How to get started with pirating music (mp3s)? (midwest.social)

submitted 3 months ago by clark@midwest.social to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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Do I use a website to download songs off of YouTube or Spotify?

Where should I store the music? I haven't any clue about self-hosting. I'm running GrapheneOS, is it enough to save the songs in Files and play in an app like Auxio? Maybe sync with SyncThing?

What's the best way to compress mp3 files but still retain the quality (even possible)?

Could really use some help as I'm very inexperienced. :)

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[-] wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works 30 points 3 months ago

Do I use a website to download songs off of YouTube or Spotify?

Soulseek and/or private trackers, both with a VPN.

Where should I store the music?

On a hard disk?

I'm running GrapheneOS

Android isn't well suited for this. It's fine for playing either by transfering your files or streaming them with something like subsonic, mod, etc.

Maybe sync with SyncThing?

This could work yeah.

What's the best way to compress mp3 files but still retain the quality (even possible)?

By design MP3 is a lossy format, so no you cannot. What you want is FLAC, a lossless compressed format.

[-] Maxy 19 points 3 months ago

To add to the audio compression: it isn’t possible to further compress an mp3 file without losing any quality. You can either:

Recompress to a lossy codec (mp3, aac, opus). This will lead to smaller file sizes if you set the bitrate lower than that of the input file, but it will always worsen the quality, no matter the bitrate.
Recompress to a lossless format (flac easily being the best one). Going from a lossy to a lossless format will increase the file size (sometimes by quite a substantial amount), while keeping the same quality. There is very little reason for you to do this
keep the original files (my recommendation)

If you’re willing to spend some extra time learning about audio compression, you can download lossless files and compress those directly to whatever format and bitrate you want. The quality will be better than option 1 above, as the audio is only lossely compressed once instead of twice.

[-] madeindjs@programming.dev 5 points 3 months ago

Recompress to a lossless format (...) There is very little reason for you to do this

I though there are no reasons at all to do it. What could be a valid use case for this ?

[-] Maxy 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

It’s possible for a certain hardware/software setup not to support a certain codec. For example, my jellyfin client (Finamp) uses the iOS native decoders (afaik), which means opus files are practically broken. My music library (8000+ songs) contained exactly 1 lossy file, which just so happened to be an opus file. I decided to spend the extra ~20MB to standardise my entire library to flac files, ensuring I could play every song on all my devices.

Edit cause I posted too soon: you are generally correct; only in very specific circumstances will you encounter compatibility issues like this one in the modern world. This is 100% apple being apple, and you can expect pretty much every other (reasonably modern) device to support all codecs you might encounter in the wild.

[-] downhomechunk@midwest.social 6 points 3 months ago

Upvote for soulseek / nicotine

[-] ElectricAirship@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 3 months ago

FLAC is best if space is no concern. But when your collection starts getting very big, there are better options like AAC (which I use). It's a lot less space than FLAC and mp3, and higher quality than mp3 as well.

https://primesound.org/audio-file-formats/

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[-] LilacLobotomies@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

https://rentry.org/firehawk52

Check this website out, there's lots of options for obtaining music. I personally use Murglar on Android for high quality Deezer rips. Telegram bots work well too.

[-] gramgan@lemmy.ml 11 points 3 months ago

As far as where you get the music from, you’ll have to determine for yourself what audio quality you require.

To test this, use something like Soulseek to get a high quality version of a song you are very familiar with, and then get the same song off of YouTube with yt-dlp (better yet—do this for a few songs). Then, open both songs in separate media player windows, randomize the layout of said windows so you don’t remember which is which, plug in your favorite headphones and see if you can guess which is which.

For me, I found the difference between a lossless or 320kbps download from Soulseek and a 128-196kbps download from YouTube to be negligible (or outright nonexistent) in most cases, so I mostly download off of YouTube, which is very simple to do.

Depending on where you get the files, you may need to add metadata yourself. For this, I recommend MusicBrainz Picard.

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[-] Algernon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 3 months ago

I’m always curious why people do this. Music is the one item where it’s easier to just sub to something like Apple Music… literally $110/yr for all the music that exists. They gave us the solution we asked for and it’s super-cheap.

I pirate the shit out of movies and tv since those guys are gouging me, but musicians barely get by in the streaming era.

Hopefully this triggers nobody. I’m making no judgements.

