this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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So I've been getting back into torrenting because I'm fed up with the inability to actually own the music I pay for. I used to torrent a lot back in the day, mostly music with a bit of anime and obscure/foreign movies and TV shows here and there, but that was a long time ago. I had been going back to the most famous of all coastal bodies of water where buccaneers reside, but I just tried too go there only to find it's currently not working. I know from lurking here that 1337x and rargb are no longer safe and LT doesn't have much to offer. All I want is music, but it seems most places are geared towards TV and movies. Where does an audiophile turn to in times like these?

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[–] Chozo@kbin.social 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just wanted to say that I love the apt use of "finding one's sea legs" in this context. The pun didn't go unnoticed.

[–] turtlepower@lemm.ee 12 points 1 year ago

Thank ye, matey! We be pirates, after all...

[–] HumanPerson@sh.itjust.works 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you want to own the music and support the artist you can buy drm free albums on bandcamp. I know this is the piracy community but they do give you drm free flac and mp3. Beyond that, I use i2p so the only advice I can give is try i2p but there isn't a whole lot there.

[–] Bone_Eve_Air@artemis.camp 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think artists get more revenue when you buy on Fridays as well, on Bandcamp.

[–] VHS@hexbear.net 18 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Soulseek is the way to go for music, way quicker and easier to find shit than torrents

[–] turtlepower@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Ok, I gave in and while it's a little confusing, I already have one of the albums I was looking for and it's flac. Thanks for twisting my arm!

[–] ted@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago

I like nicotine+ as an alternative client

[–] sanguinet@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If what you're looking for it's not a common find or just very rare, you can put it on your wishlist searches and you may eventually get a hit. You don't need to leave the app open all the time (although that'd be ideal), you can just leave it on your wishlist and it'll be searched automatically everytime you open it.

[–] turtlepower@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the tip!

[–] turtlepower@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago

Ugh. Fine, I'll try it lol.

[–] janguv@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 year ago

Absolutely. Soulseek really is incomparable. And it has the added advantage of being a throwback to the days of p2p sharing through dedicated clients.

[–] KLISHDFSDF@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

Wow. I've struggled using the "traditional" method and this is so much better. Thanks!

[–] Blizzard@lemmy.zip 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Can't believe what I'm reading, Soulseek is making a comeback?!

[–] nyakojiru@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 year ago

Seems yes and a long time ago. I’m using it and I find watever I search for in flac . I use Nicotine +

[–] AtomicPurple@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

It's been alive and well for quite some time now. I've been using it since 2018.

[–] alexthelion335@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 year ago

Download the old rargb database, it obviously isn't being actively updated, but has most of what I watch in movies and tv. I don't know about music, but I found this website not too long ago. I used the spotify downloader since I have a lot of playlists on there, and I was surprised how well it worked.

[–] Orange@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

1337x is fine to use if you don't plan to download .exe files like PC games

[–] azron@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

This is only as true as how willing people are to try to shove malware places. When you listen to music or play a video there is software that can be taken advantage of to run unexpected code. The risk is definitely lower but it is still there. If a site is burned by their own reputation I'd go elsewhere to get everything and anything.

[–] Grobot@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Soulseek works for me for 99% of the music I’m after.

[–] turtlepower@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ok, I gave in and while it's a little confusing, I already have one of the albums I was looking for and it's flac. Thanks for twisting my arm!

[–] Grobot@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

Happy to have helped!

[–] turtlepower@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, I already use a torrent client, and I don't want to download another program that requires a login. I just want a place to find magnet links for torrents. Plus I can't even see what Soulseek has available without downloading it.

[–] Grobot@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago

Soulseek is peer to peer - what’s available is dependent on which users are online and what they are sharing. If you’re not interested in another program with a login then I guess it’s not for you - might be good for someone else reading this though.

[–] AtomicPurple@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I see several people have already mentioned Soulseek, the one other place I'd recommend is rutracker. You have to sign up, and it's in Russian, but it's probably the easiest place to grab entire discographies, and you can occasionally find things there that aren't on Soulseek.

Of course if you're really serious about music piracy, getting into the private tracker scene is the only way to go. redacted.ch specifically, is probably the most comprehensive music archive on the Internet right now.

[–] nyakojiru@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 year ago

Tried to see the process to get invites into red and or more complex or hard than getting a citizenship in a decent country. To mush hassle for me

[–] eldopgergan@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I use this for all things torrent/streaming/DDL:

https://rentry.co/megathread

Hope it helps you too.

[–] Odo@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago

yea, I would just give Soulseek a try.

[–] finestnothing@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My go to for audio privacy is lidarr (radarr for movies, readarr for books, and sonarr for TV). Let's you connect to multiple torrent sites (and usenet indexers which I highly recommend), add the artists and tracks you want to get, and it does the the rest. The *arr suite in general makes piracy so much nicer and easier tbh. One bit advantage is that once you add a track/album/artist that you want to track, you don't need to worry about it unless you come across a file that isn't what it was reported as. No way around it sometimes things are mislabeled when they're uploaded, so you can just go in, blocklist that release and delete the file, and lidarr will grab a different version. Want all new albums or songs by an artist? You can set it to automatically monitor those and download them when it's available on one of your torrent sites.

[–] Anon819450514@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lidarr is useless if you don't have any site to download from. OP is asking for a website, not a bot.

