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?

  • @[email protected]
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    7910 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      910 months ago

      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.

      CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

    • @[email protected]
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      710 months ago

      How do you decide what to listen to? I assume you don’t listen to multiple entire discographies

      • @[email protected]
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        310 months ago

        Whatever I feel like listening to that day. In that regard it’s no different than having a massive Spotify/Apple music library

      • @[email protected]
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        210 months ago

        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!

      • @[email protected]
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        110 months ago

        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.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      510 months ago

      Interesting. Do you just listen on Random all the time, with maybe favorites or whatever?

      • @[email protected]
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        110 months ago

        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

    • @[email protected]
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      410 months ago

      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

      • synae[he/him]
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        110 months ago

        A single drive of that size goes for less than $100 USD (sometimes much less!). It’d actually be more economical to get an 8TB device for less than 2x the price. I’d suspect most folks in this community have far more than 3TB available…

    • poncho
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      10 months ago

      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?