Most of the discussion and sources of content talk about movies and series.
I’ve been recently looking for psy and techno music, finding FLAC or WAV with active seeders feels like striking gold. It’s definitely been a while since I’ve looked for active torrent sites and it feels more barren than ever.
Edit: Thank you all for all that valuable information. The reddit group really wasn’t this helpful and valued making fun over adding real use able knowledge.
The soulseek network is still alive and well.
Oh wow! I’ve exclusively streamed for a number of years now, but used to be pretty active on Soulseek (+10 years ago). Totally forgot the name until you mentioned it. Glad to hear it’s still up and running fine.
Go on there and share some of your stuff, if you want. We’ll be glad if people help keep the network alive. ;)
It’s pretty amazing. Everything I had wished Limewire was.
Since Apple Music / Spotify I don’t find it necessary. Far more likely to pirate TV / movies because they’re spread out across so many different services and require so many different subscriptions.
Yeah except I use Spicetify on windows and some “premium unlocked” APK on android because the ads are (intentionally) annoying as hell
I’d recommend trying out XManager so you don’t have to download Spotify apks from shady websites. I don’t use Spotify so I don’t know how often it updates, but I’ve heard good things about it.
thanks for the suggestion!
Same. I would love for someone to create a real debrid - stremio equivalent for music instead of video.
I am working on just the thing! Hopefully will manage to have some sort of music suggestion embedded into it as well without the need of Spotify or whatever algorithm people use. Currently working on making it accessible for people to export their libraries from whatever streaming service they’re using.
why pirate when bandcamp has everything I want on FLAC for pennies
The album prices are pretty high sometimes and many artists are not on bandcamp
Yeah but fuck those guys.
I buy on Bandcamp and pirate through Soulseek (specifically Nicotine+).
I also buy Vinyls.
Torrenting music has been pretty trash for me so I haven’t bothered in ages.
bandcamp
I didn’t know about bandcamp. I’m gonna buy some albums there. The music is drm-free? I think that what bandcamp and itch.io are doing should be the future of the industry.
Yes, the music there is drm free. Keep in mind it’s not ALL music. It’s mostly music from independent artists. But they are the ones that need the most support. So go all in!
Yup that’s exactly why it has flourished in the past decade or so
Bandcamp is pretty great. I usually stream from their app but you can download music you buy in a bunch of formats.
I like their writeups they do sometimes (like a “best doom metal from Texas” deep dive)
They do Bandcamp Fridays sometimes where they yield their share of the sale to the artists.
I’ve also had artists write back a few times when I put a comment in the box when buying stuff. Most notably an invite to a show they were playing once.
They did get bought by epic though so they’re not indie anymore. A bummer. But epic hasn’t shit it up yet so far as I know.
IMO, Bandcamp is one of the best places to go if you actually want to support artists. Spotify and other streaming options tend to be the worst.
I bought music from several artists on Bandcamp and could not download some of it 12 months later. Artist unresponsive, Bandcamp support unwilling to help. And now Tencent has it’s tendrils in the company so expect it to get worse.
Is nicotine working good for you? Last time I tried it, it was missing some search results that were instead appearing in soulseek-qt client
Nicotine is working fine for me. Although I’ll have to check out soulseek-qt myself to see if there is any difference in search results Up until now, I haven’t had problems finding anything unless it was something that was released within the week (usually singles)(which I just rip from youtube)
Bandcamp is great. Fuck corporate labels who prevent artists from releasing their music privately on the platform. It’s an abhorrent business practice.
I’ma get hate for this but I’m not pirating out of principle but when I think something it’s to expensive for it’s price. I live in a country with good salaries and have to work less than one hour for one month of endless music. To me that is a good deal but I am aware that it is not to everyone especially those from other countries. I mostly pirate Movies and TV Shows because you would need to pay over 50€/month to get access to all services.
Nah, not happening. I used to buy stuff from play music because they used to let u download the mp3, flac, etc. Then i would use it for an old android 4 phone wich i use as player.
But since they kill it im not doing that anymore, i refuse to suffer a netflix 2.o now with more tears for all the money u invested and watching how it evaporates because a suit tough it was something nobody watches even when it’s one of ur more popular shows, or worse, they block ur country and u end up in piracy once more.
If u wanna use the argument of “but we need to help the creators, bla, bla, bla”, dude if u really wanna help them donate them directly, be it music or series, it has been more than proven that they only recibe the bare minimum by conventional means.
I’ve always wondered why today you would torrent music instead of just downloading the audio from another site like yt.
The only upside I could see to torrenting music is the better quality, which is fair I guess, if you want super high quality.
I guess it depends on how you listen music, most of the time it’s nice to be able to torrent the full discography of a specific artist. Or just download an album you bought because you don’t have time to rip it yourself (vinyls for example).
Fair.
