Do I use a website to download songs off of YouTube or Spotify?
Where should I store the music? I haven’t any clue about self-hosting. I’m running GrapheneOS, is it enough to save the songs in Files and play in an app like Auxio? Maybe sync with SyncThing?
What’s the best way to compress mp3 files but still retain the quality (even possible)?
Could really use some help as I’m very inexperienced. :)
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Do I use a website to download songs off of YouTube or Spotify?
Soulseek and/or private trackers, both with a VPN.
Where should I store the music?
On a hard disk?
I’m running GrapheneOS
Android isn’t well suited for this. It’s fine for playing either by transfering your files or streaming them with something like subsonic, mod, etc.
Maybe sync with SyncThing?
This could work yeah.
What’s the best way to compress mp3 files but still retain the quality (even possible)?
By design MP3 is a lossy format, so no you cannot. What you want is FLAC, a lossless compressed format.
Upvote for soulseek / nicotine
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FLAC is best if space is no concern. But when your collection starts getting very big, there are better options like AAC (which I use). It’s a lot less space than FLAC and mp3, and higher quality than mp3 as well.
Thank you for the answers! As for the hard disk, do you mean something like a USB or SSD? In that case, how do I sync the music from there to my phone?
As far as where you get the music from, you’ll have to determine for yourself what audio quality you require.
To test this, use something like Soulseek to get a high quality version of a song you are very familiar with, and then get the same song off of YouTube with
yt-dlp(better yet—do this for a few songs). Then, open both songs in separate media player windows, randomize the layout of said windows so you don’t remember which is which, plug in your favorite headphones and see if you can guess which is which.For me, I found the difference between a lossless or 320kbps download from Soulseek and a 128-196kbps download from YouTube to be negligible (or outright nonexistent) in most cases, so I mostly download off of YouTube, which is very simple to do.
Depending on where you get the files, you may need to add metadata yourself. For this, I recommend MusicBrainz Picard.
Is there any program that downloads from youtube without me needing to find the URL I want? Ideally I would like to search a catalog of genre/artist/album and click the download button. It ought to maybe find the biggest youtube channel with the artist’s name in it and then find the song.
Not to my knowledge, but music.youtube.com is a pretty clean interface, and it’s easy enough to grab links from. Keep in mind, you can feed
yt-dlpboth playlist (including album) and channel (artist) links, as well as individual videos.True enough. Thank you.
Check this website out, there’s lots of options for obtaining music. I personally use Murglar on Android for high quality Deezer rips. Telegram bots work well too.
Don’t know how much storage you have on your phone but you should just try these steps : If you are downloading from YouTube Music you won’t get the best quality but for me that’s okay. So I just recommend you to download an android client for yt-dl and then download what you want. If you are downloading only 1 or 2 gigs of music it should be okay, but if you are downloading more or wanna take care, you should use a VPN 😁
Lidarr is all you need.
You can do other methods, but this one is simple and effective. Set it up, tell it what bands you like, wait a day and you’ve got the entirety of your childhood favorites and nearly every discography you can think of. All for maybe an hour of upfront work.
Versus remembering every band/song you ever liked, tracking it down, downloading each individually… Like yeah, you can do that. It’s what I do for shows and movies for curation. But for music, I have so much and so many that curating like this just isn’t as worthwhile as checking off a band in Lidarr and having all of their stuff in a few hours.
Lidarr sounds fine for computers, what about android?
They mentioned SyncThing, so I assumed a computer was very much in play.
I’m always curious why people do this. Music is the one item where it’s easier to just sub to something like Apple Music… literally $110/yr for all the music that exists. They gave us the solution we asked for and it’s super-cheap.
I pirate the shit out of movies and tv since those guys are gouging me, but musicians barely get by in the streaming era.
Hopefully this triggers nobody. I’m making no judgements.
What I do personally is get any music I want from soulseek and then sync my music directory across devices with syncthing. Although I’m planning on renting a vps to put my music on at some point as it’s taking up quite a lot of my phone storage now.
On desktop I like to use mpd with ncmpcpp. On Android(/GrapheneOS) I’m using Metro as my music player.
I personally look up torrent files for either FLACs (lossless quality, with very large files) or 320kbps MP3s (smaller files with no noticable difference in sound quality imo) and then after making sure they have the right metadata (Title, Album, Artist) (using a tool like Tagger) I upload them onto my Navidrome server, which I connect to using Ultrasonic. If I didn’t selfhost I’d probably just put the tagged files on my phone and play them with basically any music player.
