soulseek

I pay for Spotify to alleviate my guilt over how little music I buy. I go to gigs as often as I can and I use Bandcamp whenever possible to buy. Soulseek still returns nothing when I'm searching for deep cuts of UK Garage and street soul unless you want hissy 128kbps files but thats still better than Spotify a lot of the time.

I dont want to turn this into the "what isn't on Spotify thread" but:

The Chimes "Stronger Together (David Morales Mix)"
Lil Louis "Luv U Wanted"
Movement 98 "Joy & Heartbreak"
Jah Wobble, The Edge, Holger Czukay "Hold On To Your Dreams"
Moodswings "Spiritual High"

I was gonna turn this run of autoplayed Youtube faves into a Spotify playlist, but I can't. And I don't want to use my phone data to stream videos on the train. So off to Soulseek it is.

great micro-story Col. Poo!

I hardly ever use soulseek because it's such a mess. The biggest private torrent music site has pretty much everything I need and it's all properly searchable and curated with different bitrates and stuff. Much prefer that.

can i get an invite

soulseek is great. the only stuff I can't find on there is afrobeats stuff

Jesus.. Seeing so many new answers to the thread have me a right scare! Fortunately it's just an ilx love-in praising the many glories. And CP that story is amazing!

What’s “the biggest private music torrent” site these days ?

I downloaded my wife from soulseek so I'm probably more attached to it than most people

― Colonel Poo

Awwww <3

Anyway, I love slsk, was so happy to find it was still going after I had a break from it of about a decade. My files are horribly disorganised but the main folder it connects to contains a bunch of my own music, so I'm fucking pirating myself, m8s, that's how much I give a shit -> at the end of the day piracy is an amateur activity - this is why I'm for it but anti-Spotify, piracy is about people who can't really afford to buy shit sharing stuff and finding joy, streaming companies are about building a business model that shafts artists in favour of business. It's a whole different world.

red

xxxp

i don't even know what the big site is post-what. had a what account, never used it. fucking scenester gatekeeper bullshit of the sort i would have been happy to leave on the bbses, ratios and artificial scarcity with a healthy dose of "pay-to-win" in the form of seedboxes, the opposite of the "music for the people" ethos, problematic as it is, of napster and its clones.

It's a mess? Seems pretty clean / straightforward / easily navigable... it's effortless. simply enter 2-3 keywords into the search field, and you're instantly met with results. Typically, you're able to to choose between flac and varying levels of high-bitrate (or vbr) mp3s. Everything seems to be pretty well organized? Haven't ever really got on with torrents, however

fuck Spotify, by the way. i don't really get any focused listening done at a desktop computer, or when i have my phone around. still use SC and Bandcamp, though. with Bandcamp, you can actually pay artists for their music.

Yeah there is an ethical consideration especially with stuff you can stream.

delicious irony here

but anti-Spotify, piracy is about people who can't really afford to buy shit sharing stuff and finding joy, streaming companies are about building a business model that shafts artists in favour of business. It's a whole different world.

otm

I still use it occasionally for individual songs--rarely for whole albums anymore.

How has it managed to keep going when so many others were shut down?

By means of the Russian torrent tracker and interlibrary loan, I have managed to find the vast majority of popular music I am looking for, and even a lot of the obscure avant-garde classical I listen to. For the rest, I don’t mind buying the occasional CD and ripping it myself.

I am used to being told that I listen to weird music. But when people talk about Soulseek as vital source of music they couldn’t find anywhere else (even commercially), I worry that my tastes are pretty ordinary!

I think you guys are engaging in some ethical gymnastics to argue that artists getting nothing is better than artists getting something. (download all u want, follow yr bliss... but c’mon)

I think you guys are engaging in some ethical gymnastics to argue that artists getting nothing is better than artists getting something. (download all u want, follow yr bliss... but c’mon)

― #YABASIC (morrisp)

I don't know which "guys" you're referring to here. I certainly wouldn't argue that. On the other hand, the argument that artists getting .01 cents for their work is better than artists getting nothing for their work is true only in the most technical and nit-picky of senses.