[–] finestnothing@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Basically any site then find they can add to lidarr and use, it sounded like they didn't want to deal with hopping between multiple sites, so they can just add several from the list

[–] elghoto@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

For music you can try rutracker. The site is all in Russian, but you can index with Prowlarr or Jacket.

Also, you can try joining OPS or Red if you care for lossless.

I'm in Soulseek, and it's rare when there is something there and not in RED or OPS. Also, slsk sucks with the speeds and quality of content.

If you have a spare server, install navidrome and get rid of streaming services.

[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

This is the first I've seen anything about OPS or red. Any info you can share?

[–] rambos@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ive seen posts how 1337 is not safe, but I use it with no problem. You have to be carefull with all public torrents and you should be fine. All public torrents are the same imo, you should be careful with any online source anyway. Its always better to join private tracker and even better private tracker dedicated to music. Alternatively you can pay for usenet. Cant recommend any usenet, but I think torrentleech is nice general purpose tracker. Redacted for music, but that one is probably hard to join.

Anyway check lidarr, its awesome downloader for music. Its open source and you can use it with any torrent or usenet provider. Its not good like sonarr and radarr imo, but stil next level experience. Servarr ftw

[–] UnhealthyPersona@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

Those posts are people running wild with a hint of a conspiracy going on and many people immediately jumped on the bandwagon. You're completely right and not every site will be 100% safe, but it's not like there is some conspiracy with the mods getting paid off for malicious content. That's just absurd to consider with the "evidence" provided.

[–] ScratchySoft@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For me I'm just trying to find information on how to safely download games and figure out what is and isn't a virus and how to avoid getting hit with scary letters from my ISP. I know for the latter I can use Mullvad or something, but I don't know what kind of antivirus to use. Apparently a lot of them see a crack and go off about that rather than checking further to see if it's actually malicious. This mainly applies to newer games that run with exe files or other executables.

I've also been trying to find good sites that have games for retro systems like the NES, Genesis, and DS (yes, I'm counting the DS as retro for the purpose of this post) that aren't just easy to find in any No-Intro, Redump, or MAME database. You can find No-Intro stuff pretty much anywhere, at least for most of the sets. Same with Redump to a lesser extent. MAME/MESS is a bit harder, but not impossible. But trying to find anything that isn't in those is incredibly difficult. FC Gallery is alright for NES/Famicom stuff, though other than that, I've got nothing.

[–] Bone_Eve_Air@artemis.camp 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You need to find an invite to a private torrent tracker. It's pretty safe and has all the goodies.

[–] ScratchySoft@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago

True, though I'm a bit worried about seeding requirements, and making sure my ISP and college don't complain.

There's also the matter of "how the heck do I figure out if a keygen or crack or whatever is a virus if a lot of antivirus software just screams at it for being a keygen or crack without checking it for malware nowadays?"

[–] Cannizzaro@feddit.ch 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

https://rentry.org/firehawk52 this guide will be helpful for you. there are ways in it to download lossless music from services like deezer and tidal.

[–] elghoto@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

OPS and RED are music private trackers. Their names are Orpheus and Redacted.

You can get into them through interviews, or invites. But if you want to get into any private tracker, at some point you will have to do the interview

[–] mrjfilippo@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

My go-tos:

slavart (divolt)

rutracker and orpheus.network (through lidarr+prowlarr)

Soulseek (nicotine+)

[–] Anon819450514@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

It depends what kind of music you're into. There is Rawbawx if you're into rock metal and hardcore.

[–] sxan@midwest.social -1 points 1 year ago

I know this doesn't answer your question, but it's relatively easy to own music you pay for. I mostly use Amazon (from which you can buy and download mp3s), but 7digital offers FLAC encoded music, and I'm not sure they evem.offer streaming - it's buy-and-download.

There are many reasons to pirate, but I don't think not being able to actually buy music is one of them. What music are you not able to find buy-and-download options for?

[–] stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com -2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

inability to actually own the music I pay for

Do people still pay for music? How and, more importantly, why?

[–] AtomicPurple@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think people pay for streaming services, which is what I assumed was meant by the original post.

[–] turtlepower@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Yes, because it's the most prevalent, and because while you can still buy vinyl (if the label even offers it and I'm not strapping a turntable to my back when I go out), other formats (namely CDs) are rarely offered, and I don't know how iTunes works these days, but that is/was also subject to the whims of the platform, just like most any other digital library (ie; Steam, Playstation, XBox, etc.).

[–] stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com -2 points 1 year ago

You know you can use Spotify for free right?

[–] turtlepower@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ever heard of Spotify? Pandora? iHeartRadio? There are also tons of audiophiles that buy vinyl, CDs, etc. The streaming services are about "convenience". But it's not very convenient when those services don't offer everything that should be available, the quality is shit, and they can pull things from being available at any time. The physical forms are about actually owning what you pay for as well as quality. Even the best rips aren't 100%; there may be a missing track, cut too early, corruption of the file(s), etc.

So yeah, people still pay for music. It's not porn.

[–] stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com -2 points 1 year ago

Ever heard of Spotify?

Yes I have Spotify. I don't pay for it though. I don't see why I would.

audiophiles that buy vinyl, CDs, etc.

Of course but that's besides the point, because OP was talking about paying for music without actually owning it.