obsidian says this takes 27 minutes to read.

first guide of all time, lmao. this kinda sucks but this is how i avoid spotify at all costs. this will be a post that will be continually updated. So uhh, yeah.

look at the page updates here

Introduction

As I mentioned in this post, I gave Spotify it a fair shot back in 2016, and it turns out I really fucking hated Spotify. Spotify sucked, and the fact that I had to stay connected to the internet at all times to play music was very very fucking annoying and pretty much an instant dealbreaker.1 So I cancelled that trial run of Spotify, and decided to go full in on downloading music and keeping them on my devices. This was originally a very tedious process, but I would eventually find tools and software that would allow me to more efficiently download music, better music sources, I would learn to either pirate or purchase music in higher quality, get these songs tagged, and keep these music libraries updated across devices. Nowadays, I cannot imagine myself using a streaming service ever, and it makes me happy no one can come in and stop me from listening to whatever song (like what happens on Spotify).

With Spotify ramping up its own enshittification, and continuing to pay most of the artists who publish music there2 fucking nothing, quietly adding AI slop music into people’s playlists3, allowing ICE recruitment ads on the platform, constantly hiking up prices every damn year, and the CEO literally investing into AI weapons now (you can see even more shit they have done here), I noticed a recent trend of my friends and other mutuals going back to the more “traditional” ways of listening to music. Ditching Spotify, pirating music or buying it off iTunes or Bandcamp, getting music players installed on their phones, or even going back and dusting off that old iPod or MP3 they had in a drawer somewhere, buying CDs, etc. Spotify is no longer the darling it once was, it is now a awful multi-billion dollar shithole of a company that underpays artists and transforms music from the art form it is, down into meaningless slop. The algorithm decides on what people should listen to you, sometimes even pushing out AI shit for you to consume. This is not to mention the billions that Spotify’s CEO is spending on AI tech for the military for some fucking reason. Sure, there isn’t money to pay artists better, but there is more than enough to fund killer robots, cool, cool. Spotify is a disgusting company, and streaming as a whole is also godawful too. And I hope someone who finds this guide can use it and start their own music library, a music library that no one can take from them, and will always be available at all times.

How to get music?

step 0: read the megathread (or research online)

The r/piracy megathread is a very good source of information when it comes to pirating music, as it lists loads of software, websites, torrents and other tools that can help you with building a library from scratch. Do note to be careful when interacting with the links there (especially if they are not marked as trustworthy, since these can be sources of malware). Keep an adblocker on at all times, and you should be fine for the most part.

Another thing that I would recommend, is to try to use search engines more often. Maybe use Duckduckgo or something that isn’t Google while you’re at it. Just search whatever you were looking for, and maybe add .mp3 or .flac at the end. It may work, or it may not work, but it id worth a shot, at least.

Other cool sites:

https://fmhy.pages.dev/audio: FMHY’s page when it comes to music. It has a shitload of sources, tools, guides and whatever thing that you want to get your hands on.

https://wiki.dbzer0.com/piracy/megathread/music/: alternative for the r/piracy’s megathread (basically a copy of the megathread hosted somewhere else in case shit hits the fan)

https://nyaa.si: the go to place if you want to get your hands on anime soundtracks.

https://downloads.khinsider.com/: good place to get video game soundtracks, but they make it kinda tedious to mass download whole soundtracks, fortunately there are tools that can help with this. gallery-dl works, but it can only download MP3 files and I can’t figure out ways to fix this.

Music ripping from streaming sites and choosing your format of choice

There are various music ripping sites that allow a person to either use their own account or a shared account and use that to rip the music files directly from the streaming platform server, or via other more nefarious ways. There are many websites that can do this, on the top of my head, there is https://lucida.to and https://squid.wtf. These websites are probably the easiest way to get your hands on good quality music, but they often get knocked out offline either because they get hit with cease and desists, or they end up running out of usable accounts.

There are also tools that you can download from your computer if you so desired, but these tools are significantly harder to use, you need to find the specific credentials to use these (or learn how to use your own), and like those websites mentioned above, the credentials that these tools depend on are often made null and void by the streaming platforms, especially Deezer, which is now cracking down on suspicious accounts like this.

