I recently set up Sonarr and Radarr on my home server and I’m loving it.
However, I don’t get why you would ever use Lidarr. Why would you ever download music using torrents? You can use tools like spotdl and yt-dlp to download songs from YouTube music and Spotify, it’s faster and more reliable; I have had some issues finding torrents of music from less-known artists.
To me it seems like it would be much better to have a tool like Lidarr or have support in Jellyseerr to download music from common streaming services.
What are your views on this?
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YouTube and Spotify don’t have flac or alac filetypes.
Similar here, but I don’t do google and I hate Spotify lawl. I do download for my collection, but I’ve also subscribed to Apple Music because I don’t wanna fuck around with putting music on my phone, I mostly use my phone for podcasts.
But I just for some headphones that use spatial sound and holy shit is that fantastic. I have like five nice pairs of open-back fancy headphones and now I’m using my probudz all the time because it makes your music sound 4.5D and you can look around if you want and it sounds like you’re at a concert
I’m in the market for fancy headphones. What do you recommend? I mostly listen to flac tracks ripped from CDs and also would use headphones for watching movies from Jellyfin. All done at home.
HEAVILY recommend Sennheiser HD560s.
I love my Grados and other Sennheisers and I’ve tried some others that need amps, but I always come back to my 560s. They’re the best price for performance of all I own. If you’re patient, I got mine for 180USD.
BUDGET? Looove my Grado SR80e. Under a hundred bucks for some REALLY nice sound quality.
These are all open-back, so you’ll get a really good soundstage but they’re not great for loud environments. But damn do they sound good.
Perfect! This is exactly what I was looking for. I’ll pick up a pair of the HD560s when it goes on sale. Thank you so much for the recommendation!
Absolutely! I also love my pair of 599, they’re much less expensive retail but I can really feel the difference in the 560s (weirdly named, the 560s are superior). I think I paid 130 for the 599s.
The 560s have slightly better sound quality but they feel much better to wear for long periods of time. That all said, the sound quality difference is very very small for flacs, so if you find a good deal on 599s and you’re not wearing them for 6-10 hours straight (which I sometimes do) then you can totally save the money.
Both pairs don’t rest on your ears, and they both have ONE cord going to the left ear. My biggest complaints about my beloved Grados is they DO rest on your ears and they have cords going to both ears, which get all wound up and touch my chin/cheek which my ADHD ass does not appreciate the tactile…ness of.
As an aside, my partner isn’t an audiophile and I had them listen to my favorite headphone-testing-song (Tipper’s “Cuckoo”) in flac, with my 560s. I started the song and they’re like “I’ve heard this song before” and by the end their eyes were DRIPPING. I never realized sound could be so… extradimensional, and it really hits goodly.
Quick edit: oh and the Sennheisers have removable cords which can lock in, which is amazing because they come with a shorter cord and a LOOOOOONG cord you can switch out as you like.
Yeah the 560s sound perfect. I’m very excited now. Thank you!!
If you remember me, please let me know how you like them! And listen to cuckoo.flac and feel the little sizzles that tickle your ears and be like mmmmmm that’s some sizzles
It seems there’s a 560 and 560S, and they look very different from each other.
Just to make sure, are you referring to the 560S, or the 560 in plural?
Ahhhh I’m confusing when I talk about them because I pluralize them too! My favorite pair is the 560s, or pluralized, the 560s…s. I found the 560s pair on sale back when I was on Reddit at /buildapcsales/ like a month after I bought a pair of 599 (actually 599 SE) and fell in love with them.
I looked it up and actually got the 560s for a STEAL at 160USD, so I think anything below 200 is a good deal.
IIRC, Spotify added FLAC recently
I see a lot of news of it “coming soon” and leaks, but not an official release. Do you have more info?
Just looked it up, it doesn’t seem to be available yet
This is the only thing I could find on it. Seems it’s still in testing.
Hopefully soon though!
I will be surprised if Spotify won’t announce a new more expensive HIFI subscription with their support for lossless audio. Imo this still makes it less interesting than Tidal/Deezer/Qobuz since it’ll still be impossible to permanently download music from Spotify.
Nonetheless it’s great that Spotify will provide lossless audio for those who want it.
Basically boils down to quality. The default options for pirated music are FLAC 44.1-96 kHz 16-24 bit, or MP3 320kbps.
Both are better than YouTube quality.
Yep, don’t need to get a headache from crappy 128bps mp3s.
Also because fuck this rent-music mentality.
Eh - YT music (premium) offers 256kB-ish Opus now. That’s on par with 320kBps MP3.
Because some music is not available on streaming platforms. Occasionally artists and labels decide to split their ways, and suddenly their older albums are gone. Over the years I started losing notable chunks of music I like from my playlists.
Not only that but the original mixes of albums often don’t get put on streaming platforms because of licensing bullshit or whatever.
And especially for rock and metal the newer remasters of popular albums tend to be pretty bad and overly compressed or have weird post EQ added.
Because fuck Lars Ulrich.
