Struggling to find a lot of music with Lidarr (New/Recent/Modern). Have a few general public/private trackers set up but still not getting many hits. From what I gather Usenet isn't much better. And I'm not really confident in transcoding, bit rates, etc... to attempt an interview.
Basically what are my options? Is there something I'm missing or is music just getting harder to find?
If you're familiar with What.CD and its shutdown, the power users and their local copy of that music archive moved over to redacted.ch (stats) and orpheus.network (stats). They're private torrent trackers so they're invite-only, but TMK they both still offer interviewing as an entry option: RED, OPS. The interviews mostly consist of technical audio information and private tracker rules. The main downside is that these trackers expect you to seed an equal amount back, so you don't get a free pass to download everything without limits. Of the two, Orpheus is a lot easier to maintain "ratio" on since it gives you incremental credit just for having a large seedbase (even if no one is downloading from you). Ideally you should be on both if you're serious about music collecting, but these days they are largely just mirrors of each other.
If you don't want to get dirty in the private tracker world, I'd recommend Soulseek and RuTracker.
I'm just not confident that I'd be able to pass an interview with either of them. No issue with rules or ratios, I simply don't have enough time to study up on the technicals. I used to be on a decent tracker years ago, but didn't pay enough attention when they shut down and missed out on the open invites.
I've tried RuTracker in the past but it hasn't worked very well for me so far. Soulseek sounds interesting, especially if they get a Lidarr integration working.
It's really not that bad, both interviews are nearly identical, and both sites provide all the study material necessary. If you really want to get sneaky, you an look up the questions in advance. You get a reasonable time to answer, and an unlimited number of attempts. OPS I passed immediately, RED failed me the first time but passed the second. 50-60% of the answers I had no clue about before reading the study material. The worst part is waiting for an interviewer / the queue to get a test, but they've got systems to keep your place in queue as well.
There’s no soulseek integration yet, but that would be a game changer, the collections in there are incredible, especially when trying to find EPs, singles and rarities. We’ve been waiting for a good long while though.
In the meantime, it’s a lot of work to build a collection, even with lidarr, torrents, semi-private, private trackers and usenet.
For soulseek, I’d recommend setting a blackhole torrent client that points to the soulseek download folder, them always make sure you download the folder not the files from the share. That will make importing the files a lot easier into lidarr if you choose to keep that as your centralized download tool.
There are also extended scripts for lidarr that will pull music from various sources as well.
I use free-mp3-download.net but that's probably not what you are looking for. You need to search up every song manually.
As far as I know, the source is Deezer, so almost all FLACs are legitimate. Almost.
This has been my only solution. I did find out if you do artist name and album name it returns all songs in album so that helped. Still really tedious compared to getting a torrent.
I tried getting music through usenet and ended up just caving and joining my friends Spotify family plan because it was such a pain. I still have lidarr synced with Spotify so as I find new music it tracks it and tries to pull it but most fails
If you have Spotify playlist you can use telegram bot which will give you zip file google drive link ,It downloads from deezer and track quality goes up to flac
I've got it set up, it works fantastically. The other important step is to get a Deezer ARL (there are various sources for this, or you can use your own, if you have one) and the accepts will crawl your Lidarr library every 15 minutes and download anything from Deezer that's available. It can also use Tidal or Qobuz, but credentials for those aren't as easy to come by as Deezer, and they all seem to have the same music available.
I second this but I use Lidarr on Steroids, as that's the one I could get working. I also chose to subscribe to Deezer for a month or two so I can download everything in lossless/FLAC using my own arl. Then I'll cancel it. After that I'll probably go to soulseek and manually download.
Hell yeah. I do that still but I found i really like 4k video downloader cause I could make a playlist and just grab the whole thing. Though I don't care for their new app even if they are pushing it.
I have Qobuz and Spotify. There are downloaders for stuff you like enough to archive. I'd probably be happy enough if I didn't go through my old playlists and find that they just randomly delete shit ALL the time. So stuff I really like, I try to download before it's gone. Nicotine+ like others have said is probably the most complete you can ask for, but quality can be an issue. The best is private trackers but considering that getting into one is like a full time job, at the point you can't find something you really want, just buy it or something.