I’ve personally found that I can hear a sound difference in 320kpbs .mp3s, depending on whether or not it was encoded with a constant bit rate, or a variable bit rate.
Thanks for the link to Tagger, I’ve been looking for something like that. Looks like I have some library cleanup to do, I’ve been putting it off for years now lmao
This guide I wrote about downloading and tagging might help you :) https://mander.xyz/post/13720820
This seems really complicated for a beginner like me (': is there no online tool that can download my playlists in bulk with relatively accurate metadata? It seems deemix and soulseek require accounts which I’m not too keen about, but I really don’t know anything about this so I might just be spouting silly speculations.
Aw, I understand ~50.000words can be overwhelming.😅
Hm, I dont know if there’s anything better than the tools I talk about. This guide is a bit too compicated and long, so I’ll try to re-word it, hoping you can now follow it:
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Soulseek: You just use a username and a password. No emails or anything. Search and download.
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Deemix: You dont need to have a personal deemix account. You can find on some doubious sites “arls” for accounts. Arl is like the user token. They are long alphanumeric strings which essentially are used instead of username+password. You can simply find one online and put it in deezer. (You can try arls found here: https://www.arldeemix.com/2024/05/arl-deemix.html?m=1 )
To use it with spotify (like downloading a spotify playlist in deemix), its kinda more complex. You can see the steps from this post on reddit here:
https://developer.spotify.com/dashboard/ log in, create an app, go into app, click show client secret under apps title, paste it into deemix along with clientid
I suggest deemix because you can get very high quality music (in batches too) and it’s open source.
Lastly, if you simply want to get stuff from youtube without account and such:
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ytDownloader acts as a gui for yt-dpl (open source, PC).
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Seal acts as a gui for yt-dpl (open source, Android).
Almost certainly there are websites that may use yt-dlp and can download playlists though.
So I did the deemix thing and the Spotify app thing. Unfortunately I can’t find my own playlists in Favourites, only somebody else’s. Know the issue?
Oh nice, you’re very close. What you see, are the Deezer playlists of the account the arl corresponds to. For your spotify playlists, go to spotify, press the share button on your playlist, get the link to your playlist (the url), paste it in the search bar in deemix and press enter. It will automatically fetch and download the whole playlist.
(The next “level” would be to go back to my big guide, in the deemix settings section and customize it to your liking.)
I went back to your guide and adjusted some deemix settings. Is there something I should adjust in “folders/track titles” sections, since you didn’t mention them, or is it fine to leave them be? Also, why download in flac and not mp3?
If I dont mention them, it probably means I left them at their default settings, but each one has their own system so feel free to change them if it suits you better.
I download in flac because I want to have them at ~the highest possible quality (ripping CDs or finding each song infividually in various sources and comparing them might provide a better quality, but thats too much of a hassle) and I compress them to .opus format at 128kbit to copy them on my phone. Thus, I keep one flac collection and a cloned, compressed version of it in opus.
Near the ⅘ of my guide I think I describe how to compress files with fre:ac and which app (symphony on fdroid) handles well opus files. I had some frustration with how hard it is for apps to recognise song tags, especially multiple song tags (like 2 artists in a song). If you encounter such an issue, use a different separator other than
\\, like;.The rabbit hole can get a bit deep quickly.
Have fun :)
Thanks for your help! Will definitely continue following your guide.
However, I’ve already stumbled upon a few issues. First, my computer can’t seem to locate the deemix music folder that I supposedly created when I installed the application. Nowhere to be seen. Not sure what to do about it, maybe I installed the wrong version?
Furthermore, the playlists I have downloaded state the following errors: “cannot read properties of undefined” and “no such file or directory”…
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Spowlo and soundbound are essentially the same app that you just paste links to Spotify lists, artists, albums, playlists, whatever, then it’ll find matches on YouTube to download as mp3.
Desktop zotify, you can downloaded the “high” quality level with premium account credentials.
the main way i get music files (320kbps mp3) is through the Soulseek network, which many commenter have mentioned. what has been left out is the best client to get into that network, that is free and open source software, which is Nicotine+. it work on any desktop OS
torrents are still valid but you won’t find many artists there
