How to get started with pirating music (mp3s)?

Do I use a website to download songs off of YouTube or Spotify?

Where should I store the music? I haven't any clue about self-hosting. I'm running GrapheneOS, is it enough to save the songs in Files and play in an app like Auxio? Maybe sync with SyncThing?

What's the best way to compress mp3 files but still retain the quality (even possible)?

Could really use some help as I'm very inexperienced. :)

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Do I use a website to download songs off of YouTube or Spotify?
Soulseek and/or private trackers, both with a VPN.
Where should I store the music?
On a hard disk?
I'm running GrapheneOS
Android isn't well suited for this. It's fine for playing either by transfering your files or streaming them with something like subsonic, mod, etc.
Maybe sync with SyncThing?
This could work yeah.
What's the best way to compress mp3 files but still retain the quality (even possible)?
By design MP3 is a lossy format, so no you cannot. What you want is FLAC, a lossless compressed format.
- To add to the audio compression: it isn’t possible to further compress an mp3 file without losing any quality. You can either:
  Recompress to a lossy codec (mp3, aac, opus). This will lead to smaller file sizes if you set the bitrate lower than that of the input file, but it will always worsen the quality, no matter the bitrate.
  Recompress to a lossless format (flac easily being the best one). Going from a lossy to a lossless format will increase the file size (sometimes by quite a substantial amount), while keeping the same quality. There is very little reason for you to do this
  keep the original files (my recommendation)
  If you’re willing to spend some extra time learning about audio compression, you can download lossless files and compress those directly to whatever format and bitrate you want. The quality will be better than option 1 above, as the audio is only lossely compressed once instead of twice.
  
  Recompress to a lossless format (...) There is very little reason for you to do this
  I though there are no reasons at all to do it. What could be a valid use case for this ?
- Upvote for soulseek / nicotine
- FLAC is best if space is no concern. But when your collection starts getting very big, there are better options like AAC (which I use). It's a lot less space than FLAC and mp3, and higher quality than mp3 as well.
  https://primesound.org/audio-file-formats/
- Thank you for the answers! As for the hard disk, do you mean something like a USB or SSD? In that case, how do I sync the music from there to my phone?

https://rentry.org/firehawk52
Check this website out, there's lots of options for obtaining music. I personally use Murglar on Android for high quality Deezer rips. Telegram bots work well too.

As far as where you get the music from, you’ll have to determine for yourself what audio quality you require.
To test this, use something like Soulseek to get a high quality version of a song you are very familiar with, and then get the same song off of YouTube with yt-dlp (better yet—do this for a few songs). Then, open both songs in separate media player windows, randomize the layout of said windows so you don’t remember which is which, plug in your favorite headphones and see if you can guess which is which.
For me, I found the difference between a lossless or 320kbps download from Soulseek and a 128-196kbps download from YouTube to be negligible (or outright nonexistent) in most cases, so I mostly download off of YouTube, which is very simple to do.
Depending on where you get the files, you may need to add metadata yourself. For this, I recommend MusicBrainz Picard.
- Is there any program that downloads from youtube without me needing to find the URL I want? Ideally I would like to search a catalog of genre/artist/album and click the download button. It ought to maybe find the biggest youtube channel with the artist's name in it and then find the song.
  
  Not to my knowledge, but music.youtube.com is a pretty clean interface, and it’s easy enough to grab links from. Keep in mind, you can feed yt-dlp both playlist (including album) and channel (artist) links, as well as individual videos.

What's the best way to compress mp3 files but still retain the quality (even possible)?
If you're not starting from a lossless format (like FLAC), you shouldn't really be compressing anything. When compressing from a lossless format to MP3, it's totally subjective. When I was more into ripping CDs, I'd do V0 or 320 - there's probably plenty of internet arguments by people more knowledgeable than me if you need a breakdown in different MP3 compressions.

Lidarr is all you need.
You can do other methods, but this one is simple and effective. Set it up, tell it what bands you like, wait a day and you've got the entirety of your childhood favorites and nearly every discography you can think of. All for maybe an hour of upfront work.
Versus remembering every band/song you ever liked, tracking it down, downloading each individually... Like yeah, you can do that. It's what I do for shows and movies for curation. But for music, I have so much and so many that curating like this just isn't as worthwhile as checking off a band in Lidarr and having all of their stuff in a few hours.
- Lidarr sounds fine for computers, what about android?
  
  They mentioned SyncThing, so I assumed a computer was very much in play.

