this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
182 points (97.4% liked)
Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
53969 readers
1010 users here now
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
Rules • Full Version
1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy
2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote
3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs
4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others
Loot, Pillage, & Plunder
💰 Please help cover server costs.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You guys don't just download stuff with yt2mp3?
You don't get high quality mp3s from that.
I use deemix for 320kbps, I originally had FLAC but as almost 100% of my listening is remote from my server I found 320 to be great.
I'm no Hi-Fi listener, but YT rips suck.
Is there something wrong with my ear that I can't distinguish between music quality levels?
Not at all. For a lot of people, hi-fi audio is basically indistinguishable from “regular” audio, and you also need things like a DAC and good headphones to hear it. Bluetooth, as an example, can’t even play hi-fi audio at its full quality.
I mean, in that case, ig I'll just stick to yt2mp3😂😎
There is definitely something wrong with your ears if you can't differentiate between lossless and low quality YouTube rips.
I’m pretty sure they can, they just don’t know it. It’s extremely obvious.
Just, what do I have to pay attention for? It doesn't seem like the audio has chirps, or noise (at least, disturbing one) usually. So, I don't really get it.
There are a few key things that you’d notice between high quality and very low quality audio. Mostly, a loss of information, which would result in a muffled audio, a lack of crispy sounds and a loss of general clarity, as well as unpleasant distortion and other made-up noise at worst.
For 99.9% of people, it’s not really an mp3 vs wav/aiff comparison, but rather a kbps comparison. High quality mp3 (320kbps) is usually indistinguishable from lossless formats for most people.
For a good reasonable idea, compare 128kbps vs 320kbps at the bottom of this page and pay attention to the cymbals and other high-pitched sounds. You should notice that 128kbps sounds a bit more opaque, like it loses a lot of its spark, whereas 320 sounds crisp and clearer.
That being said, it’s not a huge difference unless you go below 128, and there’s no point in listening to wav and lossless files if you use Bluetooth, since Bluetooth hard-caps all your rates at 320kbps anyway. But I think it’s fairly noticeable anyway.
yeah, ok, now this makes a lot more sense! I felt how the 128 had more snappy sounds, unlike the softer ones of 320 (think: the sound itself seems sharp in 128, unlike 320 and wav). you especially notice this around the 15 seconds mark (from 15:22 I believe).
But, yeah, it's not very huge unless you go below 128 as you mentioned. Thanks for taking the time to write this!
Do you guys just listen to see how smooth it is?
Like, is there a difference between these 2: https://youtu.be/m-8n9YyfBB8 https://youtu.be/0lzRS5sIjm4
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/m-8n9YyfBB8
https://piped.video/0lzRS5sIjm4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
You need to compare lossless with lossy. YouTube only contains lossy audio.
Hmmm.... Ok. Guess I'll be looking for that.
Also know that if you listen via Bluetooth, your audio will most likely be compressed too. How much depends on the Bluetooth codec being used.
Mostly when I'm outside. Otherwise, I just use my laptop as a stereo or smth.
Keeping FLAC is such a hassle, it's not even worth.
No, I enjoy my ears not bleeding from shit quality.
Bruh. I've been listening to that stuff for way too long, idk what good quality is anymore.
But, what about disk space?
YouTube has audio in Opus format@~150kbit/s. Opus is a much better format than MP3. Almost all audio is completely transparent at that bitrate, where with MP3s, there are cases where audio is not transparent without using non standard >320kbit/s bitrates (a lot of content is transparent @320kbits/s though).
Now, sites/tools like the one you mentioned take the Opus (or AAC) file/stream from YouTube, and lossily re-encodes it again, probably to a file that is larger than the original, with at best the same quality, but probably worse quality. You obviously can't get better output than the input in lossy compression.
So, the disk space argument is weird if you can play Opus/AAC (should be playable on every device nowadays).
This is the valid part for why you shouldn't use YT-to-MP3 converters.
But there are also invalid reasons why people will tell you it's shit:
Interesting. So, if that's the case, how do I get soulseek?
Soulseek is an old-style P2P network. It has nothing to do with my parent comment. I personally don't use it (see my other comments in this thread).
If you want to grab a non-reencoded file from YouTube, you can use a tool like yt-dlp
That last command should grab you an Opus stream in WEBM format.
If you're not a CLI guy, others should be able to give you a good GUI recommendation.
Ahh, ok. Thank you.
CLI all the way, bro!
Well my collection of FLACs are about 500GB. That's about 16k songs with a total runtime of 52 days. I don't think that's too bad.
If you are really short on disk space I'd still rather download FLAC and transcode to opus @128kbps or maybe less yourself. It's transparent and even smaller than mp3. I use that to fit everything on my phone which takes about 70GB.
that's not bad at all actually.
FLAC isn't too bad on disc space.
I mostly listen to jazz, blues and classical. I use rutracker which has everything I want and in lossless formats. Mp3s too but I'm more interested in lossless.
yt-dlp is the way my friend, I got a command to download a specific playlist of mine every once in a while:
alias youtube-dl-playlist-guardar="yt-dlp -x -f bestaudio --external-downloader aria2c --external-downloader-args '-c -j 3 -x 3 -s 3 -k 1M' --ignore-errors --continue --audio-format mp3 'https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=_______'"Thank you for this! I'll put it in a bash script and roll with it!
You are very welcome! I use it with aria2, it's opcional but recommended, in case you don't want it you can strip the --external-downloader and -args part :)
Interesting. so, let me get this: how are you combining the yt-dl downloader with aria2? Like, you use yt-dl for getting the opus/ripping the vid, and feeding that to aria2 to actually download?
That's exactly it, I use aria2 pretty much for parallel downloads (also to be able to resume them).
Is yt-dl limited when it comes to downloading?