With these sites you can download music as MP3 files, or FLAC files. These have different advantages when compared with each other:

MP3 FLAC
Size (for a single song) often around 8 to 12 MB in size Most often found as 40MB, but can go up towards 500MB for a single song
Tag support Pretty good Pretty good
Music Quality (how good the songs sound?) Pretty decent all things considered Technically better than MP3, but you may not notice the difference in most situations.
Transcodability (how easy is it to convert to another format) Not really recommended (because of quality losses) It is easy, and you can pretty much transcode these files to anything you want (OGG, OPUS, MP3, whatever you want.)

FLAC files are pretty cool, they are easy to find on the internet, they have better tagging ability compared to WAV files, but they will start piling up fast in size, and a rather medium-ish library of 4000 songs could be as large as 100GB or more. If you are willing to go full-in on FLAC files, I suggest maybe putting aside the storage that you may need, or upgrading your storage. Also with FLAC files, you may not even notice the sound difference at all, since to notice the difference, your headphones have to be good enough. You may not hear any difference with some 30 dollar KZ IEMs, but you may hear some subtle differences on some full-on headphones like the HD 280 Pros. If all you have is some cheapo earbuds, or if you will be doing most of your music listening on your phone, you may want to stick to MP3s.

Another thing that you should note is that with these ripping sites there are times where the FLAC file is nothing more than a re-encoded MP3 file. This is not the ripping site’s fault, rather the fault lies in the streaming service, or even the artists themselves, but hey, you are getting this music for free, soooo…

If you want to root these out, there are tools like Faking The Funk that can help you scan and figure out which files are true FLACs and which are not. You can also get spectrum analyzers and just load up any suspect FLAC files in to it. Go ahead and read this blog post for more information regarding checking FLAC files.

With MP3s however, things become more easier. They’re smaller, easier to handle, and are pretty portable (since almost all devices may support MP3 but not FLAC files). The sound quality is good enough for most ears and should be good enough for someone who just got off streaming services. I have heard of other codecs being better than MP3, but I haven’t really ever experimented with them, and they may not be supported by the devices you may use.

Music ripping (from YouTube, and Soundcloud)

You could also try ripping your music from YouTube and Soundcloud, and often times these are also pretty easy to do. However, the quality of these are often not great, and often kinda suck ass compared to a file downloaded from a Deezer or a Tidal or whatever.

YT-DLP is a very powerful tool that can be used to rip and download music off of YouTube (alongside the ability to just download whatever video you may have in mind.), as well as Soundcloud. However, it is a command line utility, and may be pretty hard to figure out if you are someone that barely uses the terminal at all. Also to note, you may need to also download FFmpeg so that YT-DLP can rip these songs into mp3 files. Of course, there are other more GUI friendly ways to download shit from YT, such as:

To be honest, I think it is better to just suck it up and learn how to use the command line. Here is a cool cheatsheet that you can use that may help you in your downloading endeavors.

Soulseek

Soulseek is a P2P network that has surprisingly survived for a long while, partially because it is a hidden gem, as well as the fact that the userbase for Soulseek prefers to cater more to underground and independent artists, however you can now find whatever major artist you’d like on the network too. Users who use the network are expected to also share the music that they already have with other users, however there isn’t really nothing stopping you from just freeloading, until a warning that lets you know to stop doing that when tried downloading something you wanted. Anyways, Soulseek has a pretty good music selection, and it is pretty rare for me to find an artist or album that didn’t show up on the search results.

Soulseek has its downsides however. As a free user, you don’t get priority access to anything, which means you are put to the back of the waiting queue (unless you pay a fee to support the project, which is something you may want to do, considering the times we live in), and the music you are trying to search for may or may not even be available at all if you try finding it, which kinda sucks but it is understandable however. Another downside is the official app is not great at all. It sucks quite a bit, and has a very old coat of paint on it. If you want to use Soulseek, the best options for you to use it are with Nicotine+ (if using Windows or Linux) and Seeker (if you are on Android).

Purchasing music

There are a few places that still offer music to purchase from, most notably the iTunes Store and Amazon Music, These places sell music, but these often have annoying bullshit bolted on to them, like DRM and other stupid things that make it harder for you to enjoy your music. Bandcamp, on the other hand, is probably the best option4 when it comes to purchasing music. You can just buy music, and not deal with any sort of DRM, and you can download in whatever format you’d like. Also with Bandcamp, the artists get a significantly larger cut compared to other platforms like iTunes and Spotify, and you’re more likely to find the artists you actually listen to on there.

