I download anything and everything. An artist I enjoy? Entire discography. I've only heard one song? Entire discography--there may be more I might enjoy! An artist in a genre I like but I've never heard? Entire discography.

I'm at over 125k songs, and I still feel like my collection is a sliver. I eventually want to reach 1m songs and truly become my own Spotify. Finding songs I've never heard before and that I end up loving in my own collection is a joy I can't describe.

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 13 points 10 months ago

This. Just search for open directories and download entire music collections from the web to the download folder. Then dump them into MusicBrainz Picard and move whatever has proper tags into your music library. Finally, play the newly downloaded songs in random order.

The amount of stuff out there is amazing! I discovered all kinds of genres streaming services never would've recommended to me. Truly widens your palette.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

[–] AceBonobo@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago (4 children)

How do you decide what to listen to? I assume you don't listen to multiple entire discographies

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 17 points 10 months ago

Random works pretty well, but PlexAmp has a lot of ways to curate playlists, and that's what I've been using for my local collection.

[–] Nyarlathotep@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 10 months ago

I actually listen to music on Twitch a lot. I follow a handful of streamers who play music I like, and are always playing stuff that is new to me, and kindly list track IDs on the video feed.

I hear a song I like by an artist I am unfamiliar with and then guess what...? Entire discography.

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

Whatever I feel like listening to that day. In that regard it's no different than having a massive Spotify/Apple music library

[–] cirdanlunae@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 10 months ago

If I wanna listen to something and I don't know what, I just let LMS give me a random album and see what I get!

[–] butter@midwest.social 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Interesting. Do you just listen on Random all the time, with maybe favorites or whatever?

[–] cirdanlunae@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 10 months ago

Depends. I tend to listen to whole albums, so I let LMS give me a random album if I wanna hear something new. If I'm in the mood for whatever, I do random mixes in LMS. LMS also has a music similarity feature (with plugins) that will play related songs after an album, too, so that also helps me find new stuff that sounds like stuff I already like

[–] Painfinity@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Hol' up: Let's say the average size for a song (in FLAC format) is 30MB. 125k × 30 = 3'750'000 MB, or 3TB+!

Thas a lot of storage. O.o

[–] synae@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

A single drive of that size goes for less than $100 USD (sometimes much less!). It'd actually be more economical to get an 8TB device for less than 2x the price. I'd suspect most folks in this community have far more than 3TB available...

[–] cirdanlunae@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

36 TB usable space on my NAS... Music doesn't even make a dent

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[–] cirdanlunae@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 10 months ago

You pretty much calculated spot on! ;)

[–] kalkulat@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

FLAC is good, but not necessary for background listening. At 192k the average song is ~ 5Mb. 100k x 5 = 0.5 TB.

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[–] mister_monster@monero.town 19 points 10 months ago (1 children)

If I like it I download it, save the whole album or discography. Archive everything. Never delete. Same for books and movies and shows, though I find myself watching less of those lately.

[–] code@lemmy.zip 6 points 10 months ago

I do the same. If i like them i download the discog. Gotta do something with 200tb nas

[–] GravitySpoiled@lemmy.ml 18 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

https://github.com/RandomNinjaAtk/arr-scripts/tree/main/lidarr downloads automatically. I don't really decide. I add artists when I see one missing.

It's more important to contribute to musicbrainz than to my library. If musicbrainz has it, I can dosnload it, if not, I can't download it either.

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[–] akilou@sh.itjust.works 13 points 10 months ago (5 children)

To everyone in here saying they download entire discographies, great! I agree. But the follow up question is how do you even find out about new (to you) artists that you might like? I've cross referenced the library I have (about 27k tracks) with the "similar artists" sections of Spotify, last.fm, etc, and I feel like I'm just going around in circles. All of the similar artists are just similar to each other and I have all of it already. How do you branch out?

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

In previous years I've found new stuff using Pandora Radio, Youtube Music, and occasionally just by browsing music communities. Reddit's listentothis sub used to be really good for finding relatively unknown bands a number of years ago.

Pandora Radio advertises that instead of doing a basic genre or artist comparison, each track they have is manually analyzed for specific aspects of the track like "call and response", "wall of sound", "excessive vamping", so it makes connections crossing genre lines.

