Piracy General

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Another way that to get music in FLAC format is to rip music from digital music services like Deezer, Qobuz or Tidal. This rentry has a lot of good info and tools on it: https://rentry.org/firehawk52
You can also use to download music, just copy paste the song or album link into the site and hit download and it will rip the music.


Edit: Added a couple more links.

If anyone is interested interested in private trackers, here is a pretty good guide to it: https://wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/Private_trackers
It's written by a /ptg/ anon. ptg stands for private trackers general. It's a thread in 4chan's /g/ board.
 
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I've never used Soulseek, but I am glad to endorse it for the same fundamental reason we value the farms: archive everything, including music.
Rekeita's Kidneys said:
https://github.com/slskd/slskd/ I will shill this for the (hopefully) many home server chads, lidarr integration when?
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This is a very interesting tool. As mentioned, I've never used Soulseek, but something like this is what I would use. I imagine that other clients (e.g. Nicotine+) also don't include a daemon for streaming music, is this correct? Do you toss the music in something like Jellyfin and play via Finamp?

The github pages for both slskd and lidarr indicate that they are interested in integrating the two. The slskd author indicates it would be a simple project for someone who wanted to learn C#/.NET.
Kazuma said:
Another way that to get music in FLAC format is to rip music from digital music services like Deezer, Qobuz or Tidal. This rentry has a lot of good info and tools on it: https://rentry.org/firehawk52
You can also use to download music, just copy paste the song or album link into the site and hit download and it will rip the music.
[contd...]
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Ripping from Deezer, Qobuz, or Tidal is generally a great way to get FLACs. Using `yt-dlp -x --audio-format flac [link]` was mentioned a few pages back. Hopefully it was a joke, but I'm going to sperg out anyway.

Music compression works by filtering out the higher frequencies that humans typically can't hear. Audio fidelity is checked by looking at spectrograms, a time vs frequency representation of a track, which provides a visual method of checking for frequency truncation. I have prepared two FLACs and three MP3s of the song Check-It by Skream for demonstration purposes.

Introduction of files:
Skream - Check-It [Proper FLAC]: sourced via private tracker
Skream - Check-It [Proper 320 MP3]: transcoded from FLAC via flac2mp3
Skream - Check-It [Proper V0 MP3]: transcoded from FLAC via flac2mp3
Skream - Check-It [Youtube FLAC]: yt-dlp -x --audio-format flac [link]
Skream - Check-It [Youtube MP3]: yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 [link]

"320 MP3" is a FLAC encoded to a MP3 with a constant bitrate of 320 kbps, and "V0 MP3" is a FLAC encoded to a MP3 with a variable bitrate with minimal compression.

Let's first investigate the file sizes of our tracks:
Track NameFile Size
Skream - Check-It [Proper FLAC]28 MB
Skream - Check-It [Youtube FLAC]47 MB
Skream - Check-It [Proper 320 MP3]9.7 MB
Skream - Check-It [Proper V0 MP3]8.2 MB
Skream - Check-It [Youtube MP3]:3.6 MB
file_sizes.png

Right away, we can see something very interesting, which is that yt-dlp FLACs are considerably larger than a proper FLAC (direct webdl, ripped from CD, vinyl, etc). Compressing the track, which is done by removing higher frequencies, reduces the size from 60% - 90% (the Youtube MP3 has been compressed to hell). Therefore, based on file size alone, you don't want a yt-dlp FLAC. Now, let's look at the spectrograms to see what this compression does to the track.

Try to visually follow along with the song, it's not so hard!
Skream - Check-It [Proper FLAC].full.png
Here we see a clean spectrogram over the full 0 KHz - 22 KHz range. This is what you hear on a CD. What changes when you download an MP3 from Youtube?
Skream - Check-It [Youtube MP3].full.png
Ouch. Youtube runs a low-pass filter that caps out at ~14 KHz. We can see tons of spikes above 14 KHz; however, those are erroneous artifacts caused by transcoding lossy to lossy. Well, free is free and you get what you get. But what do you get when you tell Youtube that you want a FLAC?
Skream - Check-It [Youtube FLAC].full.png
You get the same thing, but with more noise. Once the data is gone, it's gone. You can't polish a turd, etc. etc.. What you DO get, however, is a file that's 13x larger and sounds exactly the same.
Well, the file size of the Youtube MP3 and proper 320 kpbs MP3 aren't so different, so let's see what a properly compressed MP3 looks like:
Skream - Check-It [Proper 320 MP3].full.png
Damn that pussy nice. A clean shelf at 20 KHz and about 20 MB smaller than the FLAC. This song would plainly sound better to someone with decent headphones, especially regarding vocal sibilance and cymbals.
Skream - Check-It [Proper V0 MP3].full.png
The V0 MP3 tries its best to remove low-decibel signals where certain frequencies are silent, which can be clearly seen around 20s - 25s. It would be hard to distinguish between this track and the 320 kbps track, but the file size isn't so different either.

