I'm an old fart who decided to get back onto the high seas following the enshittification of all paid services. I have the arr stack running nicely but I find it hard to get a hold of niche and new music.

Any tips would be much appreciated, as I'm new to this new type of piracy please explain any abbreviations and assume I won't understand what you're talking about.

Many thanks!

unless you get on some tracker like red, soulseek is the way to go, i can say i've found MOST things there and i have pretty obscure and niche tastes, use nicotine+ client

Rutracker is also really good for music and I think you just have to make an account, there’s no ratio requirements or whatever like private trackers tend to have. I was going to try soulseek but I only have one randomized port from my vpn (being used by qbt) so I couldn’t use it

Soulseek

Or scrape from spotify/similar service with tools like spotisub or use yt music with any one of the tons of scrapers.

This is the o my reason I pay for Spotify premium... To the those sweet high quality tracks.

ive used it for years without opening my ports because some issue with my isp, it's rare for users to not share and generally there's someone who has the same files willing to share, but of course sharing is caring, matey

Cool, I'll see about connecting slskd to arr then if that gives me anything.

Looking into slskd first and scraping if I'm not pleased with that. Thanks!