I’ve been building up my digital music library again after giving music streaming the boot. I was going to attempt to digitize my CD and vinyl collection, but I frankly don’t have the time for all that. So I thought I might turn to file-sharing and download digital versions of my physical collection. I prefer FLAC or WAV if the former isn’t available. Can you recommend good places to get started?
what.cd and a time machine
Ugh, knife to my heart
I’ve been using lucida to download from Tidal. It works very well.
Other than file-sharing or xdcc, where you can search for FLAC,
squid.wtfallows you to download FLACs from select providers.Nicotine+, a soulseek client
Dumb question since its peer to peer that means you’ll need port forwarding if using nicotine+ over a VPN right?
I use nicotine+ to download my music and it’s great! I can find almost everything I want to hear in flac. Maybe not the best choice for playlists but for downloading albumns is awesome
the megathread has good sources, i personally use lucida
Lucida is great especially from Qobuz !
My list in order of desperation, lowest first
- Soulseek
- Public torrent trackers
- Private torrent trackers
- Spotify rippers (they come and go like waves on a beach)
- yt-dlp youtube rip (please god have mercy on my bit-crushed soul)
Spotify rippers (they come and go like waves on a beach)
Real ones? Seems like most of them use Spotify to identify music then rip from elsewhere like youtube.
I use Zotify when I get to the “rip from Spotify” level, but would be happy to add another couple options if there’s more solid ones out there.
Most of the publicly available ones that rip streaming services to lossless fail spectral checks. They can rip high quality MP3s which they then transcode to flac but if you were to upload this somewhere like RED you’d get shit for it. Literally every one I’ve found has failed the spectral check thread on RED
This MAY not apply for Spotify as they don’t stream lossless to begin with
The people that can actually rip fully lossless files from deezer, apple music, qobuz, tidal, etc guard that info like crazy. The second the method gets public you better believe all those companies are patching it out. Plus it probably doesn’t hurt that being the one with the keys to the method gets you like infinite ratio
I work part time as an audio producer. Converting MP3 to FLAC is like trying to upscale an image: you can use all the fancy algos to repair loss, but it’s still lossy.
yes, you can’t add to the sound something that’s no longer there by just reformatting the mp3 to flac
Tidal-DL could rip Tidal tracks pretty reliably when I last used it. I ditched my Tidal sub when they split with Plex, so haven’t used it in 6 months or so. I know Spotify has lower quality, but I’ve got a .edu email so was able to subscribe for cheap. I mostly use it for music discovery, so actually listening to and ripping music from it is fairly rare.
Yeah there are plenty of apps that can rip from tidal, apple music, etc. noteburner, deemix, deezloader, musify, notecable, and noteburner are all ones that I tried where they successfully ripped audio from streams to flac but spectrals showed the flac was transcoded from lossy source.
Granted this is basically inaudible and super nitpicky, like honestly show me the person who can truly hear the difference between a modern 320 mp3 and a 16bit flac in a double blind situation. But if you’re using these rippers to upload to a private tracker, especially a popular release, guarantee someone will check
That said streamrip can get deezer 16 bit, 24bit tidal mqa (which isn’t actually lossless), and 24/192 qobuz but you need a premium account and things break from time to time
https://github.com/nathom/streamrip
Apple music remains a very closely guarded secret although I recently saw this: https://github.com/zhaarey/apple-music-downloader . I have to create a burner and vm to play with this though bc it’s pretty sketch
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I’m late to the party since it is a well-known site but rutracker is quite good for FLAC content.
seconding this, rutracker and rutor are my go to’s
I use Deezer. You pay for it per month like Spotify, but they have API to just download the songs straight up. I think the open source UI I’ve been using for that is on the rocks a bit, but do far still been working for me
https://www.reddit.com/r/deemix/comments/zlswiz/last_update_is_now_out/
This doesn’t sound like what I’m asking for. I’m not interested in paying Deezer for music I already own.
Sure sure! Just a fallback to consider if you have trouble locating elsewhere, as I did. Spotify rippers were noticably bad quality, and torrents for music were very scarce compared to other media types. But maybe I missed something or there’s better options now. Dropping $10 for a month to mass download everything at crisp quality isn’t too bad an option, imo.
I appreciate it. I always thought Deezer was just a streaming platform like Spotify.
Also, dang, surprised so many downvotes for my original comment lol.
Not gonna lie, I’m considering paying for Deezer to move back to this.
You can automate downloads with Lidarr. I’m set up to download every song by every artist that Last.FM recommends.
Currently, I’m using Soularr, but it’s really slow and not always FLAC and not always full albums and the metadata is not always perfect.
Ah, nice. I gotta do the reverse and check out Soularr a bit. I imagine my Deezer setup will eventually implode, so I’ll need a fallback haha
At the very least, be sure to put your current library out on soulseek.
Not exactly what you’re looking for in terms of being free, but you could get a Qobuz subscription then use Qobuz-dl to snag what you want to download in lossless quality.
This is what I do. The streaming subscription isn’t that much, and I can download a single album or a txt file with multiple album links with just one command. Only downside of the streaming subscription is you will occasionally run into albums that are or have purchase-only tracks that you can’t download without buying the album, but I don’t seem to run into those too often.
Managed to get my entire library in FLAC except for one album - “I Love You Because,” the soundtrack to what is apparently an obscure musical based on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”.
only thing I would add to this thread is occasionally usenet can be handy if you’re looking for music that’s fairly mainstream. If you’re looking for some weird 7” that was self released with 50 copies that’s obviously not gonna work though