[–] sodalite@slrpnk.net 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Listen to independent radio stations. Usually can find a stream link online and plug into a music player app.

[–] TheSambassador@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago

I've never found similar artists to be helpful. Most of the time it's just a worse version of the thing I like. I don't really like stuff that sounds very samey though.

[–] cirdanlunae@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 10 months ago

I'm an old man. "Back in my day", we heard by word of mouth, the radio, browsing at music shops, etc.

We can still do that in the digital age. When someone posts a random song, anywhere, check it out. Try checking out internet radio of genres you like (I'm finding a lot of Classical this way currently). Check out Bandcamp and IRL music store every once in a while just see what calls to you. Sometimes, let the cool album art guide you ;)

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[–] shrugal@lemm.ee 10 points 10 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I scrobble to Last.fm and ListenBrainz, and then import the entire discography of their recommended artists into Lidarr. Music files are small, and you never know what you'll end up liking.

[–] MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 9 points 10 months ago

If i like it.

[–] UmbraTemporis@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Like other people, whole discographies. Artist URL straight into deemix and let it do it's thing.

For finding new music, I mostly rely on radiostations such as Kerrang! and YouTube subscriptions or recommendations.

MP3 320 is what I go for, I don't have the equipment to benefit from FLAC.

I set and forget too, never delete. You never know when it'll become impossible to get that data back if you want it.

[–] finestnothing@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

You should check out last.fm (or musicbrainz, which I prefer since its open source). You connect your apps to it (Plex, tidal, Spotify, etc), they send over songs as you listen to them, you can rank them as love or hate (and some other stuff) and they curate playlists and artists that they think you'll like based on your listening habits

[–] GreyFalcon@iusearchlinux.fyi 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

bandcamp is awesome.

[–] Facebones@reddthat.com 5 points 10 months ago

Band camp Fridays are cool too when they give up their cut so artists get 100% of sales.

[–] kylian0087@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago

I like a song from a artist so I download the entire catalog. Lossless where I can

[–] AlbertScoot@kbin.social 5 points 10 months ago

Bandcamp has been pretty good for me to find the stuff I like listening to.

[–] cali_ash@lemmy.wtf 5 points 10 months ago

If I find something and I don't have it, yet, I download it.

[–] 31415926535@lemm.ee 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

"Now that's what I call music" I'm embarrassed to say, I use those volumes a lot to keep in touch with younger generations, new music. Also, among the more popular torrents generally, so download fast.

[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 5 points 10 months ago (4 children)

I purposely went out and found every super adult and suggestive grunge song they covered with Kidz Bop because it's hilarious hearing little kids singing Nirvana and Bush songs

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 10 months ago (3 children)

You'd probably like Richard Cheese (vulgar rap and rock done as vegas style lounge music).

For less vulgar, but still fun genre switch up, Paul Anka's album Rock Swings is nice. Similarly there's Pat Boone's album In A Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy.

[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 3 points 10 months ago

I love Dick Cheese ever since Dawn of the Dead used his version of Disturbed's Down With the Sickness 😁

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[–] Granixo@feddit.cl 4 points 10 months ago

Honestly i mostly download songs on .mp3 format individually.

Unless someone has been kind enough to compile the entire album on a .zip file

[–] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 4 points 10 months ago

Didn't know last fm was still around. I ditched them after they were breached. Musicbrainz is an apt alternative. I'm still bummed about how bad AI is at recommending similar songs /a artists. I'll grab random stuff and stuff from Musicbrainz recommendatiins. I definitely delete stuff I don't like, not for saving space but mainly just to keep my library tight. I also have nightmares about being in a coma and someone finding my music collection and thinking it's something I really like but really it's 80% garbage that I can't stand and they play it for me in a loop for weeks and I can't tell them to stop because of coma. I'm also pretty vocal in my life about not really liking country music, not because I want to be a judgemental jerk about it, but mainly because of the coma thing, and I want to make sure I'm not stuck listening to that in the coma.

[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 4 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I just download .MP3 or m4as of everything I add to my liked songs on Spotify. I pay for Spotify, but the offline functionality is bogus so I also keep regular copies of everything and don't rely on whatever dumbass propriety offline format Spotify uses because it never actually plays anything when offline that way.