My refusal to use Spotify is probably morally perverse. I don't think the people running Spotify are bad people. I think they want the artists to get paid. I think that Spotify in practice is more an exercise in self-serving convenience masquerading as virtue, however, and my refusal to use Spotify at this point is not really a lack of willingness or ability to pay - as money is only one way of quantifying the effort expended in pursuit of a good. It's more a conscious ascetic measure; opting out of a partnership of convenience, choosing not to collude in injustice masquerading as virtue and to sticking to actions that we as a society can, in principle, collectively agree are selfish and unjust.

Ultimately it's a futile and incomprehensible form of protest, me being my own little version of the Umbrella Man in Dealey Plaza. I will probably keep doing it, though.

I wasn’t referring to you, rush

fwiw i don't get new releases off slsk. it's stuff that's impossible to find or only for a lot of money on discogs. i do like to buy records when i really like them and can afford it and i do.

after decades of searching out and discovering music in record stores, searching online (mail order sites like Forced Exposure and Mimaroglu) music forums, et al.. reading about music in WIRE magazine, and making purchases based on reviews, write-ups, etc. i feel almost no inclination to use Spotify. i don't have any strong (ethical) feelings about it. like others, i started using sites like Audiogalaxy and slsk during the early 00s, and probably abused the privilege more back then, while continuing to purchase music. since acquiring a smartphone, and using both Bandcamp and Soundcloud (great for streaming curated, 'amateur' content) to share music, i'm more inclined to make impulse purchases on Bandcamp, or order physical copies directly from the artist/label. slsk is still a great resource for listening to new/impulse discoveries, and to sample new releases (rarely) ... beyond that, CDs (or tapes, if they're of decent quality) are the preferred medium for listening

https://www.reddit.com/r/Soulseek/comments/ds68t6/serious_souls_travelling/

wtf

*metempsychotic nod*

who the fuck is deejay.zone and can they please fuck right the fuck off with their fucking padlock and 50 versions of every other track I want

Sorry, I'll unlock them right now.

There should be a way that you can share whatever files you want but not share them to users whose files are locked.

I don't want to understand the psychology of people that will put stuff in the shared folder zone, but not actually fucking share it.

Fucking hoarder hagglers and braggarts. Truly the worst soulseekers.

exclusive footage of scramoutcha

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsZyiQFQO0Q

Now there's a name I haven't seen in a while (the ignore list is a godsend).

this deejay.zone guy is a new kind of dickhead threat - seems to be using slsk and various other platforms to advertise his "dj sharing" website. I am not going to click that shit but a google search gives a summary

got a new router with my new internet service and i cannot figure out how to port forward on it. gah.

i feel your pain

trying to remember if I've ever run across this dude, I think I just tune out anyone locked

ALRIGHT BIG MAN, I DON'T NEED YOUR 160KBPS MP3S THAT BADLY BIG MAN

https://i.imgur.com/Np82uvR.jpg

(he'd probably add me to his list if I asked, but I'm not really in the mood to grovel. at least he isn't one of those trade only motherfuckers)

protip: you can exclude a particular user's locked files from your wishlist search results by adding search terms unique to their folder structure and preceding them with minus signs, ex.:

bebe rexha meant to be live acoustic -trevorsmusic -seagate -unsortedmusictorrents -lossy -discografia

...or you can just add them to your ignore list

New SoulseekQt build for the macOS Catalina users out there: http://www.slsknet.org/news/node/3668

ppl still do p2p filesharing? wild.

it's the only way to be

Soulseek is the most important program in my life. I have been using it regularly since 2001. If it ever goes down... God forbid... life is over.

definitely swung back to 'streaming wuh? i gotta get mine and have it' the past year or so

ppl still do p2p filesharing? wild.

^^ ding ding ding.

as if p2p filesharing isn't nuff hi-tech and futuristic! There is no way I want to be reliant on shitty Virgin broadband for music listening and I'll take mp3 players over 4g streaming for music on the go, forever.

yup

I dunno - I systematically download locally the files I want to listen to from streaming services so i don't really see a big difference there. As for permanent ownershipn, if I really feel strongly about owning the files for good, i'll just go and buy the CD. I understand this may not be an option for obscure/exotic/bootleg files (which are the only things I still use slsk for).

no judgment; i honestly didn't even know that services like soulseek were still around.