Hell, I wish my downloads took money directly from him. He sucks.
What’s the issue with him? Honest question, just want to know what’s up
Metallica spearheaded the movement against the music sharing platform Napster back in the day. Lars Ulrich in general was a big opponent of music piracy. (Although, apparently he has since chilled out a bit).
He’s also just not a good drummer.
I guess he’s not that bad, all things considered. Just don’t like the guy.
Thank you for explaining! I had no idea.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Convinced that napster was stealing all his moneys and pretty much cemented the idea that people pirating things means you’ve lost BILLIONS OF REVENUE as opposed to an indicator that you’ve got a supply chain or pricing problem.
I wasn’t even a metallica fan but i started downloading tracks in the days of yore just to delete them out of spite
I to this day still make it a point to download anything from them and I refuse to listen to it. If one of their songs comes on anything I’m streaming, I skip.
If i can’t buy it in bandcamp friday i’m pirating it.
Same thing here lol
Same thing here :)
FLAC files - better sound quality
The right Deezer Downloaders have Flac tho
I’ve also had issues with Lidarr not downloading anything - For example, I tried downloading music from the artist
NF- which I don’t think is a particularly niche artist - but Lidarr didn’t download anything. What indexers do you use to download music?I think you basically need a private tracker for lidarr. The arr suite is mostly targeted toward collecting media of a particular quality and will sit on its hands if what it finds doesn’t meet that standard
Music is also not well represented in the public indexers, so it’s not surprising it doesn’t always find what you’re looking for
Personally I don’t download music. I rip my CDs but I do know that some streaming services don’t offer as high quality as CDs hence my comment.
- quality
- organization of files
- proper metadata
- extras like photos/other images, lyrics, links, etc
- community (on various torrent sites, mainly)
- not being reliant on a company and centralized servers
- someone paid for the album… band made more from that one sale than how many streams of it? Lol 😐
- commands are crowding my CLI history. Lol
It depends what it is and maybe I’m not savvy enough but, I find it easier to use bittorrent still.
Some things are easier to find on YT or X streaming service so, I’d say multiple methods these days are necessary depending on what one is into.
To that end, I think we need to just reach out to bands and point them to a primer on uploading their music. Additionally, more people need to go to shows and start creating high quality torrents of smaller, more independant bands. As well as people creating torrents or torrent packs for the stuff that gets ripped from the other sources.
Because back when the only way to listen to new music was to buy it, then find out a load of it was absolute tripe, then not be able to take it back.
So fuck 'em. I download first, then if I like it I buy it. There’s quite a few CDs on my shelf that I first pirated. And no CDs that are full of lame filler shite.
You can use tools like spotdl and yt-dlp to download songs from YouTube music and Spotify
To get quality like this https://youtu.be/cX4KA-AFS9M ? Nah thanks.
That video is A ART
When I started driving and my friends or partners would be like “can I play a song I love on your nice sound system” and they pulled up YouTube (this woulda been like late 00s to mid 2010s) it LEGITIMATELY SOUNDED LIKE THAT TO ME.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/cX4KA-AFS9M
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
You sort of asked two different questions there. Generally I don’t torrent music these days, though I have done in the past (Audio-4U, for example). I do use P2P methods like Soulseek for some stuff but predominately I rely on direct downloads through DoujinStyle.
In terms of why I pirate, it’s because I can’t afford to buy all my music and streaming services offer inferior quality, catalogue size and revenue to the artists. I’d rather manually curate my own offline collection and put the money I would spend on a streaming subscription directly towards an artist whose work I particularly liked whenever I can afford to do so.
Because I have a hoarding problem, and channeling it towards data hoarding prevents me from having all the conventional problems that come with hoarding.
Quality. YouTube audio leaves something to be desired… Spotify though… I never heard of that tool so thanks.
FYI SpotDL also downloads from YouTube, it just reads Spotify playlists.
but to answer your question, I’ve heard audiophiles complain about the highest possible quality you can get from a YouTube rip. so, I’m assuming that some of the torrents out there are higher quality than what you can get from youtube
Pretty much this. I like to DJ, mostly a hobbyist over paying gigs these days, and have plenty of tunes ripped from the tube. Now I have the fun task of trying to replace everything with higher quality versions. Shitty rips are fine enough for a house party on a humble audio system, but proper venues with subs and high fidelity audio setup make it obvious you ripped from YouTube.
In a perfect world I would love to buy what I use. Problem is I would need an insane budget to grab what I want. I listen to a lot of a music.
YT Music Premium delivers 256kBit/s Opus now, Deezer delivers FLAC.
I dowload my flacs via soulseekqt. sadly torrent is not cool for music anymore…
if the music is older, and not from the US, it’s often not on spotify. Versions matter too - even for some mainstream bands their B sides/acoustic/live versions just aren’t on spotify or youtube. Album metadata for spotify is garbage too - it just isn’t an adequate replacement for a record collection.
I do use a spotify subscription, but for me it’s a tool for playlist generation and music discovery.
Also audio quality, as others have mentioned.
