Does anyone have good site recommendations for lossless files such as flac’s specifically for music.
SoulSeekQT is a free p2p file sharing service specifically for music and you can specify file types or bitrate in filters.
Nicotine also can do similar stuff if you just add *.flac to the search field.
Wow, didn’t know this was still a thing. Used to love Soulseek back in 2004.
Soulseek is my past, present and future.
💯
Not a site, but Nicotine+ is where you can drop anchor.
Check out private torrent trackers. Look for Orpheous and Redacted, OPH/RED.
soulseek is still the best. Use the Nicotine+ and it’s even better.
I’ve seen soulseek and nicotine+ recommended a lot, however is there how to use them tutorial? Or is it so simple that it doesn’t need one ?(i opened nicotine+ and couldn’t figure out what to do next)
Not sure if there is a guide out there but it’s pretty easy and I can help you through it. First you’ll need to make an account name and password. I remember it prompting for it the first startup but if not look through the options. Then you’ll want to set the path to your music library in preferences -> shares. These are the files that you’re making available to people searching and downloading. Then go to preferences -> downloads -> folders. I like to set my download folder as separate from my music library so that I can standardize it to my naming conventions, clean up metadata, and place it directly into my Artist - Album folder hierarchy, but you could probably get by with just setting this to your music library directly if you aren’t in to that side of things. You can also set things like upload and queue limits and all that while in the preferences tab. Then just go to the “search files” tab and it’s pretty easy to find what you want. I usually just go with “[album title] flac” and that’s enough to get it 95% of the time even for obscure stuff. Pick an uploader based on speed / how nicely organized the files are, then just right click the folder name -> download folder and it will move over to the download tab.
Realized right after typing this out that there is a setup assistant at help -> setup assistant. Probably way more helpful than I am but feel free to ask anything else if you need to!
Awesome thanks a lot for explanation, i’ll go over this when i’m at computer and let you know if any more doubts.
If i’m just starting with collecting music, how/what do I put for sharing (current collection is empty or at max 20 files). Can I go ahead with empty shared folder and start sharing as I download?
Some people will have share requirements but I don’t think enough do to make getting started a problem. All of my stuff is totally unrestricted so if you like death metal / jazz I can help you out.
I think I figured it and setup correctly. I’ll never say no to jazz or some death metal though. Thanks for walking me through.
Soulseek is where its at
Mostly for me, Qobuz rips (through SlavArt) are the best. But if for some reason you can’t get what you want on Qobuz, I typically look it up on Soulseek and 99% of the time I found what I’m looking for
I used to like slavart. I found out about them while they still allowed album downloads on their website. Later I moved to their divolt website (like a selfhosted discord) where they allowed downloads via bots.
At some point they decided not to bother with divolt and told everyone to start using their discord bot. Anyone who had concerns about privacy or about using their main discord account for piracy was pretty much told that they were an idiot and should go fuck themselves.
At that point I transitioned to ripping directly from quobus as explained in this guide. If I can’t find what I want on quobuz I go to deezer.
is there discord bot public or private to their discord server?
I guess it’s private? I’m not really familiar with discord bots
SLSK
Sign up for a free trial of Tidal. Use tidal-dl from GitHub
This is really good. If you VPN to Nigeria it only costs $2.70 a month.
Seconding this, as it’s my go-to for anything that’s not for sale on Bandcamp and has treated me well.
Soulseek
For flac albums, try galxytorrent2 or RUtracker.
I second RuTracker, you can find some pretty rare out of print stuff.
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FLAC (which stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec) is a way to code audio files. It makes those audio files smaller, without affecting the sound quality.
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Best way I’ve seen it explained.
FLAC = PNG
MP3 = JPEG
Well I learned something today - I always thought PNG was lossey.
Png is compressed, but lossless. Jpg is both compressed and lossy.
No, and when used for simple images like text, it can often take up less storage space than JPEG despite being lossless.
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Continuing the analogy WAV = BMP
FLAC files use lossless compression, which means all the original data is preserved (which is why people like FLAC), which makes FLAC files smaller than an uncompressed .WAV audio file, but still larger than an MP3 file, which uses lossy compression. Lossy compression does involve the loss of some data. This is what allows MP3 files to be smaller than FLAC. With the existence of other more modern lossy audio file formats/codecs like .AAC, and .opus, MP3s should no longer be used unless it is required for compatibility reasons. The modern lossy formats offer higher quality audio files at lower file sizes than MP3.
MP3s are quite compressed, meaning a lot of data is thrown away in an effort to have smaller files. The quality of audio is sacrificed quite a bit though.
Lossless formats retain as much data as possible as to not impact the sound quality, but at the expense of larger files. The OP says “smaller” because that’s in comparison to the raw uncompressed sound data stream. But they are larger than MP3s because MP3 is a lossy format.
File size used to matter a lot in the past when digital music players first came out. My first player had 128 MB storage, for example. At 3-5 MB per song that would fill up quickly. Nowadays larger storage of portable devices is more ubiquitous, with even the cheapest phones sportiing 32-64 GB, and more. So people prefer audio quality and don’t care as much if each song takes up more space.
it’s not physically possible to downvote someone on hexbear
Usenet is actually a way better source for FLAC.
My indexer is garbage for FLAC. Got any suggestions?
I’ll have to get back to you once I fix Synology webstation yet again.
No worries. Synology are so fickle, good luck.
The first rule of soulseek is…
You have to share if you want to browse my files
We don’t talk about Soulseek.
File sharing is rule three.
That’s a pretty shitty rule, lol.
We should be educating people on how to get stuff for free whenever possible.