[-] Deceptichum@quokk.au 15 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I’ve used Spotify for like 20 years now, and I’m finally going back to pirating.

They started “innovating” and adding shit I didn’t want last year to justify fee increases.

I can’t trust businesses to not enshittify, so might as well continue on with where I left my library all those years ago.

Plus: So much music isn’t available on there. I have a huge collection of Japanese Rock, Pop, Visual Kei from the 90s and 00s that you just can’t find easily.

[-] anothermember@lemmy.zip 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Can you save it DRM-free? That's all I ask for.

[-] madeindjs@programming.dev 6 points 3 months ago

my two cents,

I personally buy some music from Bandcamp, and I'm pretty sure those songs don't exist on the Apple Music catalog. So I don't want to handle multiple apps to listen what I want.

Also, streaming platforms have the internet constraints. Sometimes, like when I'm driving, I don't have a stable internet connection

[-] jerb@lemmy.croc.pw 4 points 3 months ago

Many artists I like were signed with a now defunct record label called Tympanik Audio. Whoever got the rights to the name after the label went under stopped paying their Spotify license fees, and a large chunk of my Spotify library vanished overnight. While the albums still exist on Bandcamp, the money probably gets thrown into the void now.

Never again. The only way I can ensure my music is accessible tomorrow is to have my own copy. I buy on Bandcamp where I can, or will buy physical and rip it if I really like the album. Everything else gets ripped from Deezer automatically because there's no guarantee anything on those platforms will always be there.

[-] sillyhatsonly 3 points 3 months ago

it’s easier to just sub to something like Apple Music… literally $110/yr for all the music that exists.

As others have stated, not all music exists on every streaming platform. That alone is enough of a reason for me. I recently canceled my longtime Spotify subscription because the price kept increasing while my library kept decreasing. I actually don’t pirate music when I can help it because I’d rather support artists on Bandcamp or purchasing physical media directly. If I can’t do that then I head to Soulseek!

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[-] averyminya@beehaw.org 8 points 3 months ago

Lidarr is all you need.

You can do other methods, but this one is simple and effective. Set it up, tell it what bands you like, wait a day and you've got the entirety of your childhood favorites and nearly every discography you can think of. All for maybe an hour of upfront work.

Versus remembering every band/song you ever liked, tracking it down, downloading each individually... Like yeah, you can do that. It's what I do for shows and movies for curation. But for music, I have so much and so many that curating like this just isn't as worthwhile as checking off a band in Lidarr and having all of their stuff in a few hours.

[-] EarthShipTechIntern@lemm.ee 3 points 3 months ago

Lidarr sounds fine for computers, what about android?

[-] averyminya@beehaw.org 1 points 3 months ago

They mentioned SyncThing, so I assumed a computer was very much in play.

[-] ruplicant@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 months ago

the main way i get music files (320kbps mp3) is through the Soulseek network, which many commenter have mentioned. what has been left out is the best client to get into that network, that is free and open source software, which is Nicotine+. it work on any desktop OS

torrents are still valid but you won't find many artists there

[-] communism@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 months ago

What I do personally is get any music I want from soulseek and then sync my music directory across devices with syncthing. Although I'm planning on renting a vps to put my music on at some point as it's taking up quite a lot of my phone storage now.

On desktop I like to use mpd with ncmpcpp. On Android(/GrapheneOS) I'm using Metro as my music player.

[-] halvar@lemm.ee 4 points 3 months ago

I personally look up torrent files for either FLACs (lossless quality, with very large files) or 320kbps MP3s (smaller files with no noticable difference in sound quality imo) and then after making sure they have the right metadata (Title, Album, Artist) (using a tool like Tagger) I upload them onto my Navidrome server, which I connect to using Ultrasonic. If I didn't selfhost I'd probably just put the tagged files on my phone and play them with basically any music player.

[-] atkion@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 months ago

Thanks for the link to Tagger, I've been looking for something like that. Looks like I have some library cleanup to do, I've been putting it off for years now lmao

[-] BlastboomStrice@mander.xyz 3 points 3 months ago

This guide I wrote about downloading and tagging might help you :) https://mander.xyz/post/13720820

[-] clark@midwest.social 2 points 3 months ago

This seems really complicated for a beginner like me (': is there no online tool that can download my playlists in bulk with relatively accurate metadata? It seems deemix and soulseek require accounts which I'm not too keen about, but I really don't know anything about this so I might just be spouting silly speculations.

