CattypatAny good music sources?
MagnificentSteinerRutracker.org and a torrent client. It has loads of niche stuff. Use browser translate so you can read the website.
ex_06
danIt’s also supported by Prowlarr if you want to automate downloads using Lidarr.
Having said that, note that many uploads on rutracker are raw CD dumps (ISO file, plus a CUE file specifying when the tracks start and end) which Lidarr doesn’t support directly, so you’ll have to manually convert to FLAC and split it yourself. Once you do that, you can manually import the files into Lidarr and it’ll tag and arrange the files for you.
IlandarUse Soulseek (you don’t have to use their app, there are alternatives like Nicotine+). Free yourself from a reliance on streaming platforms.
If you have a home server, slskd is very good. Modern web UI and there’s plugins to integrate it into Lidarr (Tubifarry)
As soon as you said “Lidarr,” you had my undivided attention. I’m definitely giving this a try
Usenet. Plenty of music in lossless (FLAC) format. Use NZBGeek and DrunkenSlug as indexers. Sabnzbd to download. Lidarr and Prowlarr to automate everything. Add an artist, click to download an album, and it’ll search for the album, download the NZB file, send it to Sabnzbd to download, then tag and organize the files once it’s done downloading.
For music I’d just get a block account: www.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki/providerdeals/. Essentially, you pay for some amount of data (can usually get 1TB for US$5-15), and they usually don’t have an expiry date, so it could last you for years. Some providers have monthly plans with unlimited data, but a block account will end up way cheaper if you just want music.
For rarer music, Soulseek is very good. It’s a peer-to-peer service from the KaZaA and Napster era, but somehow it’s survived until now. Since it’s peer to peer, downloads are quite a bit slower (you’re relying on the upload speed of individual users - each download comes from only one user) but it’s a great community.
chrisbit
CerebralHawksI clicked on new to see what it had and saw the new album by a popular American rapper. I hit the download button, and inside of 30 seconds, it gave me a handful of FLAC files in a ZIP folder. Fed them to fre:ac, the metadata is good; however, it had the ARTIST tag copied to the ALBUMARTIST tag, which made the output a little messy (I have it output to ALBUMARTIST(YEAR) ALBUM), but I was able to expand all the folders, dump the m4a files I made into mp3tag, and straighten them up. Album cover was embedded and 1280x1280. No ads in the comments or even the filename of the zip file.
Bookmarked.
Oh, I also searched for an obscure(ish) Japanese band I like. It had most of their stuff. Not all, and not my favourite song by them, but it had a lot of stuff.
FYI to others, if you see the [HD] tag on something, I’m thinking that means they have it in FLAC, as opposed to MP3 or AAC/M4A. Though unless you have really good ears and/or an expensive hi-fi system, I doubt most of you can tell my m4a output from the flac input. If you can, I hope you have enough hard drives to support your collection. I don’t need FLAC, but I’ll use it to get the best possible sound at roughly a quarter to half the filesize (I use aac low complexity at the highest bitrate fre:ac supports).
It’s even open-source! Nice site.
it had the ARTIST tag copied to the ALBUMARTIST tag
This isn’t wrong though - it’s a proper use of both tags. I think most of my music has both tags populated.
That site is pulling from Tidal, which is why the tags are good. All the legit streaming sites have well-tagged files.
No, those two tags are not the same. ARTIST is everyone performing on the track. ALBUMARTIST is who the album is credited to. So for example Santana’s Supernatural, from the 1990s. The song “Smooth” that everyone knows. ARTIST would be something like Santana / Rob Thomas, or Santana feat. Rob Thomas, whereas ALBUMARTIST would be Santana.
Let me put it another way — do you want five copies of an album because four songs have collaborations? So one album is all the solo stuff, one album has one song with one collaboration, and so on… or do you want one copy of the album with all the songs on it as they appear on the album itself?
Sorry, I didn’t mean to say they’re the same. I meant to say that if all songs on an album are by one artist, the Artist and Album Artist will be identical. This is the case the majority of the time.
The major exceptions are collaborations (like you said), and compilations (which have “Various Artists” as the Album Artist)
Oh, yeah, if there are no collaborations or additional artists to name, then yes, they will be the same, for sure. And even though it seems redundant, I still have ALBUMARTIST filled in).
James R KirkWhat’s going on here? Is it just pulling from someone’s Tidal account?
Yes. The search results and music files are coming directly from Tidal, using someone else’s account. If you look in the network tab in the browser’s dev tools, you’ll see requests to Tidal.
Interesting design, since it’s trivial for Tidal to block something like this - they can see that the requests are coming from that site. I’m surprised they haven’t blocked it.
UndergroundParkingIf you see requests to tidal in your browser - they’re not going there from the server, are they :)
They must be doing some voodoo since Tidal doesn’t let you use the same account for multiple concurrent streams.