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?
If I find something and I don’t have it, yet, I download it.
If I hear a song and like it, that works, I’mma download it since shitty rural internet, I may not be able to listen to that song on demand.
Honestly i mostly download songs on .mp3 format individually.
Unless someone has been kind enough to compile the entire album on a .zip file
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.
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
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…
You pretty much calculated spot on! ;)
FLAC is good, but not necessary for background listening. At 192k the average song is ~ 5Mb. 100k x 5 = 0.5 TB.
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
How do you decide what to listen to? I assume you don’t listen to multiple entire discographies
Random works pretty well, but PlexAmp has a lot of ways to curate playlists, and that’s what I’ve been using for my local collection.
Whatever I feel like listening to that day. In that regard it’s no different than having a massive Spotify/Apple music library
I actually listen to music on Twitch a lot. I follow a handful of streamers who play music I like, and are always playing stuff that is new to me, and kindly list track IDs on the video feed.
I hear a song I like by an artist I am unfamiliar with and then guess what…? Entire discography.
If I wanna listen to something and I don’t know what, I just let LMS give me a random album and see what I get!
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.
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
I scrobble to Last.fm and ListenBrainz, import their recommended artists into Lidarr, and let it download the entire discography. Music files are small, and you never know what you’ll end up liking.
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.
You should check out last.fm (or musicbrainz, which I prefer since its open source). You connect your apps to it (Plex, tidal, Spotify, etc), they send over songs as you listen to them, you can rank them as love or hate (and some other stuff) and they curate playlists and artists that they think you’ll like based on your listening habits
“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
Dunno why, but your comment reminded of this:
That was some fire 🔥 🤣
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.
Baba Brinkman does rap music about science, evolution.
I love Dick Cheese ever since Dawn of the Dead used his version of Disturbed’s Down With the Sickness 😁
Didn’t know last fm was still around. I ditched them after they were breached. Musicbrainz is an apt alternative. I’m still bummed about how bad AI is at recommending similar songs /a artists. I’ll grab random stuff and stuff from Musicbrainz recommendatiins. I definitely delete stuff I don’t like, not for saving space but mainly just to keep my library tight. I also have nightmares about being in a coma and someone finding my music collection and thinking it’s something I really like but really it’s 80% garbage that I can’t stand and they play it for me in a loop for weeks and I can’t tell them to stop because of coma. I’m also pretty vocal in my life about not really liking country music, not because I want to be a judgemental jerk about it, but mainly because of the coma thing, and I want to make sure I’m not stuck listening to that in the coma.
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.
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.
I read reviews from some music review websites. I also get recommendations from friends. Occasionally, I might go shopping for new music on youtube
bandcamp is awesome.
Band camp Fridays are cool too when they give up their cut so artists get 100% of sales.
I go crate digging through soundcloud and bandcamp every so often, once in a while ill play a mix on youtube. Even if I only really like one or two songs on an album, i usually still download the entirety of it because sometimes i like just having songs on in the background if they fit a vibe i’m feeling. This is especially true for me with vaporwave, probably wouldn’t bump it on my commute for example but it can really make me drift mentally if i have it on in the background while say, browsing lemmy or something. And of course for my absolute favourite artists I tend to have almost if not the entire discography.