I think Steam also offers video game soundtracks purchased there as just MP3 or FLAC files. If you are a heavy Steam user, chances are that you probably purchased bundles that include soundtracks, and you can use these to further make your music library your own.

Another way you can purchase music is via CDs. From what I can tell, they’re readily available to purchase on sites like Amazon or can be found in thrift shops, there is even music stores around that sell CDs too. CDs are very cool and awesome since you can rip them easily, the quality is often great, and they are very cheap, with most CDs even here, where everything tech is expensive, being pretty cheap to purchase. However, you do need a CD drive to be able to rip them, alongside software that can get those songs ripped and tagged automatically. I don’t know any specific software that can do this, so I guess this would be a think you’d have to search somewhere, sadly.

Keeping music organized

I don’t think anyone likes poorly tagged music, and fortunately there are tools made to help with exactly that.

Picard

So Picard (or MusicBrainz Picard) is a program that can help you tag your songs, and it uses MusicBrainz as its backbone, where it can use its vast database to get the tags it needs. It also has the AcoustID thing, which allows it to identify a song via a snippet of it, and it can be very accurate. I really like Picard, and it was a breath of fresh air compared to the time I had to depend on various auto tagging software on Android, which often was closed source and proprietary, and had a cost to use them too.

LRCGET

LRCGET is a lyrics editor and downloader that helps you to create, edit and download LRC files, which are specially formatted text files where lyrics data is stored. For context, an average LRC file looks like a simple text file with timestamps added on to it, which help the player show the correct lyrics at the correct time.

LRCGET uses LRCLIB, which is a database of song lyrics that are created by the community. For the most part, most songs should have an LRC file already, but in case they don’t, you can also contribute to the database by submitting your own edits from the LRCGET program. This program runs on pretty much every OS (even Linux too).

Something that should be kept in mind, is the fact that LRCGET sometimes (however pretty rarely) will add LRC files that are incorrect, and may have incorrect time stamps, or maybe will be for a completely different song entirely. So maybe take care when pressing that big “DOWNLOAD ALL LYRICS” button, mayhaps lmao.

Syncthing

Syncthing is a syncing program that supports most popular operating systems, and Android is one of them. The neat thing about Syncthing is that it can help you continually keep your library updated, so if you go ahead and add a folder of music, that same folder of music will eventually show up in your phone or other computer. Syncthing offers a very fast transfer rate across two devices, however unfortunately, the speed is limited to very slow speeds on Android due to system restrictions. Despite the slow speed, I think it is nice to keep Syncthing and keep this constant syncing all the time. There also has been some issues with the project in Android, with the Syncthing team essentially dropping official support for Android ports of Syncthing due to pointless Google restrictions + Google’s various attempts of removing the project off the Play Store. Regardless of that, the project has been handed off by various members of the community, which seem, I think, doing a good job on keeping Syncthing updated and working.

On Windows, I specifically use Synctrayzor, which is a all-in-one package for Syncthing, which is built to be pretty usable, and it allows you to see shit regarding logs, synced stores, connected devices, and more. And Android, I use one of the various Syncthing forks (this one, specifically), which work okay but I heard Syncthing has issues with Android, specifically when it comes to saving stuff on external storage. It may take too long to sync a larger library, which sucks, but once its all loaded, you shouldn’t have any issues with syncing anymore.

Best music players to use (in my opinion)

On Windows

On Windows, I use Musicbee, and I really like it. The reason why I love Musicbee is because of how customizable and versatile it actually is. You go ahead, customize the panels you want to see, and cut out the panels that you rather not see, download some themes, play around with how stuff looks like, and get other plugins that extends the music player’s abilities to new heights.

Clementine is another decent option, however it suffers the FOSS software curse of being batshit ugly, lmao. Technically, Strawberry is the better version of Clementine, but it is not available on Windows for free, which means you need to pay some amount to get the EXE files from the Strawberry devs Patreon page.

VLC is another decent one. It may not have library management like Musicbee has, but it is a solid music player, and it can play CDs too if you ask it nicely, which is nice.

I think Windows 11 to this day has a dusty ass copy of Windows Media Player, and you may use that as well, just to get that nostalgia hit. It supports FLAC files just fine, and while it may not have the same customization or features as the other players I mentioned. It is indeed very nostalgic and has some features that for some reason is just missing on modern music players (think visualizers or themes).

I also heard of the following music players as well. I am gonna list these off pretty quickly, since I haven’t used most of them:

On Linux

There are a lot of options of music player available for users to try out. Unfortunately, most of them are hot garbage compared to the ones that you can find on Windows. Despite this, there is some good ones around at least.

