I recently made a post asking about getting spotify cheaper via vpn.
My question to everyone: how do you decide what to download?
Do you just grab everything, do you use last fm, do you erase music that you never listen to?
Storage is cheap, and music (even in FLAC format) is small. You can fit tens of thousands of songs into a terabyte.
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.
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.
How do you decide what to listen to? I assume you don’t listen to multiple entire discographies
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.
Interesting. Do you just listen on Random all the time, with maybe favorites or whatever?
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
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
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…
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 ;)
Depending on how diverse your taste is, you could always try to branch out to something outside of “similar artists”. Just look up genre names and start checking them out. If you find something you like, you can use the same " similar artists" approach on an entirely new search space.
