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?
Download everything that would upset you if it were no longer available forever starting tomorrow.
Honestly i mostly download songs on .mp3 format individually.
Unless someone has been kind enough to compile the entire album on a .zip file
What a weird question. I download music I like. Sometimes I buy stuff on Bandcamp or download from YT. I don’t use Spotify and I’m an album/artist listener. Am I missing something here? Do people not have personal music libraries any more? Do people now just listen to whatever bullshit Spotify randomly plays? If so, that’s sad.
Google Play Music hooked me by letting me upload my entire library. I used Songza to discover new music (playlists curated by real humans).
Google bought Songza and shut it down. Raised the price of Google Music multiple times, forced me over to YouTube Premium, raised the price again multiple times and got rid of everything that made the service appealing.
I’ve been in music limbo since I dropped it entirely and yeah it’s kind of sad.
Man, songza was so great. It was my default music app 11 years ago lol
For a while, it was noted that the “Hip Hop Caviar” playlist had a direct and noticeable affect on single/album sales and streams on other platforms. So yeah kinda, although people are still interested in owning the music they like, but a not-insignificant portion of humans don’t care either way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Whatever I feel like listening to that day. In that regard it’s no different than having a massive Spotify/Apple music library
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!
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
FLAC is good, but not necessary for background listening. At 192k the average song is ~ 5Mb. 100k x 5 = 0.5 TB.
You pretty much calculated spot on! ;)
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…
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
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.
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.
If i like it.
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
Lately ive been getting a lot of new music from rateyourmusic.com . I look up an album i like, find some themed lists featuring it that aound interesting (a lot of the lists are like “things i listened to this year”, i ignore those), and will hop from list to list as i see interesting looking albums.
I follow YT accounts that post music that I’m interested in such as Vapor Memory or Cryo Chamber. I’m also on the mailing lists of several artists on Bandcamp so I get notified of new releases. I ask friends for recommendations, I ask on forums, other places. Really not that hard.
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
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 add stations to my radio app, like Ancient FM, Cosmo Vintage, Intergalactic FM, King Dub, Nightwave Plaza, Radio Nova. Tons of cool stuff comes up, most is tagged. If I really like it I soulseek it. I stopped downloading whole albums by default, good tunes end up in my assorted folder. I throw out stuff I don’t listen to as well, I’m not a hoarder.
I just set up lidarr with all artists I like listening to and tell it to download everything they’ve made. That’s how I have about 700gb of flac files
If I hear a song I like in a movie, game or other media I add the song and the discography for the artist to the downloader.
Once I have some free time I listen through those songs and filter out everything I don’t like.
The rest gets added to my collection. I never delete songs unless something slipped through like a short interlude.