Strawberry is a music player that can do a lot of things. It can play music, it can save your music plays to last.fm if you so want, you can browse your collection, transcode music to another format, read CDs, manage playlists, edit audio file tags, as well as manage other dedicated music players that are connected (and apparently it has support for iPods too lmao). It is not a beautiful music player by any means, but it is a fast and pretty robust, and can manage large libraries just fine. I just wished it had support for synced lyrics, as well as additional last.fm features (like the ability to display total play counts from last.fm). There are some things that annoy me

Another one that I used on Linux was one that was called Fooyin. Fooyin is a music player that aims to recreate that feeling of Foobar2000, and it supports custom layouts, scrobbing to Lastfm and Librefm, has support for synced lyrics, uses standard rating tags, and also does not use GTK (thank fuck). I think it has a lot going for it, but sadly it is missing a lot of features compared to Musicbee.

On Android

Android has always had a large number of cool music players that kick ass and are awesome. You have foobar2000 on there, VLC, Phonograph, AIMP, and a whole lot of cool and useful music players. However, my favorite music player on Android right now is probably Musicolet. I really like this app, and I believe it is the best music player out there. It is not flashy, but it does its job well without much fuss.

The great thing about Musicolet is the fact that it has, a so called “multi queue playlist” system. This means that you can have multiple queues, which are by themselves a sorta mini playlist, and they’re great because if you had a good mix going on, but suddenly you had the urge to listen to an album out of nowhere, you can play the album in its entirety in a different queue, and then come back to the original queue where you had your mix originally. It really is something that you didn’t know you need, until you have it, lmao.

Phonograph is another music player I used to use a lot back in the day, and I kinda missed it. I found the player again after just fucking around and searching for anything that caught my eye on F-Droid, and I found a project called Phonograph Plus, which is a continuation of the old Phonograph project. It has been updated to work on the latest versions of Android, has a bunch of fixes that help it work in the modern Android era, as well as having some experimental Material You color support, which is kinda neat, really. I do plan to use Phonograph more again soon, but since my playlists are already inside Musicolet, I think actually doing so may be kinda annoying compared to what’s it worth.

Finally, there are the Retro Player forks and clones. So Retro Player is a music player that visually looks pretty stunning, and I think it would make a great fit for someone who’s just switching over from Spotify. It has some sort of “For you” page which allow you to pick any songs that the player selected for you, it also has the newer Material design thing which makes it fit in more with modern Android. However, I feel this player isn’t as flexible as Phonograph or Musicolet, since I feel that I end up hitting myself in roadblocks because of the design language and how the app is laid out.

On iOS

Let me start off by saying that trying to get FLAC files playing on iOS is fucking awful. And believe me, I tried so much bullshit out:

The thing is that iOS is not suited for managing large FLAC file based music libraries. You can’t directly interface with the filesystem, which forces you to use iTunes, which sucks on anything that isn’t a Mac, and then most often than not the very slow USB 2.0 speeds on your nearly $1K smartphone will make a 150GB music transfer take so fucking long, storage is very limited on devices with iOS, and most music players on iOS are either awful subscription based ones or players that will gladly charge an arm and a leg for the privilege.

Honestly if you really want the least painful experience, might as well convert all your library to MP3s, that way, iTunes will gladly sync to those directly at least5. That is what I ended up doing, for the time I had to deal with an iPhone.

Dedicated music players?

I don’t particularly know about dedicated music players; the little experience I have with them are probably limited to the iPod Mini that I had for a while, which died because I didn’t used it enough apparently. I guess I also had my hands on a second hand iPod Shuffle at one point at my life too, and I also had an iPod Nano that was starting to develop the Black Spot™6. I know there are also some insane dedicated music players like that FiiO M17 that Dankpods frequently shows in his videos, or those Sony DAPs that I remember seeing Techmoan talking about. To be honest, dedicated music players sound great but I would probably never get into them, since I like the “using a phone for music” thing. Maybe I can use an older phone for music mayhaps? Who knows.

