I'm tired of being screwed over so I'm done. So far I have:

• Installed YouTube music and YouTube via Morphe
• Installed uBlock Origin, Sponsor Block and YouTube Enhanced on Firefox
• I've also installed YT-DLP to download videos if I have to.

Yet to do:

• Work out the best app for my Nvidia Shield Pro 2019
• Work out if there are any alternatives or way to still use my google nest minis in any way.

Does anyone have any advice or tools to help improve the experience?

Finally I have to add that I do also have a full ARR suite installed and setup on a raspberry pi for but I've always found Lidarr to be the weakest of the bunch. Works a treat for my TV shows and Music

SmartTube for your nvidia shield. You'll need 'Downloader' to get it. Also check out Project Ivy for the shield if you want a better UI

I couldn’t get Lidarr to work very well so I started using Soulseek. Highly recommend it!

I recommend grayjay on your phone+fcast receiver on your tv.

Keep in mind, if your VPN only has one port you can forward, which is likely to be the case, you have to choose between Soulseek and your torrent client.

Soulseek, start to collect and share your music collection in high-quality format (FLAC)

navidrome, self-hosted is what I use. Personally, the less I have to contact google's servers for the media I enjoy, the better.

Sorry I don't have better advice, but alongside soulseek, lucida.to, and torrents, I have way more music than I think I'll ever be able to listen to in my lifetime.

Very relevant comment, navidrome is amazing

What's the spot for music torrents nowadays?

I second the existing recommendations. Unfortunately Lidarr is only partially operational. My stack consists of:

• Music on a large storage drive
• Slskd so it keeps my account active and supplies a WebUI for downloads (but if you try to browse users with 500K songs, the browser just dies trying to load it all in memory)
• Beetbox beets for metadata embedding, renaming and moving into the final storage as per my naming convention. Pro tip: pipx install beets[lyrics] to include the lrclib plugin
• Navidrome for hosting a personal streaming service. Comes with a WebUI, and is SubSonic compatible to allow any SubSonic client such as Symfonium or Tempo (available on F-droid).

For my particular use case (Proxmox-based container), I have a tutorial available. This can no doubt be adapted slightly if your system differs.

I just use soulseek/Nicotine+ or I keep it old school cause it's never let me down and use pirate bay still.

My main issue with music streamers is that lately they have been pumping way too much AI garbage music into my playlist.

What's a good playlist generation app to discover music in the same vein as a song or album I select?

last.fm?

I'll give it a try. I have not pirated music since the 2Ks. Enshittification is gonna drive me back out to sea.

last.fm isnt really piracy tho, iirc you can use their scrobbler with all sorts of things including spotify

when I'm in need of offline music I pay for one month of tidal and then use streamrip to download it all

https://github.com/nathom/streamrip

soulseek/nicotine :3

Thank you, I will look into soulseek!

That's not a bad idea at all!

Ok I think this is a very attractive option. This is the first I'm hearing of navidrome!

I've not come across any of those annoyances yet with Morphe, but I've only been using it for a day or so.

I've never heard of it before. It's sounding very convincing

Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed answer. Lidarr is a complete flop for me I find it very frustrating to use!

Excellent, very happy to hear there is an option for shield! I've never heard of project Ivy to I will take a look

Yeah Lidarr is just not that good, thanks for the recommendation.

I just got slskd for soulseek going. You can add slskd as a source in lidarr. Need to add a plug-in to do so. I've also noticed lidarr sucks with torrents, but now that it's using slskd it's been pretty great. There's also nicotine+ if you want a desktop app to connect to soulseek, but seeing as I already had portainer and a bunch of docker stuff already, I went with slskd.

You can use slskd as a source in lidarr to download from soulseek. Gives you the nice *arr format and auto downloads, but connected to soulseek you actually get results to download.

Huh, I’ll have to try that out. Thanks!

They are not even close to being the same...
The closest topic they share is being about music.

Slskd is a plugin which isnt officially supported. So no support in the discord if you have to ask about issues.

Lidarr is also no source but a search engine. If you don't supply it with indexers it's of course "shit".
Same as the eternal issue of bing vs google as a search engine.

