Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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.

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.

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.

Lidarr is all you need.

You can do other methods, but this one is simple and effective. Set it up, tell it what bands you like, wait a day and you've got the entirety of your childhood favorites and nearly every discography you can think of. All for maybe an hour of upfront work.

Versus remembering every band/song you ever liked, tracking it down, downloading each individually... Like yeah, you can do that. It's what I do for shows and movies for curation. But for music, I have so much and so many that curating like this just isn't as worthwhile as checking off a band in Lidarr and having all of their stuff in a few hours.

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.

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.

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.

This guide I wrote about downloading and tagging might help you :) https://mander.xyz/post/13720820

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 😁

the main way i get music files (320kbps mp3) is through the Soulseek network, which many commenter have mentioned. what has been left out is the best client to get into that network, that is free and open source software, which is Nicotine+. it work on any desktop OS

torrents are still valid but you won't find many artists there

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.

For the longest time, I've relied on DDL sites, blogspot sites with lots of links and Uloz. Since many of them have become rather tedious to use or just outright suck, I now use MP3Caprice. Yeah I know, some money is involved so you're paying people to pirate for you. But on the flipside, everything is relatively dirt cheap (except soundtracks and compilations, they like those enough to charge more).