Users with personal music libraries, how do you decide what to download?
I recently made a post asking about getting spotify cheaper via vpn.
My question to everyone: how do you decide what to download?
Do you just grab everything, do you use last fm, do you erase music that you never listen to?
Storage is cheap, and music (even in FLAC format) is small. You can fit tens of thousands of songs into a terabyte.
I download anything and everything. An artist I enjoy? Entire discography. I've only heard one song? Entire discography--there may be more I might enjoy! An artist in a genre I like but I've never heard? Entire discography.
I'm at over 125k songs, and I still feel like my collection is a sliver. I eventually want to reach 1m songs and truly become my own Spotify. Finding songs I've never heard before and that I end up loving in my own collection is a joy I can't describe.
This. Just search for open directories and download entire music collections from the web to the download folder. Then dump them into MusicBrainz Picard and move whatever has proper tags into your music library. Finally, play the newly downloaded songs in random order.
The amount of stuff out there is amazing! I discovered all kinds of genres streaming services never would've recommended to me. Truly widens your palette.
How do you decide what to listen to? I assume you don't listen to multiple entire discographies
Random works pretty well, but PlexAmp has a lot of ways to curate playlists, and that's what I've been using for my local collection.
I actually listen to music on Twitch a lot. I follow a handful of streamers who play music I like, and are always playing stuff that is new to me, and kindly list track IDs on the video feed.
I hear a song I like by an artist I am unfamiliar with and then guess what...? Entire discography.
Whatever I feel like listening to that day. In that regard it's no different than having a massive Spotify/Apple music library
If I wanna listen to something and I don't know what, I just let LMS give me a random album and see what I get!
Interesting. Do you just listen on Random all the time, with maybe favorites or whatever?
Depends. I tend to listen to whole albums, so I let LMS give me a random album if I wanna hear something new. If I'm in the mood for whatever, I do random mixes in LMS. LMS also has a music similarity feature (with plugins) that will play related songs after an album, too, so that also helps me find new stuff that sounds like stuff I already like
Hol' up: Let's say the average size for a song (in FLAC format) is 30MB. 125k × 30 = 3'750'000 MB, or 3TB+!
Thas a lot of storage. O.o
You pretty much calculated spot on! ;)
FLAC is good, but not necessary for background listening. At 192k the average song is ~ 5Mb. 100k x 5 = 0.5 TB.
Noob here: How do you handle editing tags and album covers on that large amount of music? I recently started to experiment with learning how to use a batch script on mkv files to edit their metadata and was wondering if there was something similar with music files?
If I like it I download it, save the whole album or discography. Archive everything. Never delete. Same for books and movies and shows, though I find myself watching less of those lately.
I do the same. If i like them i download the discog. Gotta do something with 200tb nas
https://github.com/RandomNinjaAtk/arr-scripts/tree/main/lidarr downloads automatically. I don't really decide. I add artists when I see one missing.
It's more important to contribute to musicbrainz than to my library. If musicbrainz has it, I can dosnload it, if not, I can't download it either.
So far I really haven't had musicbrainz be missing any artists or songs, idk if its different if you listen to indie or niche music though
To everyone in here saying they download entire discographies, great! I agree. But the follow up question is how do you even find out about new (to you) artists that you might like? I've cross referenced the library I have (about 27k tracks) with the "similar artists" sections of Spotify, last.fm, etc, and I feel like I'm just going around in circles. All of the similar artists are just similar to each other and I have all of it already. How do you branch out?
In previous years I've found new stuff using Pandora Radio, Youtube Music, and occasionally just by browsing music communities. Reddit's listentothis sub used to be really good for finding relatively unknown bands a number of years ago.
Pandora Radio advertises that instead of doing a basic genre or artist comparison, each track they have is manually analyzed for specific aspects of the track like "call and response", "wall of sound", "excessive vamping", so it makes connections crossing genre lines.
Listen to independent radio stations. Usually can find a stream link online and plug into a music player app.
I'm an old man. "Back in my day", we heard by word of mouth, the radio, browsing at music shops, etc.
We can still do that in the digital age. When someone posts a random song, anywhere, check it out. Try checking out internet radio of genres you like (I'm finding a lot of Classical this way currently). Check out Bandcamp and IRL music store every once in a while just see what calls to you. Sometimes, let the cool album art guide you ;)
I've never found similar artists to be helpful. Most of the time it's just a worse version of the thing I like. I don't really like stuff that sounds very samey though.
