How to get started with pirating music (mp3s)? (midwest.social)

submitted 3 months ago by clark@midwest.social to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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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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[-] BlastboomStrice@mander.xyz 1 points 2 months ago

Ayy, arrr, glad you made it:)

[-] clark@midwest.social 1 points 2 months ago

Oops, too early to cheer... looks like I can only download individual songs seamlessly, but when I try the playlists the "cannot read properties of undefined" error keeps popping up. Ugh, I'm so close to the finish line, why's there always a hinder. (':

[-] BlastboomStrice@mander.xyz 2 points 2 months ago

Hang on, I have some ideas

(Maybe either theres a mistake in the way you connected spotify or some issue with the links. I'll do some tests and report back.)

[-] BlastboomStrice@mander.xyz 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

So, I did some tests. Apparently you can download individual songs with spotify links, but it can no longer download spotify playlists. I think spotify possibly changed their api recently, breaking deemix... I had used it in the past to batch download ~3k songs..

I used this reddit post to create the spotify app, but there's probably an issue with the api.

Ugh... thats an issue.. I might create a post about that on the community tomorrow or today (its getting late)..

I feel like I wasted your time too🫤

If I get any updates I'll try to let you know.

[-] clark@midwest.social 2 points 2 months ago

You didn't waste my time. This experiment kick-started my process of finally downloading my music, even if it didn't work out completely. Not yours or anybody else's fault anyway. (: Do feel free to update me!

[-] clark@midwest.social 2 points 2 months ago

Hey again! Just a random question.

Is it okay to skip the tagging steps in your guide? My school computer won't allow me to download the mp3tag application, and I wonder if these tagging steps are necessary or will mess anything up if skipped? I downloaded some songs to my phone and most metadata and lyrics are there, and that's fine with me. Does not completing the guide make me miss out on anything important (such as metadata or syncing the files)?

[-] BlastboomStrice@mander.xyz 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Deemix fetches a lot of metadata and they are kinda accurate. If the tags appear properly on your devices you probably dont have to care much more. Besides, you can do it in the future if your needs change. Thus, I think you can skip it.

As to why I do it:

Deezer and any platform may have lacking info, so what I try to do is kinda merge tags from various sources in a way that I get ~the most and best info. Unfortunately (or fortunately) there is no standard way of tagging or at least ~noone uses it (I think flac and opus have some general tagging guidances, but many times they are ignored), so I tried to make my way of organizing the mess.

Another reason is that if you have proper tags, you (almost) no longer need to create playlists (which are hard to move across devices). I also came up with the idea of adding a custom genre to the genre tags of songs. For example, I add the [F@vourites] genre tag to my favourite songs and I can simply select to play all songs under the [F@vourites] genre, bypassing the need of playlists.

I just find it neat (but probably breaks the standard even more), lol. (And it's a good way to unconsciously distract myself from my responsibilities.)

[-] clark@midwest.social 1 points 2 months ago

Do you think it would be fine for me to download all songs and then wait until I'm able to download the tagging applications, or does everything need to happen in one go for everything to sync? I'm thinking waiting about a year (when I buy a new computer) and then use the apps to tag my songs, or will I still need the data from deemix?

[-] BlastboomStrice@mander.xyz 1 points 2 months ago

Do you think it would be fine for me to download all songs and then wait until I'm able to download the tagging applications

Yes, I think that's what I would do. Downloading from deemix and tagging in other programs are separate processes, so you can do them separately at different times.

I'd probably even encourage to download them now, because as you can see, deemix doesnt get updated anymore and things start to break.

It also gives you time to revise your methods of downloading and tagging. (For example, I started downloading my songs from a website, one by one, until I found deemix (that website got shut down soon after, rip).)

So, no need to do them simultaneously. Download them now and tag them next year or whenever you can. You can afterwards simply sync the ("properly") tagged files to your other devices and have the metadata everywhere.

[-] clark@midwest.social 2 points 2 months ago

Thank you so much for your help! So excited to finally begin the journey of owning my music.

[-] BlastboomStrice@mander.xyz 1 points 2 months ago

owning my music

Thats the spirit! Lets goo

[-] clark@midwest.social 1 points 2 months ago

Just to be clear, because some metadata is missing such as year released, tagging and such can all be solved in the other applications? Deemix is solely used for download?

[-] BlastboomStrice@mander.xyz 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

In the tags section in settings you can tell deemix to download tags along with the songs. It does a rather good job as it fetches data from deezer. Is the year missing from every song? On my setup, it automatically downloads the date (or only the year) of almost all the songs I download with deemix (some obscure songs may not have a proper date). Deemix should do a good job and download around 70% (this is an abstract percentage) of the tags you may need.

Once you download the songs from deemix, you should probably not need to use deemix again.