I’m always curious why people do this. Music is the one item where it’s easier to just sub to something like Apple Music… literally $110/yr for all the music that exists. They gave us the solution we asked for and it’s super-cheap.
I pirate the shit out of movies and tv since those guys are gouging me, but musicians barely get by in the streaming era.
Hopefully this triggers nobody. I’m making no judgements.
- I’ve used Spotify for like 20 years now, and I’m finally going back to pirating.
  They started “innovating” and adding shit I didn’t want last year to justify fee increases.
  I can’t trust businesses to not enshittify, so might as well continue on with where I left my library all those years ago.
  Plus: So much music isn’t available on there. I have a huge collection of Japanese Rock, Pop, Visual Kei from the 90s and 00s that you just can’t find easily.
- Can you save it DRM-free? That's all I ask for.
- my two cents,
  I personally buy some music from Bandcamp, and I'm pretty sure those songs don't exist on the Apple Music catalog. So I don't want to handle multiple apps to listen what I want.
  Also, streaming platforms have the internet constraints. Sometimes, like when I'm driving, I don't have a stable internet connection
- Many artists I like were signed with a now defunct record label called Tympanik Audio. Whoever got the rights to the name after the label went under stopped paying their Spotify license fees, and a large chunk of my Spotify library vanished overnight. While the albums still exist on Bandcamp, the money probably gets thrown into the void now.
  Never again. The only way I can ensure my music is accessible tomorrow is to have my own copy. I buy on Bandcamp where I can, or will buy physical and rip it if I really like the album. Everything else gets ripped from Deezer automatically because there's no guarantee anything on those platforms will always be there.
- I've been using a hacked Spotify app for years. It takes 5 minutes to set up and I don't have to pay any money to a soulless corporation who will throw a few half pennies to the artists that I enjoy. Oh, and I get to disable the shit ui choices that they try to implement so I get a better experience than a paying customer.
  
  I stopped using those hacked spotify apps as I had to hunt down a fresh new apk every time there was an update and I just couldn't be bothered. I just dont use Spotify anymore at all. Do you have a good solution to this or are you doing the same?
  
  Does revanced have patches for Spotify?
- My good faith response to your good faith question: because having a DRM-free copy on your own server or hard drive is the only way to be sure you will be able to play it tomorrow.
  Streaming services are a complex collection of licensing deals that are by design temporary. You may not hear beforehand when your favorite artist's label's parent company's conglomerate's CEO decides to pull their content because they're going to start their own streaming service, or another service gave them a lucrative exclusive deal.
  And while you're never going to have a hard time finding Taylor Swift, that one 70s esoteric album may become instantly impossible to find once it drops off a streamer.
  In the end there are no promises with a streaming service. On the other hand, you put in a small amount of work to grab MP3s or FLACs, set up your own Plex server (or Emby, etc), and you're good for pretty much forever.
  Similarly, support artists by buying their direct merch, going to shows, and so on, but they are barely seeing any Spotify money. Between Spotify and the labels, they are cleaning the plate and artists are getting whatever crumbs fall off the table (unless you're Taylor Swift or another global artist).
  
  If the streaming service I use (Apple Music) doesn’t have something, I buy it and add it. Spotify goes out of their way to make that difficult, so I don’t use Spotify. I actually think Spotify is terrible in every way.
  I’m not worried about owning all the music since streaming is not going to disappear in my lifetime. If it did, I’d drop the cash on bands that need my money and pirate the ones who don’t.
- it’s easier to just sub to something like Apple Music… literally $110/yr for all the music that exists.
  As others have stated, not all music exists on every streaming platform. That alone is enough of a reason for me. I recently canceled my longtime Spotify subscription because the price kept increasing while my library kept decreasing. I actually don’t pirate music when I can help it because I’d rather support artists on Bandcamp or purchasing physical media directly. If I can’t do that then I head to Soulseek!
  
  Spotify is terrible, but you seem to be saying that since none of these have every single album, you’ve chosen to pirate it all? Not sure if that was the reason.
  I shouldn’t have said “all the music that exists,” more like “an overwhelming majority of existing music.”

