I would like to move away from using spotify for music. Are there any torrenting sites where I can torrent music with high quality audio (~320kbps) tagged properly?
Nicotine+ is a very good soulseek front; I suggest to adjust tags with Picard.
I would like to move away from using spotify for music. Are there any torrenting sites where I can torrent music with high quality audio (~320kbps) tagged properly?
I strongly suggest to always tag your own music. I think expecting to always finding every album tagged to your own (or you media center’s) specifications and preferences in one place is a fantasy. At least it’s one that I’ve given up on more than a decade ago. Your music will always come from multiple different sources and I don’t think there is (or ever can be) one golden goose.
So yeah, +1 for Musicbrainz Picard. I’ll throw in Puddletag for small manual corrections.
So I actually made a python script yesterday that uses spotify’s web api to make a list of urls of every song on every album that I’ve liked one or more songs on. I then wrote a shell script which takes the file with all the urls and fetches the songs as 320 kbps mp3 files with a tool called zotify using a burner premium account I made. Unfortunately, it can only download songs in real time and will probably take around a month to finish downloading all the songs so I just set it to run on my vps. The mp3 files are good quality and have proper tagging and album art. I think I may have done it.
Would you be willing to share your scripts?
Well, I’ll be darned - I hope it works out!
I will also add a cron job to check for new liked songs once a day after this big download of ~15,000 songs is finished.
YT Premium, YT music, yt-dlp and tag using Musicbrainz Picard. 256kBit/s Opus is done.
I’ve had good results with 1337x.to, but it’s been a while because I moved and haven’t set up a new VPN.
I have soulseek/nicotine+ on my private server and I just use that. It’s really easy. If you ever used Napster or limewire or Kazaa or whatever it’s exactly like that.
I have never used soulseek. Isn’t this basically just Napster/kazaa/bearshare/limewire kind of deal? Wouldn’t it be loaded with garbage with bad tags?
Soulseek is popular with audiophiles, so there tends to be a lot of large, well-tagged FLAC collections
TIL. I’m picky but not that picky. I’ll have to give it another shot.
the tags are really decent, like the previous poster said it’s pretty much all audiophiles so everything is tagged, a lot of FLAC stuff but you can sort by MP3 (Nicotine+ makes it really easy in that regard)
The great thing about it and because the user base is mostly audiojunkies is that you can find some REALLY obscure stuff. Like things you’d never find on spotify or youtube music or any of that. I once found a set from a band I love from a show I was actually at.
That’s incredible. I used to have a hard drive I lost years ago with tons of obscure stuff and I was never able to find a lot of it again.
Edit:
Nobody is concerned about privacy? Seems to work a lot like bittorrent, exposing your IP
As a Canadian, I’ve never worried about privacy when torrenting or using Soulseek, but if you are worried, then yeah you’d want a VPN
Same boat but there’s some moves happening lately that aim to change those laws
slsk-batchdl is pretty powerful too, if you’re not afraid of a little command line
yup! I used that to pull my playlists from spotify and youtube to download my songs on soulseek. very powerful tool that worked great. just let it run on my server overnight and had all my songs by the morning.
Offtopic follow-up question:
How do I prevent it from aborting when I launch it through SSH and want to quit the client?I used screen. Just start a screen session for it like “music-downloads” and then you can quit the session and exit out OR install a DE like XFCE on your server and then use something like xfreerdp to remote desktop in, run the script in a terminal on the server, then just close your xfreerdp.
I first used screen to download everything but then decided to install XFCE and Nicotine+ and just leave it up so people can download from my library also.
Looks like nohup, screen, or tmux are good options.
I’ve used screen before, it worked well. Though I’ve never used it to download stuff, it should work the same
I would love to do this from Spotify. Can you share any code snippets or examples?
this was the script I used to download my youtube playlist, you can modify it to do spotify also:
#!/bin/bash PLAYLIST_URL="$1" if [ -z "$PLAYLIST_URL" ]; then echo "Usage: $0 <youtube_playlist_url>" exit 1 fi # Log file with timestamp LOG_FILE="$HOME/music-downloads/download_$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S).log" echo "Starting download at $(date)" | tee "$LOG_FILE" echo "Playlist: $PLAYLIST_URL" | tee -a "$LOG_FILE" echo "----------------------------------------" | tee -a "$LOG_FILE" # Run sldl with YouTube playlist sldl "$PLAYLIST_URL" --yt-dlp 2>&1 | tee -a "$LOG_FILE" echo "----------------------------------------" | tee -a "$LOG_FILE" echo "Download completed at $(date)" | tee -a "$LOG_FILE"I just ran this in a screen session. You don’t have to log everything but I did it so I could check to see what songs weren’t on soulseek from my playlist.
Look at the documentation on the Github-page. It looks difficult but you only need a few options and they give you examples as well.