Tagging afterwards should fix many of the missing or incorrect metadata (obsucre songs may have lower success rates). In my guide, I even have the code for a python script I made, which I use to download the dates of songs from genius (the site with the lyrics). (I think it was my first time coding in python, lol.)

PS. It's getting late, so I'll probably be off for some time.

[-] clark@midwest.social 1 points 2 months ago

Hm, unfortunately all songs are listed as Unknown Year, and the genres are very scattered and inaccurate. I've ticked all the tag boxes already. So long as I can solve this with the tagging applications, I shouldn't have to redownload everything, or?

[-] BlastboomStrice@mander.xyz 1 points 2 months ago

So long as I can solve this with the tagging applications, I shouldn't have to redownload everything, or?

Yes. As long as the title and the artists tags (not the filename) of the song are correct (in many cases not even these have to be correct, because there's an option to auto-scan songs with Shazam in my process), my process should be able to work without redownloading anything.

songs are listed as Unknown Year

Thats a bit weird, may I ask:

How do you view the metadata? Some apps may have trouble reading metadata.
Do you download them in flac or mp3?
Could you share a song so that I try to download it myself to check if this only happens to you?

I just downloaded a random song and I can see the date under the YEAR tag. Also if I right-click it on file explorer and go to details, I can see under the "date released" the date of the song.

(Btw, the genious script I use, as I have told you somewhere, fixes the dates, high very high accuracy. Im pulling the dates from genius, because deezer, spotify etc. for some reason seem to use the date they were added to the platform as the date of release and it bothered me a lot.)

genres are very scattered and inaccurate

Yeah.. Genres is probably the hardest to get it right, even after all the automation in my process, there have been times I manually edited the genres. Bandcamp is a good source of genres, so I try to draw genres from there, but still the automation fails some times and have to manually edit them with mp3tag (genious is a good source too).

[-] clark@midwest.social 1 points 2 months ago

I can't view the metadata on my phone, just on my computer. As an example I'm viewing the song "Crown of Thorns" by Black Veil Brides. It is a FLAC file (as per the settings), and on my computer I can see the date released, artist, album, genre, track number, file size... so I don't know why this info doesn't translate to the music player on my phone (Gramophone). Maybe it's because I haven't gone through with the tagging process yet? In which case that's understandable.

Also, some songs failed to download from deemix, but their .lrc files still downloaded. Can I transfer these .lrc files to my phone (along with the other downloaded songs), or must the FLAC and LRC files be downloaded as a pair for the metadata to be synced with the right song?

[-] BlastboomStrice@mander.xyz 1 points 2 months ago

Ok, I did some tests:

For some reason, many mobile apps (like Gramophone, or Symphony which I use) cant read the tags properly.

a) Both apps cant separate tags that use \\ as separator for some reason. Gramophone doesnt have an option to choose a tag separator. Symphony has an option, but doesnt work with \\. (To fix this you have some options; What I do is have a separate cloned compressed .opus music collection that uses ; as separator and to do this I use mp3tag and fre:ac. You can do this in the future.)

b) Both apps in the Year tag expect to only see 4 digits (of the year). We have set deemix to store the whole date in that tag, so they fail to read it. You can either go in deemix to settings, under date format for flac files and choose YYYY (which loses accuracy) or use mp3tag and manipulate the tags so that you have both the year and the date in separate fields. Another option is to use Phonograph plus which can read properly the whole date.

c) Apparently, no (open source) mobile app can read tags separated by \\ properly and as a result, they either combine all the tags into one (they might read the genre tags Glam Rock and Punk Rock as a single genre Glam Rock\\Punk Rock) or they read only the first of the tag (on our previous example they would read only one genre Glam Rock). I think Vlc does the latter. It's frustrating, I know...
As long as the .lrc file has the same name as the .flac file and they are in the same folder, the app should be able to read the lrc file as the lyrics of the flac file. (Though if there's anything wrong in the way the contents of the .lrc file are structured, it might have a hard time reading it.)

[-] clark@midwest.social 2 points 2 months ago

Well, at least now I know the issue isn't on my end, so that's a relief. I'm fine with how things are right now, it's all very scattered but I can create a playlist of my favourites to make it easier. Besides, once I get to the tagging part of your guide I imagine things will get much more accurate. I've downloaded all of my 1000 songs now so I think I'll delete my Spotify account and leave the world of streaming (music) behind. (:

[-] BlastboomStrice@mander.xyz 1 points 2 months ago

Oh youre gonna do the big jump, good luck with that😄

PS. If you care about your spotify listening history there is a way to get your listening records in your email (takes about a month tho). And about music discovery there's Innertune (the forked version is better) which uses yt music without an account or Listenbrainz which can help you find songs and artists/bands.

You persisted despite the struggles and you made it, well done!