[-] BlastboomStrice@mander.xyz 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Aw, I understand ~50.000words can be overwhelming.😅

Hm, I dont know if there's anything better than the tools I talk about. This guide is a bit too compicated and long, so I'll try to re-word it, hoping you can now follow it:

Soulseek: You just use a username and a password. No emails or anything. Search and download.
Deemix: You dont need to have a personal deemix account. You can find on some doubious sites "arls" for accounts. Arl is like the user token. They are long alphanumeric strings which essentially are used instead of username+password. You can simply find one online and put it in deezer. (You can try arls found here: https://www.arldeemix.com/2024/05/arl-deemix.html?m=1 )

To use it with spotify (like downloading a spotify playlist in deemix), its kinda more complex. You can see the steps from this post on reddit here:

https://developer.spotify.com/dashboard/ log in, create an app, go into app, click show client secret under apps title, paste it into deemix along with clientid

I suggest deemix because you can get very high quality music (in batches too) and it's open source.

Lastly, if you simply want to get stuff from youtube without account and such:

ytDownloader acts as a gui for yt-dpl (open source, PC).
Seal acts as a gui for yt-dpl (open source, Android).

Almost certainly there are websites that may use yt-dlp and can download playlists though.

[-] clark@midwest.social 1 points 3 months ago

So I did the deemix thing and the Spotify app thing. Unfortunately I can't find my own playlists in Favourites, only somebody else's. Know the issue?

[-] BlastboomStrice@mander.xyz 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Oh nice, you're very close. What you see, are the Deezer playlists of the account the arl corresponds to. For your spotify playlists, go to spotify, press the share button on your playlist, get the link to your playlist (the url), paste it in the search bar in deemix and press enter. It will automatically fetch and download the whole playlist.

(The next "level" would be to go back to my big guide, in the deemix settings section and customize it to your liking.)

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[-] foremanguy92_@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 months ago

Don't know how much storage you have on your phone but you should just try these steps : If you are downloading from YouTube Music you won't get the best quality but for me that's okay. So I just recommend you to download an android client for yt-dl and then download what you want. If you are downloading only 1 or 2 gigs of music it should be okay, but if you are downloading more or wanna take care, you should use a VPN 😁

[-] 6FingerJoe@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 months ago

Spowlo and soundbound are essentially the same app that you just paste links to Spotify lists, artists, albums, playlists, whatever, then it'll find matches on YouTube to download as mp3.

Desktop zotify, you can downloaded the "high" quality level with premium account credentials.

[-] petrescatraian@libranet.de 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

@clark@midwest.social wrote:

Where should I store the music?

I just store it in the music folder of every device I own. I have a 1 TB hard drive on my PC and my phone has 128 GB of internal storage, with an SD card slot.

I haven't any clue about self-hosting. I'm running GrapheneOS, is it enough to save the songs in Files and play in an app like Auxio? Maybe sync with SyncThing?

Yes. Any music player will generally prompt you to scan for your files upon first opening.

Edit: didn't notice your first question. Well, I just get them from everywhere, lol. If you have a tracker that you use for anything, be sure that there will be some music there. If you cannot find it, then just refer to the FMHY's list of various tools to download music from just about anywhere: Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud you name it. I also buy music from Bandcamp as it supports downloading it directly for an unlimited amount of times and in any of the most popular formats, or just go to the band's concert and buy their album directly. This way you're also supporting the artists directly with your money (if you care about it).

[-] clark@midwest.social 2 points 3 months ago

It's really too bad Pixel phones don't have an SD slot.

[-] petrescatraian@libranet.de 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

@clark Ugh. You could probably get away with multiple cloud storage services then, and mapping their folders to the music player of your choice. Also, use file types that are generally smaller in size for storing music (like opus or ogg). For cloud services, use the ones whose apps support Storage Access Framework so they can appear in the default Android File Manager / File Picker thing (you can also use something like Round Sync to access them all, and it does all the job for you). If you're willing to pay for cloud storage, then one single provider with 100-200 GB can also be more than enough for your music needs if you own more than just a few songs.

Then you can add the folders in your music player settings.

Edit: Don't forget to also backup your music somewhere in case something happens with your phone or your cloud provider(s)

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