More than just 'what app are you using', but I do want that as well.

I want a good mindset for downloading music that has what I want and at least some of what I'll probably like.

Currently, partially as a limitation of the app, I have every song in every album that contains something I like. This works well ish for discovery, but I know less than a quarter of my library, no matter how much time I spend listening to new music. This was with Lidar + tubifary (Tidal and Slskd only).

Currently I'm trying Downtify configured with slskd and yt as a backup, but it seems very slow to download and the app itself is very laggy.

I don't know all this fancy stuff. Like, yesterday, I wanted to listen to the songs from the anime The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya so I grabbed them from nyaa, moved them from the "Downloads" directory to the "Music" directory and then played it with VLC.🤷‍♀️

I'm still very much in the process of finding what will work for me. Music Assistant to somewhat merge my YT Music and my locally stored files in one workflow. Last.fm and Listenbrainz scrobbling for generating recommendations for me. Maybe in a while I'll feel like I don't want YTM anymore, but right now I still find it hard to leave it fully. Lidarr and Tubifarry are also part of my stack.

On 'good mindset': I'm afraid that's still something that needs attention, and I hope to find it with what I currently use as I'm still too comfortable streaming YTM.

I download albums (through piracy or not) and add them to my modest mp3 collection the same way I used to buy CDs — once in a while when it seems like a good idea. If there's an album I don't think is worth listening to again, I delete it.

Mostly rutracker + jpopsuki.

I open amazon music and copy over all the album and single links from an artist I like to lucida to download them all as flacs, then I use an ffmpeg script to convert them all to 320kb mp3s. I reformat the names and metadata and put them into my music folder.

I enjoy my music.

Same setup. I did "make" a crappy bridge between Lidarr and Streamrip to search and download from my Qobuz subscription.

I tend to look for specific songs. If I can't find something on Bittorrent, I'll look on all the p2p networks, and if it's not there either, I'll settle for downloading audio-only off of YT.

Lidarr for discographies and keeping up with releases, deemix for downloading singles direct from deezer. I often only like one song from a release and hate having to filter through full discographies to find the one thing I like, so this works great for me. Deemix is also blazingly fast.

This all goes to jellyfin and i play it on my phone with symphonium.

slsk! When Audiogalaxy got shut down, that’s where we fled to. Not as much these days since I have a Deezer sub, but every now and again the completionist in me wants the flacs for offine. Have a large repository that goes back to the late 1990s when EMusic accounts were being shared and there were no gates to stop that. Was like backing your pickup truck to the Amoeba Records loading dock and filling er up!

Soulseek is kinda weird now. Wasn’t always full of gatekeepers and the stuffy folks. Time changes things, I suppose. Some of my old slsk friends are still on there.

I use soulseek and the FMHY list of sites for acquisition. As far as discovery, no idea really. I'm still working on getting my Spotify favorites downloaded for now. I have kinda gotten back on last.fm for scrobbling and hopefully some discovery, but honestly I connected mpdscribble and haven't looked at it since.

Navidrome has been on my radar for unifying mobile access instead of syncthing duplicating everything, but I keep putting off setting up a home server.

I have Lidarr setup to track album and singles releases from a handful of artists and bands that I am really, really into so I don't miss something. Mostly, though, I acquire new music the same way I always have, something catches my ear somewhere and I go looking for it.

Discovery is kinda all over the place, but lately Youtube has been pretty good at suggesting new artists and tracks to listen to, though, it is occasionally hard to actually acquire said track or album. Other places have movie and tv show soundtracks, ListenBrainz recommendations and occasionally an actual radio station..

For the most part, I've moved away from pirating music and audiobooks as it's generally pretty easy to find an above-board source that is either DRM free or can be cracked easily. When I do pirate something for whatever reason, I'll usually go back later and purchase a copy. I would rather support the artists since I usually have the means at present and most of the artists I'm into aren't really all that big. I really wish that ebooks, tv shows and movies would get the damned hint and do the same..

I've used Tidal Plus lidarr, and that's probably been my favorite setup. What does Music Assistant and StreamRip add to this stack? I don't know either of these apps.

Soulseek.
On Linux I use Nicotene.

Personally I just use Nicotine+ to grab whatever I want as a .flac, then use beets to organize them.

On a similar note, I've been curious if that's a tool that one could feed a playlist into and have it return another playlist, based on the former's genre, tone, bpm, lyrical theming, etc. I'm not even sure how to begin searching, though. 🤷🏼‍♂️

Also, I have the slimmest idea of what to recommend here, sorry. 🙇🏼‍♂️

I've tried beets. Very manual. I like Nicotine

You can kinda use audiomuse?
Scans your local library and by way of a plugin can generate songs that sound like a given song.

Doesn't work on a whole playlist, but this is a start

If it works, it works. Don't fix what ain't broken.

When you run into issues of scale, hopefully the ecosystem is a little more forgiving

Interesting. I forgot lucida was a thing.

I used SyncThing for years, but once I got into self hosting, I never looked back.

If you ever decide to bite the bullet, reach out, I'll help how I can. Self hosting is the fun part of listening to music.

I usually walk into a music store, fill up a box and scream "bye bitches" and leave.

What did the script do?

You only listen to discographies? Do you go back and redownload new artists? Private tracker?

yubal to grab stuff from yt, then some scripts smashing Claude and beets together for more intelligent automation, then navidrome for serving. Occasionally I'll use slskd for more obscure stuff. Tempus is my current Android player of choice.