I personally look up torrent files for either FLACs (lossless quality, with very large files) or 320kbps MP3s (smaller files with no noticable difference in sound quality imo) and then after making sure they have the right metadata (Title, Album, Artist) (using a tool like Tagger) I upload them onto my Navidrome server, which I connect to using Ultrasonic. If I didn't selfhost I'd probably just put the tagged files on my phone and play them with basically any music player.
- I've personally found that I can hear a sound difference in 320kpbs .mp3s, depending on whether or not it was encoded with a constant bit rate, or a variable bit rate.
- Thanks for the link to Tagger, I've been looking for something like that. Looks like I have some library cleanup to do, I've been putting it off for years now lmao

What I do personally is get any music I want from soulseek and then sync my music directory across devices with syncthing. Although I'm planning on renting a vps to put my music on at some point as it's taking up quite a lot of my phone storage now.
On desktop I like to use mpd with ncmpcpp. On Android(/GrapheneOS) I'm using Metro as my music player.

Don't know how much storage you have on your phone but you should just try these steps : If you are downloading from YouTube Music you won't get the best quality but for me that's okay. So I just recommend you to download an android client for yt-dl and then download what you want. If you are downloading only 1 or 2 gigs of music it should be okay, but if you are downloading more or wanna take care, you should use a VPN 😁

This guide I wrote about downloading and tagging might help you :) https://mander.xyz/post/13720820
- This seems really complicated for a beginner like me (': is there no online tool that can download my playlists in bulk with relatively accurate metadata? It seems deemix and soulseek require accounts which I'm not too keen about, but I really don't know anything about this so I might just be spouting silly speculations.
  
  Aw, I understand ~50.000words can be overwhelming.😅
  Hm, I dont know if there's anything better than the tools I talk about. This guide is a bit too compicated and long, so I'll try to re-word it, hoping you can now follow it:
  Soulseek: You just use a username and a password. No emails or anything. Search and download.
  Deemix: You dont need to have a personal deemix account. You can find on some doubious sites "arls" for accounts. Arl is like the user token. They are long alphanumeric strings which essentially are used instead of username+password. You can simply find one online and put it in deezer. (You can try arls found here: https://www.arldeemix.com/2024/05/arl-deemix.html?m=1 )To use it with spotify (like downloading a spotify playlist in deemix), its kinda more complex. You can see the steps from this post on reddit here:
  https://developer.spotify.com/dashboard/ log in, create an app, go into app, click show client secret under apps title, paste it into deemix along with clientid
  I suggest deemix because you can get very high quality music (in batches too) and it's open source.
  Lastly, if you simply want to get stuff from youtube without account and such:
  ytDownloader acts as a gui for yt-dpl (open source, PC).
  Seal acts as a gui for yt-dpl (open source, Android).
  Almost certainly there are websites that may use yt-dlp and can download playlists though.

the main way i get music files (320kbps mp3) is through the Soulseek network, which many commenter have mentioned. what has been left out is the best client to get into that network, that is free and open source software, which is Nicotine+. it work on any desktop OS
torrents are still valid but you won't find many artists there

Spowlo and soundbound are essentially the same app that you just paste links to Spotify lists, artists, albums, playlists, whatever, then it'll find matches on YouTube to download as mp3.
Desktop zotify, you can downloaded the "high" quality level with premium account credentials.

@clark@midwest.social wrote:
Where should I store the music?
I just store it in the music folder of every device I own. I have a 1 TB hard drive on my PC and my phone has 128 GB of internal storage, with an SD card slot.
I haven't any clue about self-hosting. I'm running GrapheneOS, is it enough to save the songs in Files and play in an app like Auxio? Maybe sync with SyncThing?
Yes. Any music player will generally prompt you to scan for your files upon first opening.
Edit: didn't notice your first question. Well, I just get them from everywhere, lol. If you have a tracker that you use for anything, be sure that there will be some music there. If you cannot find it, then just refer to the FMHY's list of various tools to download music from just about anywhere: Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud you name it. I also buy music from Bandcamp as it supports downloading it directly for an unlimited amount of times and in any of the most popular formats, or just go to the band's concert and buy their album directly. This way you're also supporting the artists directly with your money (if you care about it).
- It's really too bad Pixel phones don't have an SD slot.
  
  @clark Ugh. You could probably get away with multiple cloud storage services then, and mapping their folders to the music player of your choice. Also, use file types that are generally smaller in size for storing music (like opus or ogg). For cloud services, use the ones whose apps support Storage Access Framework so they can appear in the default Android File Manager / File Picker thing (you can also use something like Round Sync to access them all, and it does all the job for you). If you're willing to pay for cloud storage, then one single provider with 100-200 GB can also be more than enough for your music needs if you own more than just a few songs.
  Then you can add the folders in your music player settings.
  Edit: Don't forget to also backup your music somewhere in case something happens with your phone or your cloud provider(s)

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