YouTube quality is horrendous. Converted from 44.1k to 48k then compressed to shit in 128kbps Opus/AAC.
I stream music off of YouTube a bit and I can tell you the poor quality is notable on good speakers for certain artists/songs. It is jaring enough at times it breaks my focus and I switch to my local collection.
YouTube quality is horrendous. Converted from 44.1k to 48k then compressed to shit in 128kbps Opus/AAC.
YouTube quality is horrendous. Converted from 44.1k to 48k then compressed to shit in 128kbps Opus/AAC.
YouTube quality is horrendous. Converted from 44.1k to 48k then compressed to shit in 128kbps Opus/AAC.
YouTube quality is horrendous. Converted from 44.1k to 48k then compressed to shit in 128kbps Opus/AAC.
Personally, I tend to only pirate music files that I just can’t find anywhere else. For example, audiophile quality 45rpm vinyl rips of albums that might have only been sold in that format once, and for a very limited run. In cases like that, I almost feel a responsibility to maintain a copy because it is something that could very easily disappear from existence.
The guys doing the rips understand that they might own one of maybe a few hundred copies of a certain album, so they rip at audiophile quality and share.
You can pay for any streaming service that serves FLAC and rip that. Very easy to do for Tidal and Deezer for example.
Not accessible in my country
As the normies went to streaming it became more gatekept and toxic. I’m mainly familiar with the attitude of trades only or straight up selling tracks (eg groupbuys with kids paying thousands of dollars for some shitty Kanye mumble demo). The game didn’t used to be like that. The days of the blogs with mega/rapid share links are long gone
I mean you got all the stream rippers eg SlavArt which is super nice. Soulseek is still alright but getting taken over by traders. RED/OPS around but you can’t just waltz in and I’d argue they don’t compare to what.cd or even OinK. RuTracker still got stuff going on
But when you’re after actual rare stuff that you can’t just buy or stream it can be real tough nowadays. Scene archives can be nice but very hard to get access and it’s mostly mp3s.
Not for me, I’m pirating tons of songs in these days. Try Soulseek it’s a gold mine of good music with great quality
Soulseek has been great since I found it. I’ve been able to replace so much of my CD collection that I ripped 2 decades ago in 256 MP3 with flac.
I have people download my files on soulseek/nicotine+ daily. Plus anyone that would pirate music probably already know how to rip it straight from streaming services.
Soulseek is still around? It’s been like 10 years since I’ve used it
I use it daily, they even have a mobile version called Seeker which is pretty nice.
Omg you’re amazing! I’ve been searching for an Android version of soulseek for ages, and somehow never got recommended Seeker. The only app I found was dead by the time I downloaded it.
Awesome, enjoy! I was in the same position and super happy to find it.
I don’t think it’s dying at all. Check out private music trackers like https://redacted.ch/index.php or https://interview.orpheus.network/
OiNK -> WHAT.CD -> RED
Music is hard to find on public trackers. RED and ORP are awesome private trackers that have basically anything you can think of. And if its not use the deezload telegram bot and send it a link to the song on deezer
Or you can you soulseek. That’s still very viable even today
Good leads, the bot sounds interesting
Soulseek is the goto piracy thing for music.
Streaming service ripping is alive and well.
Youtube scrapers like Newpipe and alternative frontend makes listening easy if you aren’t quality obsessed. This has been adequate for my levels of listening.
Some private trackers have massive music collection dumps.
However, I’d say directly supporting artists through storefronts like bandcamp is the best way to go, where it’s available. No DRM, no bullshit, the artist benefits. This, to me, is the best alternative to piracy.
Napster, Deezer, Tidal aren’t terrible offerings either FWIW.
Sorry to ask a dumb question but how do I rip from streaming services? It’s worth buying a subscription for this ability
youtube-dl has the ability to extract audio
And there are similar apps for my streaming services.
god, there’s lot of telegram bots which can download music from services like deezer/spotify/soundcloud/etc
from my perspective, music piracy is not dying anytime soon
God, I need to start using Telegram.
Telegram is a shitty messenger apart from having a big file upload limit, which makes it good for piracy. Anyway, those bots just scrape song titles, go to youtube and download songs from there, no magic involved
The audio quality pales in comparison. I have no idea if Dezer scrapping is still working but you can get flac from scrapping it. YouTube music is junk
Why would you say it’s a shitty messenger though? As far as privacy goes, they haven’t ever complied with authorities for takedowns etc and I think for many countries its so useful in terms of protest organization like in HK. Not to mention the polish. No need to subscribe to Telegram Premium either its kinda just a way to support server costs.
Well, there not only youtube bots there actually. For instance, there are bots that download from VK and mp3 files there are often 320kb/s. Also, there are bots for movies, series, anime and so on, lots of book groups, so, telegram basically is piracy paradise.