Looking for resources to rebuild my music collection (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 year ago by evranch@lemmy.ca to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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In the pre-streaming days I used to have a large collection of ripped and downloaded music. However as my taste in music is extremely wide and it became easier and more fun to use hacked streaming services (i.e. Youtube Music Vanced) to play music especially on the go, I decided to let my music collection go years ago. Plus... it was a big mess due to undiagnosed ADHD so let's be honest it wasn't a huge loss.

Now with the streaming ecosystem degrading and me now capable of keeping my things in order, I find myself wanting to start rebuilding a local music collection for the coming post-streaming era.

Wondering if there are any places I could find huge collection torrents that could be pared down to what I want, rather than spending my life downloading single albums or discographies? I'm ideally talking torrents that would be like 20GB of funk, but not just a shitload of tracks in a root directory with no tagging.

One of my favourite things about streaming services is getting to hear tracks or artists I haven't even thought of in ages, and it's hard to build a collection when you can't think of exactly what to put in it!

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[-] GoumLeChat@jlai.lu 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

For downloading music Soulseek is my main source. I might grab a torrent here and there for a specific release or when it's just a mess to get with Soulseek (like the Final Fantasy OSTs).

For managing the library and listening to it, Foobar2000 all the way. It can get a while to set it up properly but it will be tailored to your liking. It's the most advanced player out there. And there are plenty of add-ons (called components) to add features and basically do anything you could need : play MIDI or old consoles music files, play music from Youtube, get tags from Discogs or MusicBrainz, get lyrics, UPnP server... The interface is highly customizable as well. And you can create shortcuts for almost anything, components included (although shortcuts would need a revamp).

Oh and I didn't told you about queries. That makes tag fields as variables. So now you could make a query on a genre, a codec, an artist... "%codec% IS FLAC" will output only FLAC files. Very, very handy to manage your library. These variables can also be used to rename or move files. You can also use queries to create autoplaylists. These playlists are auto-updated based on the query, you don't have to maintain them. I have made a bunch for 60s to 2020s music, my favorite artists, or mixed compilations.

A few components to install right away : Playback Statistics and Enhanced Playback Statistics, they will no only give you better play stats (duh) but also new query fields. Masstagger to make batch modification on tags, this will save you a lot of time. Also for now install the 32bits version, many components are not available on the 64bits yet.

So yeah Foobar2000 takes a bit of time, but it's great, highly customizable. It has saved me dozens if not hundreds of hours to manage my library. And it's free. It's my favorite piece or software and I could talk about it all day long.