For streaming/discovery, custom cli application that scrapes Bandcamp 'recommended' albums to get associations between them and considers what I've liked and disliked for probability weights determining what to play next, playing them with mpv.

For actually downloading stuff I like enough to want to save, I have a dedicated button to take the url in my clipboard and save audio files from it to my music folder with a script that uses yt-dlp

I am on a music private tracker called Orpheus.. I download everything I want from there. I also have navidrome, it automatically scans the folder for new albums and I have transcoding enabled so whenever I play music it transcodes to opus 162kbps. That's if.

i used to download from deezer when public ARLs were extremely easy to get and use, but they got more restrictive recently. these days i just soulseek.

Generate, as in list them, yes? I'm somewhat amenable to LLM use in such a search, but "AI" "music" is worse than TJ Maxx in the 90s.

fucking cassettes

Yea I do this in Prowlarr and it works ok, it's a great starting point. When that fails, I use slskd or Nicotine+

do you have any guides on how to use soulseek? is it safe to use on public wi-fi? (And will I get a letter from my ISP lol)

soulseek is very easy to use. everyone shares a folder on their computer, and one can query keywords on everyone's directory listing and download off of them.

install the client nicontine+ (on desktop. if on android, use 'seeker'. there's none for ios), choose a nickname, set a shared folder, optionally fill it with some media you already have, and you can start using immediately. i recommend setting the shared folder the same as the soulseek download folder so you get to share what you download.

since soulseek is P2P and requires direct network connection, at least one of two peers need open ports. so if you have open ports you can download from everyone, but with closed ports you can only download from those who have their ports open. so, port forwarding is optional and not strictly necessary.

i haven't ever heard of receiving letters from ISP because of soulseek, since it's surprisingly quite under the radar for some reason. ISP letters are usually because of torrents. but still, soulseek protocol is unencrypted so it's not impossible. because of this i don't recommend usage on public wifi. use it through a VPN if you can.

I have a streaming subscription on qobuz, and use qobuz-dl to download anything that’s available to stream on qobuz. I tried using soulseek for a bit but it was sometimes a bit hit-or-miss with my searches, so the qobuz stream-rip option seemed like the best compromise. I’ve still got soulseek running, though, so whatever I get from qobuz is made available to the community.

I use Lidarr to manage my library. If you don’t mind running the plugins branch, there’s a qobuz-dl plugin that will let you utilize this method to download albums directly through Lidarr. Qobuz often has multiple versions of an album that can be hard to differentiate in the lidarr UI, so I often just end up downloading the specific version I want and then importing it into lidarr.

I delete it.

HERESY!!!!

I don't pirate music, I buy it from Bandcamp. Then I download the files to my storage server and sync it to my phone, or play it with MPD.

I wish I could do the same with movies and TV shows....

I get my music from discord servers and sometimes soulseek if I can't find a song or album, and then play it using USB Audio Player Pro since I use an external dac.
Symfonium is also another great player with a highly customisable interface that I sometimes use

I second the Symfonium recommendation - Feishin is a great desktop player as well. Click the now playing album on the bottom left for a full screen mode with visualiser/lyrics/up next screen present alongside the now playing info 👍🏼

I buy loads and loads of old vinyl records from various discount bins, flea markets and thrift stores. If it's 1 or 2 €: I often just buy blind if cover is somewhat appealing to me or because artists names ring a bell for me.

If I like what I hear, I obtain an mp3 copy of it (various sources) for my library. If I really liked it and can't find it digitally (it happens): I record my own vinyl record to have a digital copy. My file preference is mp3 VBR. I think flac is overkill for most basic soundsystems and human ears and they are not worth the enormous filesize difference.

Jellyfin + Nicotine+

Symfonium is a paid app. I use Tempus (which is free) and while it has fewer features, it's more than enough for me.

You may like to check out Subvert.FM, a cooperative successor to Bandcamp, (the latter was bought by Epic Games, not a reputable company unfortunately). The platform is owned by its members: artists, labels, supporters and workers and runs on a democratic basis.

get the original cd/vinyl/non-remastered (there are exceptions) release flac from nicotine+ for my desktop, convert it to 96 kbps opus for my phone.

It's so worth it for the price (it was like $1.50 in my region)
Tempus looks great, it Reminds me of Oto Music which is also another great free player that has the fastest library scanner I've found in any player I've tried which is very useful if you have a large music library like I do

Oto music also has a really good music tagger that also lets you edit metadata for entire albums in bulk, which is the only reason I use it for lol

It's a lot more expensive in Europe, 9EUR. Not saying it's not worth it, just that I don't really feel like I need it.

nicotine+ also I make playlists in Spotify and download them with onthespot, and then finally use old school forums for niche bits.

Download torrents, organise by artist/album and manage/consume it with Plex.

:(

Bandcamp is an American online music distribution platform, founded in 2008,[1][2][3][4] with an office and record store in Oakland, California.[5] It was acquired by Epic Games in March 2022 and sold to the music-licensing company Songtradr in October 2023; about half of Bandcamp staff did not receive offers to continue under the new owne

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandcamp

Songtradr is an American B2B music platform that helps to facilitate brands, content creators, and digital platforms in their use of music for licensing purposes. As of 2019, Songtradr was the largest music licensing platform in the world

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songtradr