this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Streaming sites are convenient up until you want to listen to that mildly obscure artist from your country your parents used to listen to back in the early 50s. Then it's absolute bollocks.
Not even old music.
Architecture In Helsinki is missing the third album on Spotify. There are plenty more, but that's always the first that pops in my head whenever I'm listening to Indie playlists, Of Montréal comes on and I realise I haven't heard Places Like This in a long time. Then I remember why, and I either have to dig through my old CD collection or download it.
Or if you live outside of America, the number of albums that don't let you play some of the songs is insane.
Just as the other user said, using YouTube Audio for this stuff is the way to go.
Just look for
<Artist Name> - Topicchannels and check the playlists (not the uploads). You should find full albums uploaded directly by copyright holders. Use a VPN if you don't find anything. Sometimes stuff from your region will not be available in your region, but available if you appear to be somewhere else ;)Also, if we are going old style P2P, and not using torrents for some reason (RuTracker deserves a special mention), then DC++ should come before SoulseekQT/Nicotine+ anyway.
Mostly lossless grabs from torrents + YouTube Audio (edit: using
yt-dlp), and you have a selection with guaranteed high quality*. Definitely better than whatever scattered MP3s in SoulseekQT/Nicotine+* Opus@150kbits/s is transparent, except for some killer samples heard by a trained ear.
I’ve found DC++ public hubs garbage. The private ones are amazing but near impossible to get into if you’re not already familiar. What hubs are you recommending that are better than Soulseek?
I hardly use DC++ anymore. I mentioned it because I didn't find anything unique about Soulseek when I tried it last a few years ago. But I did grab plenty of classical music in lossless format from DC++, using public hubs.
So, it's the "are better than Soulseek?" part of the question that intrigues me. What's good about Soulseek? For lossless collections, it doesn't (didn't?) have much. For lossy stuff? There are better (in selection, availability, and quality) places to grab lossy files from (e.g. YouTube). And Torrents (with or without DC++) would probably have you covered there too anyway.
That is/was my experience with all these platforms/networks. I'm open to learn something new if I'm missing something.
Better chance to find that on Youtube honestly
My parents favourite music artists finally popped up on Spotify about 5 years ago. It was a dry run until then - I was PISSED when my brother lost my CD of a band I liked when we went back home on vacation.
That's why I pay for YouTube Music. YouTube has a pretty good collection of obscure tracks and it lets you upload your own files to access anywhere.
This is because current Youtube policy effectively bundles ContentID and YouTube Music. Basically if a rightsholder wants to put audio into ContentID, they are forced to also publish it on Youtube Music (topic channels).