Move on from the algorithm

I sometimes think that the fact we depend so much on the algorithm is a bad thing. Like, we don’t even get to choose the music we listen to anymore, we just leave it to the robot and the robot will just decide for you. So I decided to do some things to avoid my dependence of the algorithm for finding music; I go and see what my friends are talking about regarding music, if I hear a song that I like while in public, I pull out my phone and use Audile7 to find out what song it is. I sometimes talk to my friends about music, and I also found some bangers there too. There are a lot of ways to find music, and while it may take more effort compared to just pressing play on Spotify, and letting the machine pick for you, it makes it more, intentional, if that makes sense. You are actively choosing to listen to a song under your own accord, and that makes it more worthwhile, imo.

This video also has some good ways to find music as well, so I would also recommend you give it a watch.

Use something like AOTY or RYM

These two websites are really great places to get recommendations curated by the community, for me however I like AOTY more because RYM is too serious for my liking, like they really have that “stick up ass syndrome” and hate every single song. These websites often harbor a large music listening community, and you can find reviews made from users. Sometimes the reviews are good, they give good criticisms, sometimes they are just shitposts, and other times, it is a scathing review that makes you not want to listen the fucking album however.

For AOTY, you get new releases on the front page, highest rated, and other tools that can make finding music that much easier. Users can create their own lists of music, which makes it very easy to share lists of songs that you may like. And you can find a bunch of cool music on the front page, as well as log and rate any cool music that you end up coming across. You also can see new music on the homepage, which can also help you into discovering cool music too. These websites can also help you keep track with new releases, if you’re the kinda person that wants to keep up with the current musical trends or whatever.

Despite of the good these websites may give you, the other side of the sword is that, the ratings can (and often will) deter you from listening to a song sometimes. For example, Hawaii Pt. 2 is among my favorite albums of all time, and I really love it so much. However, AOTY rates this song as a 70, which may deter someone from giving it a listen. Snail’s House’s ALIEN POP series of albums also tend to get lower ratings on RYM, and I remember a review that was just so fucking negative I just gave up on RYM, so uhh, yeah. I feel that EDM in general tend to get abysmal ratings on most of these sites as well.

lastfm is good

Last.fm (will call it Lastfm from now on) is a music scrobbling8 service that I recently came to like quite a lot. It allows me to see what my music habits are in a way, and allows me to share them quickly with friends and other persons as well. Lastfm also gives you like, soft recommendations?, if that makes sense? Like it doesn’t queue anything, it just shows artists and albums that you may find interesting, and the way it does that is that, it looks at the tags for the albums and songs you listen, and then find other songs and albums with similar tags. It also kinda tells you the reason for the recommendation, which is also pretty neat too.

use Shazam more often (or Audile, if you will)

Shazam is a cool tool that you can use, to figure out a song that is playing. Maybe you went to a coffee shop or restaurant, or you’re in a taxi and the driver has some banger music. Shazam allows you to find out what is that song, and it is surprisingly accurate, managing to find most of the music you throw at it. But the sad thing is that, Shazam is a app that has a lot of trackers, since of course it is free, and owned by Apple. Fortunately, there are other alternatives for Shazam.

Audile is a FOSS frontend for multiple song detection services/APIs (how tf are these called lmao) like AudD and ACRCloud (however these have a cost to use them), alongside Shazam for detecting music. It should, in theory, be more private compared to regular Shazam, and should allow you easier control with the songs that you manage to find over the years (like exporting them to a list, or to a different phone when you decide to upgrade). Overall Audile is pretty cool, and can be useful in finding cool music that is being played in public spaces or whatever.

i guess, talk to your friends?

I have found many good bangers via talking to my friends. Like, sometimes they’ll post a link to an awesome song, or tell you about the music that they were listening to at the time. I think this is probably the best way to find new music, since you also get to talk with your friends and just generally have a great time and everything, really. I also like sharing the music that I like to them as well.

page updates:

  1. i was a kid that grew up using youtubetomp3 converter, so i guess that is to be expected lmao↩︎

  2. according to this article here↩︎

  3. from the wiki article here↩︎

  4. do note there are other places to buy music, but bandcamp is the more well known option however.↩︎

  5. you may also try converting FLACs to WAV files, which are another format that iTunes likes, but these suck for tagging, and are just generally less convienent compared to a FLAC file.↩︎

  6. this basically is referring to an issue these iPods have, which is, with age, the batteries inside these players often expand and push the screen out, creating a black spot where the display is damaged.↩︎

  7. a pretty neat replacement for Shazam, that also supports the Shazam protocol.↩︎

  8. according to wikidictionary, it means to “publish one’s media consumptioon habits to the internet via software”↩︎