Soulseek is I2P not Torrenting, but I’ve found it to be the best place to find music by a long shot.
Edit: It’s actually P2P not I2P
I use Soulseek along with a little command line tool to download all the music for my radio show. It’s an absolute joy to use.
Soulseek is the opposite of “tagged consistently”.
Agreed but it is not open source, it depends on a central server, and personally enriches a man named Nil who went to Tel Aviv university. I would prefer a music tracker.
Plus, Soulseek has a lot of quirks that make it less reliable for slow downloads. It’s not a “fire and forget” solution to acquiring files in the same way a magnet link with at least one seeder lurking around is. Soulseek will not just start again when they come back, it has other rate limits that can be jumped with their “donations”
I use soulseek but still have no idea how to find quality sources. I just filter my search with .flac and scan the users’s folder structure (the more organized the better odds at being a good rip?). Am I doing it wrong?
Totally agree here. For tagging I also reccomend musicbrainz picard
Picard is great. I find that beets is more accurate in some cases. Yymv so worth giving them both a try. Picard is a lot easier to use and doesn’t maintain it’s own library index which has its pros and cons.
I can recommend Beets for tagging, with the Lyrics plugin. Perfect for my Navidrome server and synced lyrics work perfectly on Symfonium
Nicotine+ is an open source client for the Soulseek network. Soulseek/Nicotine+ does not use i2p or do any type of anonymization; it’ uses direct connections. Guessing you meant “p2p.” The network has a lot of music I can’t find through torrents, and I can almost always find the music I’m looking for as FLAC files.
Yeah I meant P2P my bad.
I2P?
But he updated to say he misspoke, he meant p2p
Yeah that’s what I thought 😁
(Thanks anyway)
Yes, this. Torrenting music is not necessary. Slsk is a better option 99% of the time. Most of the tags are the automatic ones applied by the streaming service it was ripped from or MusicBrainz. But everyone seems to expect different things from tagging, so if you want every performer tagged and like every genre you’re never gonna find that.
Private trackers
(Or soul seek but it’s not open source)
RED and OPS. If you want to join, try OPS first and after making decent ratio, you could try getting into RED.
OpPS does not do interviews atm, so I’d recommend interviewing for RED.
RED is great, if you have the time and money needed to get ratio for downloading. You have to continuously buy new music on day 1 of release and have an ultra low latency server to serve it because of the way their algos direct bandwidth.
It is not for the faint of heart, but it is the catalogue of choice.
Do they ever do “freeleech” periods or staff picks with freeleech?
I was able to boost my ratio back on what.cd back in the day by downloading and seeding the 2009 Beatles Remasters Box Set in flac.
Thing was absolutely massive, and none of the download counted towards my ratio, only upload. I think I got my ratio up to 12.
They do, rarely.
A lot of people just rip Qobuz, Deezer, and Tidal FLAC for free using shared keys that you can find on the megathread (“Knowledge & Tokens”). Autosnatchers will give you at least one snatch per upload. No one is actually buying most of that WEB FLAC. There also might be a big batch of freeleech tokens during December for kickstarting a library. Also, I’d recommend just going full FLAC from the start; MP3 is easier/smaller to snatch, but it’s 2025 and no one wants MP3, so long-term you’ll get the best results by perma-seeding a large FLAC library.
What? Things sure have changed. Why would everyone want FLAC over mp3 vbr V0?
Mainly, HDDs are bigger and FLAC is future-proof for future audio formats, as well I think the death of What.CD has really impressed upon the next generation that preservation is of utmost importance. A lot of albums were fully lost during the transition to RED/OPS, and a good chunk of albums that used to have a lossless copy now only have lossy versions from those who kept MP3 libraries. IMO, piracy is ownership, and owning the master lossless copy so you can generate any other formats is that concept taken to its logical conclusion.
Thank you for your explanation. That makes sense. I stopped pirating music exactly due to oink and then what dying, getting disillusioned by private trackers.
I wonder what the in is to RED/OPS?
Worth noting that when What died, ~4 new sites popped up immediately and invited all the old members, and everyone raced to re-upload everything from What onto them, which was actually pretty effective. At this point, RED and OPS have greatly surpassed What in many ways, aside from some releases that never made it back (you can actually find out which releases used to exist because What’s database was made available after its death). Users and staff are a lot more prepared if it happens again, e.g. keeping track of all metadata via “gazelle-origin”.
If by “in” you mean how to get into them, generally you’re supposed to have a friend invite you. If you don’t have anyone you know on private trackers, you’ve gotta get in from scratch. Luckily, RED and OPS both do interviews to test your knowledge on the technicals of music formats, though I’ve heard RED’s interview queues are long and OPS’s interviews are often just not happening: https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html https://interview.orpheus.network/
Alternatively, you can interview for MAM, which is IMO the best ebook/audiobook tracker. They’re super chill and have a very simple interview e.g. “what is a tracker”: https://www.myanonamouse.net/inviteapp.php. After that, you can just hang around there for a while until you can get into their recruitment forums to get invites to other entry-level trackers, and then on those entry-level trackers you can get recruited into slightly higher-level trackers, and so on, and eventually RED/OPS should be recruiting from somewhere.