Comparing apples and oranges...

Hi. I'm not saying it's shit. I know you need an indexer. I just wasn't a huge fan of how it oragnised music and it struggles with discs with multiple artists etc. Maybe I didn't know hoe best to utilise it properly, which is most likely the case.

I found a soulseek image for my portainer setup but I'm struggling to get it to work. Navidrome works perfectly which is exciting. I don't really understand the difference or rather the connection between slskd and soulseek

If you are are already doing docker slskd is a nice container client for soulseek.

Hi I have installed the slskd image and I can access the web interface now. I was wondering if you could help because I'm not connected to the server and I don't see how to "register" or login

I need to get navidrome set up, but I'm also wary of selfhosting anything externally accessible at home. As it is I just sync my music between phone and pc which works well enough.

The one thing I haven't been able to find is a good music recommendation or discovery solution a la Spotify daily mixes

This is the way to go. And it's really satisfying to see randos downloading your music. I never clear the "upload" tab lol

Set it up with NetBird or Tailscale so it isn't externally accessible.

Yeah, I use Tidal for recommendations, then download so they don't rug-pull me.

I really hate that all the support channels are moving to discord instead of the web where you can just search and find the answers, because it's almost a guarantee that someone else already had the problem and it got answered. And you used to just be able to Google to find the answer. Now every question is, this is a support question, closing the thread go to discord.

It doesnt organize what musicbrainz isnt providing. And it does what musicbrainz does.
The main artist is the sorting artist.
Additional artists are just that. Additions.
If it is an even collab, it's either under 'Various Artists' or on the other artist.

Does it bother me? Yep.
I think how Spotify does it, it's better (listing all artists on the album). But that's now how the industry seems to work ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Discord is the equivalenf of "I need support now".
Sort of like a lifeline for personalized issues.
Sometimes self inflicted.

Your described issues are something else. Something that is worthy a git issue.

Yes it annoys me too. But there are channels for each topic. And to be fair, a forum aint exactly support friendly for on-demand questions.

It's one word "projectivy" fyi

If you enjoy a small independent band please consider going to their website and ordering physical media or buying a digital copy from their bandcamp or something. You can still pirate content you will never play to to fill up your storage. Small artists aren't getting hugely rich from their music and touring costs are out of control. It doesn't have to be all or nothing with the piracy.

• soulseek is the sharing platform (not sure how it works exactly, some kind of federation with a central broker to search for users? Like how Matrix by default uses the primary domain for 'discovery')
• soulseekqt is the program that enables you to interact with the soulseek network
• slskd is a program specifically for remote running soulseekqt on a headless (no display) server, and serves a web UI with separate login so you can access it from another machine

The use case for slskd is if you want your music to live on a different machine, whereas soulseek/qt is for if you want your music on your primary machine. Another reason I keep it on a server is efficiency - I can expose my collection for sharing without having my 200W+ PC on, instead my server takes ~60W, ~20 if i remove the GPU

My favourite group of the year Fin del Mundo came to my city and I made sure to buy a cassette of theirs they released. I will always support groups I love when I can.

not sure about the nvidia shield but have you looked at re-vanced?

The spotify daily mix thing, I get you on that, I miss it too! I honestly just browse rateyourmusic, acquire them via soulseek, and hope for the best. As I said, I have more than enough music to last a lifetime, but for those who don't have a great library already, I think some of the fun of music comes from the process of discovery too!

But as to making my music externally accessible, I mean, it is at least secured by a basic auth page, and I mean, what would a bad actor want, to sabotage my music collection? It would suck, but I mean, wouldn't be the end of the world. I have it routed behind caddy and a cloudflare tunnel, so the only threat in this circumstance is someone who has access to my home.

rutracker, I guess, or any other public tracker. The more niche the music though, the less likely torrents will be alive.

Links for Fin del Mundo

• https://findelmundo.bandcamp.com/music
• https://www.youtube.com/@lasfindelmundo
• https://music.youtube.com/channel/UCbuNHd8zSeB5oJCiL9Va43w