and rip that. Very easy to do for Tidal and Deezer for example.