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?

  • cirdanlunae@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    9 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.

    • onlinepersona@programming.dev
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      9 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

    • AceBonobo@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

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

      • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        9 months ago

        Random works pretty well, but PlexAmp has a lot of ways to curate playlists, and that’s what I’ve been using for my local collection.

      • Nyarlathotep@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        9 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.

    • butter@midwest.socialOP
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      9 months ago

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

      • cirdanlunae@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        9 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

    • Painfinity@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      9 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]@lemmy.sdf.org
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        9 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…

          • Painfinity@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            9 months ago

            Good on ya, with that much storage I would do that too :P

            I’m about to build my first NAS, and intend to start with 8TB - for family backups, photos, music, TV shows, and self-hosted apps. That’s why the thought of dedicating 3TB, or ~1/3 of my entire storage, to music alone sounds nuts in the eyes of a beginner like me😂

            But I guess it’s true what they say: Storage grows with time! Although I don’t wanna know how many songs you’ll have when I catch up to your current number…

      • kalkulat@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        FLAC is good, but not necessary for background listening. At 192k the average song is ~ 5Mb. 100k x 5 = 0.5 TB.

    • poncho@lemmynsfw.com
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      9 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?