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[–] helpImTrappedOnline@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I use Spytify, so I "download" my songs real time in the background. If anything it makes me more intentional about what I do grab. Grabbing the entire discography of an artists may take a day, so a little pre-veting is necessary. you find out why some of the big names only have 1 or 2 hits out of a hundred, but you also find some great songs that didn't make it.

I'll usually aquire a few albums at a time. I'll give each song a quick pass (jumping to random parts) to determine the following

is the song awful and/or nothing like what the artist normally does = Delete.
is there dead space (a really long start/end of silence) or random talking/noises = trim
is it the volume stupidly loud/quiet compared to other songs = fix*
stupid rap section in the middle for no reason (thank god that trend is basically gone) = cut
what playlists does it belong in?

*I use MP3Gain for bulk volume adjustment, it does pretty good and is non-destructive, though not every player respects the adjustment (a tag in metadata or something)

I don't catch everything doing this, mostly because I spend a few seconds on each song, but it does filter out a lot.

Sometimes it takes a few listens to decide "I dont like this song" - delete.

I'm not a completionist (or try not to be) for albums/artists. If I don't like the song, its gone. If there's one part of a whole that I don't like, its chopped out.

[–] kaupas24@kbin.social 4 points 10 months ago

I just set up lidarr with all artists I like listening to and tell it to download everything they've made. That's how I have about 700gb of flac files

[–] Teppichbrand@feddit.de 3 points 10 months ago

I add stations to my radio app, like Ancient FM, Cosmo Vintage, Intergalactic FM, King Dub, Nightwave Plaza, Radio Nova. Tons of cool stuff comes up, most is tagged. If I really like it I soulseek it. I stopped downloading whole albums by default, good tunes end up in my assorted folder. I throw out stuff I don't listen to as well, I'm not a hoarder.

[–] LucidBoi@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

I follow YT accounts that post music that I'm interested in such as Vapor Memory or Cryo Chamber. I'm also on the mailing lists of several artists on Bandcamp so I get notified of new releases. I ask friends for recommendations, I ask on forums, other places. Really not that hard.

[–] 0Xero0@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

Listen to a song. I like the song. I download the song. It's not rocket science.

[–] darkphotonstudio@beehaw.org 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

What a weird question. I download music I like. Sometimes I buy stuff on Bandcamp or download from YT. I don't use Spotify and I'm an album/artist listener. Am I missing something here? Do people not have personal music libraries any more? Do people now just listen to whatever bullshit Spotify randomly plays? If so, that's sad.

[–] Toribor@corndog.social 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Google Play Music hooked me by letting me upload my entire library. I used Songza to discover new music (playlists curated by real humans).

Google bought Songza and shut it down. Raised the price of Google Music multiple times, forced me over to YouTube Premium, raised the price again multiple times and got rid of everything that made the service appealing.

I've been in music limbo since I dropped it entirely and yeah it's kind of sad.

[–] dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 10 months ago

Man, songza was so great. It was my default music app 11 years ago lol

[–] dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 10 months ago

For a while, it was noted that the "Hip Hop Caviar" playlist had a direct and noticeable affect on single/album sales and streams on other platforms. So yeah kinda, although people are still interested in owning the music they like, but a not-insignificant portion of humans don't care either way.

[–] rockhandle@lemm.ee 2 points 10 months ago

I read reviews from some music review websites. I also get recommendations from friends. Occasionally, I might go shopping for new music on youtube

[–] StellarTabi@hexbear.net 2 points 10 months ago

Download everything that would upset you if it were no longer available forever starting tomorrow.

[–] FeelThePower@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I go crate digging through soundcloud and bandcamp every so often, once in a while ill play a mix on youtube. Even if I only really like one or two songs on an album, i usually still download the entirety of it because sometimes i like just having songs on in the background if they fit a vibe i'm feeling. This is especially true for me with vaporwave, probably wouldn't bump it on my commute for example but it can really make me drift mentally if i have it on in the background while say, browsing lemmy or something. And of course for my absolute favourite artists I tend to have almost if not the entire discography.

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