Anyway, this is the (highly autismo) power of investigating spectrograms. While it's known that yt-dlp serves bad audio quality, these tools are also useful for checking if that FLAC on Soulseek (or even Tidal/Qobuz/Deezer) is actually lossless, or if they are actually serving compressed files.

In my opinion, the juice of lossless files isn't worth the squeeze of hunting them down, larger file sizes, etc. I can distinguish between lossless and lossy tracks when I focus on the song, but not when I'm walking or working. Bluetooth codecs aren't (yet) able to play a lossless file without compression. Therefore, digital-analog conversion is necessary, and most cheap headphones drivers (especially earbuds) aren't even close to playing a full-frequency response.

I suggest taking a blind lossless/lossy audio test to see if your system is set up to enjoy lossless audio fully. Soulseek is probably great, but I don't know what the catalog availability is like. In my experience, if you can and do enjoy lossless audio, and want an endless catalog to draw from, the popular music private trackers are the way to go.
 
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Saddam Hussain Obama said:
what happened to the MP3s from napster?
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I have them. Do you want them back?

Womble of Wimbledon said:
My favourite resource is rutracker. Make an account, if you can get past the fact that it's all in Russian it's an insanely good resource for music torrents. Nearly everything downloads pretty quickly regardless of the number of seeders, too. Also has some obscure films and TV that you won't find elsewhere.
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Yup, I even got the full 7 game rip of a World Series from the 1960's from rutracker a few years back. Had to have been the only copy in the world and took forever because of 1 seeder, but yeah.
 
Lusotropicalismo said:
In my opinion, the juice of lossless files isn't worth the squeeze of hunting them down, larger file sizes, etc. I can distinguish between lossless and lossy tracks when I focus on the song, but not when I'm walking or working. Bluetooth codecs aren't (yet) able to play a lossless file without compression. Therefore, digital-analog conversion is necessary, and most cheap headphones drivers (especially earbuds) aren't even close to playing a full-frequency response.
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I listen to music in my car a lot and my aftermarket headunit has a cool feature that automatically upsamples low bitrate music. It's probably some smart non ai way of processing and filling in the blanks. It honestly sounds pretty good for a car environment where you have road and wind noise to contend with. I simply stick with 320kbps or VBR mp3 for my mobile library.
 
Lusotropicalismo said:
The github pages for both slskd and lidarr indicate that they are interested in integrating the two. The slskd author indicates it would be a simple project for someone who wanted to learn C#/.NET.
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Fantastic news, can finally fill in all my blanks in Lidarr without doing it manually.

Lusotropicalismo said:
Soulseek is probably great, but I don't know what the catalog availability is like.
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It’s had everything I’ve thrown at it and I’m not searching for mainstream music exactly, plus most of it in FLAC and if not then definitely in 320Kbps or just wait a day for FLAC.
 
Lusotropicalismo said:
In my opinion, the juice of lossless files isn't worth the squeeze of hunting them down, larger file sizes, etc. I can distinguish between lossless and lossy tracks when I focus on the song, but not when I'm walking or working. Bluetooth codecs aren't (yet) able to play a lossless file without compression. Therefore, digital-analog conversion is necessary, and most cheap headphones drivers (especially earbuds) aren't even close to playing a full-frequency response.
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Right now I have been transcoding my music library from FLAC to 192kbps opus and then store them in my phone. I had read that opus at 192kbps is transparent.
 
Lusotropicalismo said:
I imagine that other clients (e.g. Nicotine+) also don't include a daemon for streaming music, is this correct? Do you toss the music in something like Jellyfin and play via Finamp?
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It's not like a playback daemon or anything, it's just a way of accessing SoulSeek through a web browser. If you have Lidarr setup you can get a "blackhole downloader" folder thingie going and have it import it you your Jellyfin library (that's what I've got working)
 
any recommended tools to ripping out from ubisoft games?
i wanna south park TFBH on my steam deck without ubishit connect running in the background like a parasite.
 
I've been downloading PS3 JRPGs for the past day for my collection, and one of them won't fucking work. Trinity Universe. Apparently it wasn't very popular, because all of the downloads that I can find use the same fucking files, so I can't even find an alternate copy to try, like I did with the other games that wouldn't load properly. I'm honestly getting tempted to just buy a copy of the game and try dumping it myself.

On the bright side, I found this website: https://vimm.net/ . Looks really good for roms and emulation.

Well, that's enough venting for now.
 
anustart76 said:
It's doable, but the various Bluray players are hit-or-miss on dumping, so if you don't already have one or a hacked PS3 to dump from, I'd pick one of the ones listed on the RPCS3 site: https://rpcs3.net/quickstart#dumping_drives
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Yeah, already bought the game and an external drive. Probably shouldn't be paying this much for a single game that might not even be any good, but I had $20 on Upside and $30 of Brave tokens. Besides, I'll be able to use the drive for other shit.
 
Banana Hammock said:
I don't use it as much as I used to, after they nerfed how much gas gives you. Starting to get back into it, though.
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Same, but because I have a hybrid (I know) I never get that much back. I’m also the one getting gas about half the time. I think my all time earnings is less than $10. It’s easy to use though, so I don’t mind keeping it around.
 
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