Depending on how diverse your taste is, you could always try to branch out to something outside of "similar artists". Just look up genre names and start checking them out. If you find something you like, you can use the same " similar artists" approach on an entirely new search space.
If i like it.
I like a song from a artist so I download the entire catalog. Lossless where I can
Like other people, whole discographies. Artist URL straight into deemix and let it do it's thing.
For finding new music, I mostly rely on radiostations such as Kerrang! and YouTube subscriptions or recommendations.
MP3 320 is what I go for, I don't have the equipment to benefit from FLAC.
I set and forget too, never delete. You never know when it'll become impossible to get that data back if you want it.
You should check out last.fm (or musicbrainz, which I prefer since its open source). You connect your apps to it (Plex, tidal, Spotify, etc), they send over songs as you listen to them, you can rank them as love or hate (and some other stuff) and they curate playlists and artists that they think you'll like based on your listening habits
bandcamp is awesome.
Band camp Fridays are cool too when they give up their cut so artists get 100% of sales.
If I find something and I don't have it, yet, I download it.
Bandcamp has been pretty good for me to find the stuff I like listening to.
Honestly i mostly download songs on .mp3 format individually.
Unless someone has been kind enough to compile the entire album on a .zip file
I use Spytify, so I "download" my songs real time in the background. If anything it makes me more intentional about what I do grab. Grabbing the entire discography of an artists may take a day, so a little pre-veting is necessary. you find out why some of the big names only have 1 or 2 hits out of a hundred, but you also find some great songs that didn't make it.
I'll usually aquire a few albums at a time. I'll give each song a quick pass (jumping to random parts) to determine the following
*I use MP3Gain for bulk volume adjustment, it does pretty good and is non-destructive, though not every player respects the adjustment (a tag in metadata or something)
I don't catch everything doing this, mostly because I spend a few seconds on each song, but it does filter out a lot.
Sometimes it takes a few listens to decide "I dont like this song" - delete.
I'm not a completionist (or try not to be) for albums/artists. If I don't like the song, its gone. If there's one part of a whole that I don't like, its chopped out.
Didn't know last fm was still around. I ditched them after they were breached. Musicbrainz is an apt alternative. I'm still bummed about how bad AI is at recommending similar songs /a artists. I'll grab random stuff and stuff from Musicbrainz recommendatiins. I definitely delete stuff I don't like, not for saving space but mainly just to keep my library tight. I also have nightmares about being in a coma and someone finding my music collection and thinking it's something I really like but really it's 80% garbage that I can't stand and they play it for me in a loop for weeks and I can't tell them to stop because of coma. I'm also pretty vocal in my life about not really liking country music, not because I want to be a judgemental jerk about it, but mainly because of the coma thing, and I want to make sure I'm not stuck listening to that in the coma.
I just set up lidarr with all artists I like listening to and tell it to download everything they've made. That's how I have about 700gb of flac files
I just download .MP3 or m4as of everything I add to my liked songs on Spotify. I pay for Spotify, but the offline functionality is bogus so I also keep regular copies of everything and don't rely on whatever dumbass propriety offline format Spotify uses because it never actually plays anything when offline that way.
This seems like double work, do you have this automated?
I kinda did last time I needed to download anything. Not sure if it's still working though. I used an app that would find and convert the songs out of a playlist from YouTube and other sources. But even at that time, it was a pain finding what I used; plenty of things claimed to do this but most of them were defunct and didn't function.
Soggfy is great if you are paying for Spotify anyway.
"Now that's what I call music" I'm embarrassed to say, I use those volumes a lot to keep in touch with younger generations, new music. Also, among the more popular torrents generally, so download fast.
I purposely went out and found every super adult and suggestive grunge song they covered with Kidz Bop because it's hilarious hearing little kids singing Nirvana and Bush songs
You'd probably like Richard Cheese (vulgar rap and rock done as vegas style lounge music).
For less vulgar, but still fun genre switch up, Paul Anka's album Rock Swings is nice. Similarly there's Pat Boone's album In A Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy.
Dunno why, but your comment reminded of this:
I follow YT accounts that post music that I'm interested in such as Vapor Memory or Cryo Chamber. I'm also on the mailing lists of several artists on Bandcamp so I get notified of new releases. I ask friends for recommendations, I ask on forums, other places. Really not that hard.
I add stations to my radio app, like Ancient FM, Cosmo Vintage, Intergalactic FM, King Dub, Nightwave Plaza, Radio Nova. Tons of cool stuff comes up, most is tagged. If I really like it I soulseek it. I stopped downloading whole albums by default, good tunes end up in my assorted folder. I throw out stuff I don't listen to as well, I'm not a hoarder.
