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. :)
https://rentry.org/firehawk52
Check this website out, there's lots of options for obtaining music. I personally use Murglar on Android for high quality Deezer rips. Telegram bots work well too.
What's the best way to compress mp3 files but still retain the quality (even possible)?
If you're not starting from a lossless format (like FLAC), you shouldn't really be compressing anything. When compressing from a lossless format to MP3, it's totally subjective. When I was more into ripping CDs, I'd do V0 or 320 - there's probably plenty of internet arguments by people more knowledgeable than me if you need a breakdown in different MP3 compressions.
As far as where you get the music from, you’ll have to determine for yourself what audio quality you require.
To test this, use something like Soulseek to get a high quality version of a song you are very familiar with, and then get the same song off of YouTube with
yt-dlp(better yet—do this for a few songs). Then, open both songs in separate media player windows, randomize the layout of said windows so you don’t remember which is which, plug in your favorite headphones and see if you can guess which is which.For me, I found the difference between a lossless or 320kbps download from Soulseek and a 128-196kbps download from YouTube to be negligible (or outright nonexistent) in most cases, so I mostly download off of YouTube, which is very simple to do.
Depending on where you get the files, you may need to add metadata yourself. For this, I recommend MusicBrainz Picard.
I’m always curious why people do this. Music is the one item where it’s easier to just sub to something like Apple Music… literally $110/yr for all the music that exists. They gave us the solution we asked for and it’s super-cheap.
I pirate the shit out of movies and tv since those guys are gouging me, but musicians barely get by in the streaming era.
Hopefully this triggers nobody. I’m making no judgements.
I've been using a hacked Spotify app for years. It takes 5 minutes to set up and I don't have to pay any money to a soulless corporation who will throw a few half pennies to the artists that I enjoy. Oh, and I get to disable the shit ui choices that they try to implement so I get a better experience than a paying customer.
I stopped using those hacked spotify apps as I had to hunt down a fresh new apk every time there was an update and I just couldn't be bothered. I just dont use Spotify anymore at all. Do you have a good solution to this or are you doing the same?
I think I had to update twice, maybe three times in the past four or five years? I've never considered that an issue.
I personally look up torrent files for either FLACs (lossless quality, with very large files) or 320kbps MP3s (smaller files with no noticable difference in sound quality imo) and then after making sure they have the right metadata (Title, Album, Artist) (using a tool like Tagger) I upload them onto my Navidrome server, which I connect to using Ultrasonic. If I didn't selfhost I'd probably just put the tagged files on my phone and play them with basically any music player.
What I do personally is get any music I want from soulseek and then sync my music directory across devices with syncthing. Although I'm planning on renting a vps to put my music on at some point as it's taking up quite a lot of my phone storage now.
On desktop I like to use mpd with ncmpcpp. On Android(/GrapheneOS) I'm using Metro as my music player.
This guide I wrote about downloading and tagging might help you :) https://mander.xyz/post/13720820
This seems really complicated for a beginner like me (': is there no online tool that can download my playlists in bulk with relatively accurate metadata? It seems deemix and soulseek require accounts which I'm not too keen about, but I really don't know anything about this so I might just be spouting silly speculations.
Aw, I understand ~50.000words can be overwhelming.😅
Hm, I dont know if there's anything better than the tools I talk about. This guide is a bit too compicated and long, so I'll try to re-word it, hoping you can now follow it:
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Soulseek: You just use a username and a password. No emails or anything. Search and download.
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Deemix: You dont need to have a personal deemix account. You can find on some doubious sites "arls" for accounts. Arl is like the user token. They are long alphanumeric strings which essentially are used instead of username+password. You can simply find one online and put it in deezer. (You can try arls found here: https://www.arldeemix.com/2024/05/arl-deemix.html?m=1 )
To use it with spotify (like downloading a spotify playlist in deemix), its kinda more complex. You can see the steps from this post on reddit here:
https://developer.spotify.com/dashboard/ log in, create an app, go into app, click show client secret under apps title, paste it into deemix along with clientid
I suggest deemix because you can get very high quality music (in batches too) and it's open source.
Lastly, if you simply want to get stuff from youtube without account and such:
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ytDownloader acts as a gui for yt-dpl (open source, PC).
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Seal acts as a gui for yt-dpl (open source, Android).
Almost certainly there are websites that may use yt-dlp and can download playlists though.
So I did the deemix thing and the Spotify app thing. Unfortunately I can't find my own playlists in Favourites, only somebody else's. Know the issue?
Oh nice, you're very close. What you see, are the Deezer playlists of the account the arl corresponds to. For your spotify playlists, go to spotify, press the share button on your playlist, get the link to your playlist (the url), paste it in the search bar in deemix and press enter. It will automatically fetch and download the whole playlist.
(The next "level" would be to go back to my big guide, in the deemix settings section and customize it to your liking.)
I went back to your guide and adjusted some deemix settings. Is there something I should adjust in "folders/track titles" sections, since you didn't mention them, or is it fine to leave them be? Also, why download in flac and not mp3?
If I dont mention them, it probably means I left them at their default settings, but each one has their own system so feel free to change them if it suits you better.
I download in flac because I want to have them at ~the highest possible quality (ripping CDs or finding each song infividually in various sources and comparing them might provide a better quality, but thats too much of a hassle) and I compress them to .opus format at 128kbit to copy them on my phone. Thus, I keep one flac collection and a cloned, compressed version of it in opus.
Near the ⅘ of my guide I think I describe how to compress files with fre:ac and which app (symphony on fdroid) handles well opus files. I had some frustration with how hard it is for apps to recognise song tags, especially multiple song tags (like 2 artists in a song). If you encounter such an issue, use a different separator other than
\\, like;.The rabbit hole can get a bit deep quickly.
Have fun :)
Thanks for your help! Will definitely continue following your guide.
However, I've already stumbled upon a few issues. First, my computer can't seem to locate the deemix music folder that I supposedly created when I installed the application. Nowhere to be seen. Not sure what to do about it, maybe I installed the wrong version?
Furthermore, the playlists I have downloaded state the following errors: "cannot read properties of undefined" and "no such file or directory"...
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Don't know how much storage you have on your phone but you should just try these steps : If you are downloading from YouTube Music you won't get the best quality but for me that's okay. So I just recommend you to download an android client for yt-dl and then download what you want. If you are downloading only 1 or 2 gigs of music it should be okay, but if you are downloading more or wanna take care, you should use a VPN 😁
Spowlo and soundbound are essentially the same app that you just paste links to Spotify lists, artists, albums, playlists, whatever, then it'll find matches on YouTube to download as mp3.
Desktop zotify, you can downloaded the "high" quality level with premium account credentials.
