What public indexers do people advise for audio?

I am using Lidarr, so the pool of options is somewhat limited. Naturally it would be preferable to have access to one or two private trackers, such as Redacted or Orpheus, but life is what it is (invites are understandably hard to come by).

  • If OP takes the Soulpill, I offer some tips:

    • Don’t despair if search results carry a [private] prefix. Some of these people just got frustrated once upon a time and decided to whitelist peers rather than blacklist. Often they just want a polite PM asking for access. It pays to be inquisitive, so check their User Info for information.
    • Chat rooms don’t need to be occupied to obtain or download search results. In fact it’s usually better to ignore them.
    • 99 per cent of users would rather you share 3 albums than 500 system files.
    • Appreciate your guidance, was completely unaware of this network before now, gives me Limewire vibes for some reason.

      My whole library is on offer, it isn’t too small, hopefully that will be enough to satisfy people.

      Probably will continue with torrents alongside, I do like the Lidarr interface.

      • I’m hosting slskd and Lidarr on Unraid and pretty much only using slskd as a download client. That way I can use Lidarr to rename/organize/tag everything like I want. Only drawback is still having to download stuff from the slskd web ui and then go back to Lidarr, so some of the automation benefits are lost. But soulseek has provided better quality and access to the music i’m looking for, so it’s been worth it.

  • Honestly I gotta second SLSK here. More specifically nicotine+ since it’s better. That and yt-dlp works on bandcamp and youtube music (if this whole youtube bullshit hasn’t fucked it up, I haven’t checked but I also haven’t noticed the outcry I’d expect.)

    It’s not torrenting but for music it’s better. Protip, slap just over 1k files in your “shares” folder to evade the autoban jerks.

    • Thanks for this - I was completely unaware of Soalseek.

      I now have it installed, with the necessary port forwarding in place, seems relatively straightforward to use. Unfortunately the (perhaps obscure) artists I’m looking for are not well serviced, but I presume it’s a case of checking back from time to time.

  • rutracker.org (note this is different from the other rutracker so make sure it’s .org) is a Russian tracker with a lot. From what I’ve seen, most of their flac is from Quboz but I mostly go for popular stuff so idk about about more niche music.

    Honestly, even though it’s a pain, it might be worth it to just bite the bullet and try for the Redacted interview. I’ve been thinking of this for myself.