Listen to a song. I like the song. I download the song. It's not rocket science.
What a weird question. I download music I like. Sometimes I buy stuff on Bandcamp or download from YT. I don't use Spotify and I'm an album/artist listener. Am I missing something here? Do people not have personal music libraries any more? Do people now just listen to whatever bullshit Spotify randomly plays? If so, that's sad.
Google Play Music hooked me by letting me upload my entire library. I used Songza to discover new music (playlists curated by real humans).
Google bought Songza and shut it down. Raised the price of Google Music multiple times, forced me over to YouTube Premium, raised the price again multiple times and got rid of everything that made the service appealing.
I've been in music limbo since I dropped it entirely and yeah it's kind of sad.
Man, songza was so great. It was my default music app 11 years ago lol
For a while, it was noted that the "Hip Hop Caviar" playlist had a direct and noticeable affect on single/album sales and streams on other platforms. So yeah kinda, although people are still interested in owning the music they like, but a not-insignificant portion of humans don't care either way.
Download everything that would upset you if it were no longer available forever starting tomorrow.
I read reviews from some music review websites. I also get recommendations from friends. Occasionally, I might go shopping for new music on youtube
Lately ive been getting a lot of new music from rateyourmusic.com . I look up an album i like, find some themed lists featuring it that aound interesting (a lot of the lists are like "things i listened to this year", i ignore those), and will hop from list to list as i see interesting looking albums.
When I buy something, I add it to my library. If I need or want to listen to something in more narrow a category, that's what playlists & metadata are for.
For example, if I just want to listen to songs by Miracle of Sound, I go to Miracle of Sound in my music player app and click play or shuffle.
If I want to play a particular playlist that I've made, I just go to the Playlists tab and select which one I want.
The interface of course varies with the app.
1 on Vinyl music player
afa music collection, I slowly shift things from folder to folder where I gradually cull tracks which I decide I no longer need to hear. I curate rather than hoard (although I see long term value in others opting to keep everything for the sake of all; so 'hoard' is not intended to judge those who do in this instance).
To find new music, I lean on Bandcamp. ofc they're trying to sell the artist on the platform; but the blogs are often quite good, steering me to stuff I would've unlikely discovered on my own. If I identify a new genre that I've gravitated towards, I read up on it, e.g. on Wikipedia, to find other artists emblematic of the style
Yeah, Vinyl Music Player is awesome. Been using it for a a couple years now, and before that I used the app it was forked from (I can't remember the name).
And yeah Bandcamp is fantastic! I use it all the time to discover artists I'd never have known about otherwise. :)
If I hear a song I like in a movie, game or other media I add the song and the discography for the artist to the downloader.
Once I have some free time I listen through those songs and filter out everything I don't like.
The rest gets added to my collection. I never delete songs unless something slipped through like a short interlude.
I go crate digging through soundcloud and bandcamp every so often, once in a while ill play a mix on youtube. Even if I only really like one or two songs on an album, i usually still download the entirety of it because sometimes i like just having songs on in the background if they fit a vibe i'm feeling. This is especially true for me with vaporwave, probably wouldn't bump it on my commute for example but it can really make me drift mentally if i have it on in the background while say, browsing lemmy or something. And of course for my absolute favourite artists I tend to have almost if not the entire discography.
With a long, varied list of select internet radio stations, you can choose what genre (or special weekly show) you want to listen to at the moment. Picked by people, not algorithms. Keep a playlist of the stations you like best, startup your player (like VLC) with the list, and pick the one you're in the mood for.
Or you could just collect mp3s locally for choosier days, dump a bunch of them into VLC, listen to them in album or random order. In either case, at no cost.
Usually go for More obscure rare stuff like video game sound tacks and underground lesser known artists that I find. Eventually, the top ones that pique my interest I will end up buying physical copies or purchased digital files because I wanna show My support.
If I hear a song and like it, that works, I'mma download it since shitty rural internet, I may not be able to listen to that song on demand.
Whenever I get files in higher quality than you'd normally get from e.g. YouTube Music or Spotify. Currently I'm at a just 9.2 GiB library, but whatever, I don't listen to music too often anyway
I highly recommend Hype Machine for properly new and sometimes unexpected music. Downside is that you need to sort through some stuff you might not enjoy but upside is pretty solid when you find a new artist! More organic than any of the prediction-based discovery apps.