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How to get started with pirating music (mp3s)? (midwest.social)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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. :)

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 4 months ago (5 children)

Do I use a website to download songs off of YouTube or Spotify?

Soulseek and/or private trackers, both with a VPN.

Where should I store the music?

On a hard disk?

I'm running GrapheneOS

Android isn't well suited for this. It's fine for playing either by transfering your files or streaming them with something like subsonic, mod, etc.

Maybe sync with SyncThing?

This could work yeah.

What's the best way to compress mp3 files but still retain the quality (even possible)?

By design MP3 is a lossy format, so no you cannot. What you want is FLAC, a lossless compressed format.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago (1 children)

To add to the audio compression: it isn’t possible to further compress an mp3 file without losing any quality. You can either:

Recompress to a lossy codec (mp3, aac, opus). This will lead to smaller file sizes if you set the bitrate lower than that of the input file, but it will always worsen the quality, no matter the bitrate.
Recompress to a lossless format (flac easily being the best one). Going from a lossy to a lossless format will increase the file size (sometimes by quite a substantial amount), while keeping the same quality. There is very little reason for you to do this
keep the original files (my recommendation)

If you’re willing to spend some extra time learning about audio compression, you can download lossless files and compress those directly to whatever format and bitrate you want. The quality will be better than option 1 above, as the audio is only lossely compressed once instead of twice.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Recompress to a lossless format (...) There is very little reason for you to do this

I though there are no reasons at all to do it. What could be a valid use case for this ?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

It’s possible for a certain hardware/software setup not to support a certain codec. For example, my jellyfin client (Finamp) uses the iOS native decoders (afaik), which means opus files are practically broken. My music library (8000+ songs) contained exactly 1 lossy file, which just so happened to be an opus file. I decided to spend the extra ~20MB to standardise my entire library to flac files, ensuring I could play every song on all my devices.

Edit cause I posted too soon: you are generally correct; only in very specific circumstances will you encounter compatibility issues like this one in the modern world. This is 100% apple being apple, and you can expect pretty much every other (reasonably modern) device to support all codecs you might encounter in the wild.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

Upvote for soulseek / nicotine

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

FLAC is best if space is no concern. But when your collection starts getting very big, there are better options like AAC (which I use). It's a lot less space than FLAC and mp3, and higher quality than mp3 as well.

https://primesound.org/audio-file-formats/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Thank you for the answers! As for the hard disk, do you mean something like a USB or SSD? In that case, how do I sync the music from there to my phone?