this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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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?

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[–] [email protected] 101 points 9 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] onlinepersona 13 points 9 months ago

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.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (4 children)

How do you decide what to listen to? I assume you don't listen to multiple entire discographies

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago

Random works pretty well, but PlexAmp has a lot of ways to curate playlists, and that's what I've been using for my local collection.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Whatever I feel like listening to that day. In that regard it's no different than having a massive Spotify/Apple music library

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

If I wanna listen to something and I don't know what, I just let LMS give me a random album and see what I get!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Interesting. Do you just listen on Random all the time, with maybe favorites or whatever?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

36 TB usable space on my NAS... Music doesn't even make a dent

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Good on ya, with that much storage I would do that too :P

I'm about to build my first NAS, and intend to start with 8TB - for family backups, photos, music, TV shows, and self-hosted apps. That's why the thought of dedicating 3TB, or ~1/3 of my entire storage, to music alone sounds nuts in the eyes of a beginner like me😂

But I guess it's true what they say: Storage grows with time! Although I don't wanna know how many songs you'll have when I catch up to your current number...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

You pretty much calculated spot on! ;)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

FLAC is good, but not necessary for background listening. At 192k the average song is ~ 5Mb. 100k x 5 = 0.5 TB.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Noob here: How do you handle editing tags and album covers on that large amount of music? I recently started to experiment with learning how to use a batch script on mkv files to edit their metadata and was wondering if there was something similar with music files?