I don't know all this fancy stuff. Like, yesterday, I wanted to listen to the songs from the anime The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya so I grabbed them from nyaa, moved them from the "Downloads" directory to the "Music" directory and then played it with VLC.🤷‍♀️

Personally I just use Nicotine+ to grab whatever I want as a .flac, then use beets to organize them.

Newly created account account asking where our pirated sources are and asking for quite intimate details

Interesting

🤔

Y'all are way too trusting

I download albums (through piracy or not) and add them to my modest mp3 collection the same way I used to buy CDs — once in a while when it seems like a good idea. If there's an album I don't think is worth listening to again, I delete it.

I open amazon music and copy over all the album and single links from an artist I like to lucida to download them all as flacs, then I use an ffmpeg script to convert them all to 320kb mp3s. I reformat the names and metadata and put them into my music folder.

I enjoy my music.

Occasionally yt-***

But mostly relying on old big library of mp3s from oink’s 20 years ago.

I'm still very much in the process of finding what will work for me. Music Assistant to somewhat merge my YT Music and my locally stored files in one workflow. Last.fm and Listenbrainz scrobbling for generating recommendations for me. Maybe in a while I'll feel like I don't want YTM anymore, but right now I still find it hard to leave it fully. Lidarr and Tubifarry are also part of my stack.

On 'good mindset': I'm afraid that's still something that needs attention, and I hope to find it with what I currently use as I'm still too comfortable streaming YTM.

I pay for Spotify, but since some of my favourite songs are not available anymore (they're greyed out, as if they lost the rights) I decided I won't renew. Back to piracy!

Newpipe : download audio VLC : play audio

Acquisation:

• Buy CD and then rip with ExactAudioCopy
• Buy media from various sellers like Bandcamp, ototoy, Amazon Music, etc. (basically the official vendor that sells the artists music)
• Acquire FLAC or MP3 through various means lile nyaa, slskd, indexer, DDL

Manage:

• Lidarr. If not available in Lidarr, create entry in musicbrainz, wait 7 days then import

Listen:

• Jellyfin
• Symfonium

Dropped needle (newer version of musicseerr) plugged into lidarr and slsk. Using musicbrainz. A few good indexers/sources on the back end set to flac and high quality versions for the profile. Relatively fast and good coverage overall. Slsk helps to fill in the gaps

Mostly rutracker + jpopsuki.

I have Lidarr setup to track album and singles releases from a handful of artists and bands that I am really, really into so I don't miss something. Mostly, though, I acquire new music the same way I always have, something catches my ear somewhere and I go looking for it.

Discovery is kinda all over the place, but lately Youtube has been pretty good at suggesting new artists and tracks to listen to, though, it is occasionally hard to actually acquire said track or album. Other places have movie and tv show soundtracks, ListenBrainz recommendations and occasionally an actual radio station..

For the most part, I've moved away from pirating music and audiobooks as it's generally pretty easy to find an above-board source that is either DRM free or can be cracked easily. When I do pirate something for whatever reason, I'll usually go back later and purchase a copy. I would rather support the artists since I usually have the means at present and most of the artists I'm into aren't really all that big. I really wish that ebooks, tv shows and movies would get the damned hint and do the same..

Soulseek. On Linux I use Nicotene.

I get my music from discord servers and sometimes soulseek if I can't find a song or album, and then play it using USB Audio Player Pro since I use an external dac. Symfonium is also another great player with a highly customisable interface that I sometimes use

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.

I usually walk into a music store, fill up a box and scream "bye bitches" and leave.

Download torrents, organise by artist/album and manage/consume it with Plex.

Lidarr, and YouTube Music with last.fm scrobbling.

Lidarr monitors my last.fm scrobbles and automatically downloads anything I've listened to enough.

I also manually add stuff to lidarr that I've heard on radio stations like 4ZZZ, or as soundtracks to movies and TV shows I'm watching.

Currently at 2.8TB on my music library.

I'm pulling from torrent sites as the preference, with Usenet backup. FLAC quality, and CD source. I've also ripped all my CDs, and updated Musicbrainz for stuff that didn't already exist there so it works nicely with lidarr.

Tried using Soulseek but it's laughably bad. Wrong tags, gatekeepers who have ludicrous restrictions on their libraries, and most music is just (poorly) downloaded from streaming services anyway.

I use Plexamp for listening, or YouTube Music. Mostly I'm just downloading it because I know at some point in the future I'm going to crack the sads with paying the price YouTube Music charges. Seems to go up every month. When I get rid of it I want a decent library ready to go, and a nice listening history so the the recommendations aren't total shite.

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.

I get music from a variety of sources. Mostly torrents or soulseek. Both are hooked up through Lidarr but I also like to use the soulseek daemon web UI. I also buy off Bandcamp and download from the browser. Less often I get files from friends. All sources lead to "inbox" folders for Beets-flask, which handles tagging and then importing to the actual library. Navidrome serves the library up for clients. Koito handles scrobbles.

I've been trying out Aurral for recommendations and playlist generation but I'm not loving it. Pretty quick I learned it wants me to stream from it's subsonic API (in place of Navidrome) for best results. I can't figure out if it will work just off my Koito scrobble history.

Will try Audiomuse AI at some point. Auto playlist generation would make my stack feel more "modern" I think.

On a similar note, I've been curious if that's a tool that one could feed a playlist into and have it return another playlist, based on the former's genre, tone, bpm, lyrical theming, etc. I'm not even sure how to begin searching, though. 🤷🏼‍♂️

Also, I have the slimmest idea of what to recommend here, sorry. 🙇🏼‍♂️

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.

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.

I buy loads and loads of old vinyl records from various discount bins, flea markets and thrift stores. If it's 1 or 2 €: I often just buy blind if cover is somewhat appealing to me or because artists names ring a bell for me.

If I like what I hear, I obtain an mp3 copy of it (various sources) for my library. If I really liked it and can't find it digitally (it happens): I record my own vinyl record to have a digital copy. My file preference is mp3 VBR. I think flac is overkill for most basic soundsystems and human ears and they are not worth the enormous filesize difference.

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.

Good old Soulseek, but filtering by opus.

youtube playlist and yt-dlp. most of the music I listen to isn't on other platforms

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.

https://github.com/kushagrasinghx/BitChord

YT Music Morphe -> YTDLnis -> VLC

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

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.

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.

Jellyfin + Nicotine+

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.

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....

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