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. :)

  • Blastboom StriceEnglish
    1•3 months ago

    So long as I can solve this with the tagging applications, I shouldn’t have to redownload everything, or?

    Yes. As long as the title and the artists tags (not the filename) of the song are correct (in many cases not even these have to be correct, because there’s an option to auto-scan songs with Shazam in my process), my process should be able to work without redownloading anything.

    songs are listed as Unknown Year

    Thats a bit weird, may I ask:

    1. How do you view the metadata? Some apps may have trouble reading metadata.

    2. Do you download them in flac or mp3?

    3. Could you share a song so that I try to download it myself to check if this only happens to you?

    I just downloaded a random song and I can see the date under the YEAR tag. Also if I right-click it on file explorer and go to details, I can see under the “date released” the date of the song.

    (Btw, the genious script I use, as I have told you somewhere, fixes the dates, high very high accuracy. Im pulling the dates from genius, because deezer, spotify etc. for some reason seem to use the date they were added to the platform as the date of release and it bothered me a lot.)

    genres are very scattered and inaccurate

    Yeah… Genres is probably the hardest to get it right, even after all the automation in my process, there have been times I manually edited the genres. Bandcamp is a good source of genres, so I try to draw genres from there, but still the automation fails some times and have to manually edit them with mp3tag (genious is a good source too).

    • Wild BillOPEnglish
      1•3 months ago

      I can’t view the metadata on my phone, just on my computer. As an example I’m viewing the song “Crown of Thorns” by Black Veil Brides. It is a FLAC file (as per the settings), and on my computer I can see the date released, artist, album, genre, track number, file size… so I don’t know why this info doesn’t translate to the music player on my phone (Gramophone). Maybe it’s because I haven’t gone through with the tagging process yet? In which case that’s understandable.

      Also, some songs failed to download from deemix, but their .lrc files still downloaded. Can I transfer these .lrc files to my phone (along with the other downloaded songs), or must the FLAC and LRC files be downloaded as a pair for the metadata to be synced with the right song?

      • Blastboom StriceEnglish
        1•3 months ago

        Ok, I did some tests:

        1. For some reason, many mobile apps (like Gramophone, or Symphony which I use) cant read the tags properly.

          a) Both apps cant separate tags that use \\ as separator for some reason. Gramophone doesnt have an option to choose a tag separator. Symphony has an option, but doesnt work with \\. (To fix this you have some options; What I do is have a separate cloned compressed .opus music collection that uses ; as separator and to do this I use mp3tag and fre:ac. You can do this in the future.)

          b) Both apps in the Year tag expect to only see 4 digits (of the year). We have set deemix to store the whole date in that tag, so they fail to read it. You can either go in deemix to settings, under date format for flac files and choose YYYY (which loses accuracy) or use mp3tag and manipulate the tags so that you have both the year and the date in separate fields. Another option is to use Phonograph plus which can read properly the whole date.

          c) Apparently, no (open source) mobile app can read tags separated by \\ properly and as a result, they either combine all the tags into one (they might read the genre tags Glam Rock and Punk Rock as a single genre Glam Rock\\Punk Rock) or they read only the first of the tag (on our previous example they would read only one genre Glam Rock). I think Vlc does the latter. It’s frustrating, I know…

        2. As long as the .lrc file has the same name as the .flac file and they are in the same folder, the app should be able to read the lrc file as the lyrics of the flac file. (Though if there’s anything wrong in the way the contents of the .lrc file are structured, it might have a hard time reading it.)

        • Wild BillOPEnglish
          2•3 months ago

          Well, at least now I know the issue isn’t on my end, so that’s a relief. I’m fine with how things are right now, it’s all very scattered but I can create a playlist of my favourites to make it easier. Besides, once I get to the tagging part of your guide I imagine things will get much more accurate. I’ve downloaded all of my 1000 songs now so I think I’ll delete my Spotify account and leave the world of streaming (music) behind. (:

          • Blastboom StriceEnglish
            1•3 months ago

            Oh youre gonna do the big jump, good luck with that😄

            PS. If you care about your spotify listening history there is a way to get your listening records in your email (takes about a month tho). And about music discovery there’s Innertune (the forked version is better) which uses yt music without an account or Listenbrainz which can help you find songs and artists/bands.

            You persisted despite the struggles and you made it, well done!