This can feel a little silly and convoluted, but I guess I’d just appreciate that these sites put the effort into conducting interviews for new people at all, since the alternative is that you will just never get into anything without a friend. Reddit’s /r/trackers wiki is unfortunately one of the better places for information about private trackers if you want to do further reading.
I’m totally blanking on the name of a popular older torrent site that was invite-only as well. Demon something? Do you know what I’m talking about?
The Demonoid you remember is lonnnng gone although a shell of it’s former self exists.
RIP
I also really fucking miss what.cd
Oink
The og
My “bad luck Brian” was I got on that site after years of trying…. For it to be shut down a month later.
Major bummer. I completely lucked into an invite by having a friend in a fraternity at an ivy league school who had a frat brother who had an account and invites.
Seconding the notion to get into OPS somehow if at all possible. RED’s economy is one of the few economies that is actually non-trivial, whereas OPS’s economy is totally trivial. A large amount of RED stuff is automatically mirrored to OPS, so you can just grab it at OPS and cross-seed back to RED (there are a few tools to do this automatically, e.g. nemorosa). RED is still definitely the more active and qualitative place to be, but cross-seeding shenanigans with OPS will keep RED’s economy in-check.
Is cross posting torrents like that allowed? I haven’t been on a closed tracker for a very long time, but in my time, that was a huge no-no that would get you (and possibly even the people who you have invited/person who invited you) kicked off of the site.
Yes, it’s allowed and encouraged between RED<->OPS. There are a few tools on the RED and OPS forums to automate most of the process (e.g. Transplant, REDCurry, Takeout, Orpheus-Populator, etc.). Cross-posting torrents on many sites is allowed and fine, you just have to be aware of the rules of the source site, e.g. some places don’t want their internals to be shared, or some have a literal timer countdown before cross-posting is allowed. On the other hand, most sites are not going to enforce other sites’ exclusivity demands (PTP explicitly has a note about this). If an exclusive file is cross-posted onto PTP, PTP isn’t going to take it down on anyone’s behalf.
I’ll note that private tracker culture has warmed up quite a bit in the past decade and a half that I’ve been on them. Trackers (and their users) don’t usually see other trackers as rivals/competitors anymore, release groups are respectful of each other, there are a ton of tutorials and help forums around to help low-skill members learn how to do the advanced stuff, and so on. There are recognizable usernames everywhere, and the general vibe is to cross-upload as much as possible and help build everyone’s trackers together. Cross-seed (the program) has helped a lot with this, and seedbases have become very strong even on smaller trackers as a result.
Interesting… I haven’t done them since they shut down what.cd. I came from OiNK originally, and it’s a small miracle that I ever got an invite at all.
I still have all of the amazing shit (tons of vinyl rip FLACs of classic albums. Dunno if “pbthal” is still ripping them, but he was the best at the time) I got during that period.
Thanks for the info
If you have any drive to get back into it, TMK the interview for RED is roughly the same as the interview for WCD, and although OPS isn’t interviewing right now it’s fairly easy to get to power user on RED and get an invite to OPS that way. I think RED is a little bit more hard-ratio than WCD was because RED doesn’t do freeleech staff picks or site-wides, but they do give out handfuls of freeleech tokens from time to time, so even if you can’t keep up with ratio requirements you can still nab free stuff with those just by having an account. As before, having an OPS account will help tremendously for keeping up with RED ratio, and eventually it’ll become a non-issue.
I never had to interview… I got into OiNK from a friend who got invited and then got his own invites.
For some reason that I cannot explain, I took a screenshot of the top of the page once where it shows the user name and ratio info. So once it got shut down, and wcd rose from the ashes, I was able to get an invite from a friendly reddit stranger after showing him the screenshot to prove I was on OiNK, and know how to act.
Anyway, I don’t think I’m interested in getting back into it, but I appreciate the info. Haven’t thought about those sites in years. I had a wcd hoodie that I wore for like a decade after it shut down.
Rutracker
Good but by no means consistent
Just use Soulseek.
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There’s a few uploaders that cross post in the more known public torrent sites, who have always uploaded MP3 320 and FLAC. Some of these websites also have ways to distinguish users who are trustworthy, and the music section shows they upload a lot of stuff. Whenever I want to download music, I seek this sort of user out. Never fails.
looks like its temporarily down atm but i like squid.wtf
https://interview.orpheus.network/ (might not be doing interviews right now per the other comment)
Anything in particular your looking for?
