soulseek

Exactly! As upsetting as that is, it is equally as satisfying to establish a perfect square version of the album artwork at the best possible resolution available. So I've been doing that painstakingly. And the art that is the most unavalailable can be the most rewarding to solve for. Like artwork that consists of separate cassette panels or weird photographs of said cassettes or show posters or demo compilations that have nothing at all so it is up to YOU to create the most believable album art via artfully cropped band photos + logos that fit the vibe/era.

I'm feeling quite grumpy this evening but I spent so many years dicking about with artwork and tags in iTunes; sure, it kept me off the streets but I certainly don't miss it.

Love Soulseek though - just more relaxed about keeping things pristine and up to date.

I love curating collections. You have to be into that sort of thing.

I guess the soulseek element has given me a little boost of incentive too. The idea that if someone downloads one of those more obscure examples from me they'll get nice clean artwork attached that you can't find anywhere else (assembled so lovingly at least).

best possible resolution available

My biggest annoyance with tags the past few years has been bought files that come with a several MB humongous album art *embedded* in every single track. I save it out to cover.jpg (or whatever) in a quarter of the size and expunge it from all the mp3's. mp3tag is great. I have a session now and then. Still a bunch of coverless albums in the rotation, whatever.

What interface are you using where the album art is inconveniently big, to the extent where you would need to go through that trouble to expunge it? You're just talking about the files being too big?

Large + duplicated among all the files is annoying. If there is just a big "cover" image file I'm probably leaving that alone these days. The idea of not giving a care because "storage is so cheap now!" is annoying.

But yeah I am used to running pretty low power music servers. Raspberry Pi or nowadays on a Synology NAS.

The turn this thread has taken has led me to believe that I don’t love music in the same way as some of you.

My comments here don't summarize the way I love music, it's just a thing I like to do with my digital library.

I need to categorise everything by year because my obsessive hyperfocus has led me to spend all of my available time compiling, editing and mixing music from different years for a vast and barely manageable web project, which now dictates 95% of my listening. I hope & expect that nobody else does this, and I would not recommend it as a lifestyle choice.

i'm mostly dinking around on Spotify tbf

Anyone else have their little metadata file curation obsessions or does nothing matter except the quality of the sound?

i've been rating every song i have on itunes. helps me when i forget which are the good tracks and which ones suck. also helps when i want to make a smart playlist by year or genre etc, I can just tell it to not include any track that is below a 3. one of the reasons i have never made spotify my go-to music player.
also for that reason i've been keeping the years accurate and fixing the "various" bs. i've also ben trying to keep album artwork accurate lately. mainly because i'm a visual thinker and seeing what an album "looks" like will help me remember things about it (if that makes sense).

I wrote (and use a small part of) a very basic extended metadata standard for use in the comments field of itunes to enable more complexity in creating smart playlists.
I also obsessively make sure year of release data and cover art are correct. I blame this on my librarianship background
Also mp3tag is great because it supports FLAC, mp4 and other standards beyond mp3. Having played with it a little the combination of regular expressions with it's various functions can be scary useful - if you can get your head around the slightly non-standard implementation

I feel like album art and tagging digital music files is something ChatGPT is going to make very simple once somebody figures out the right prompts.

I will never trust AI, not even for album cover art

I used to be a lot more rigorous about metadata, since I used to make a lot of very specific smart playlists. I'd use the iTunes "grouping" field for the record label and the comment field for the exact date (or at least year and month) something was released, in case I felt in the mood to listen to a playlist of, I dunno, summer 1968. Or I wanted to listen to band's work chronologically, with live shows or singles mixed in; I'd turn on the "comment" field so I can sort by YYYY-MM-DD. I'd even go to a compilation like Super Hits Of The '70s: Have A Nice Day and switch the year of each track to when the original single came out, rather than the year of the compilation.

These days I don't have that many actual FLAC files (unless something I want isn't in Apple Music, or I want the mono version and it only has stereo) so there's not much to tag. I also realized I didn't generate those playlists as much anymore to justify the research/work.

I feel like album art and tagging digital music files is something ChatGPT is going to make very simple once somebody figures out the right prompts.

Could go for batch tagging every track with AI art like Moka's track poll rollout. That seems to have taken a lot of input on her part for each though.

logged on today and had the dreaded crash that makes you lose your queued files and chat history :(

honestly i can't imagine spending a lot of time on metadata for music you've downloaded. you don't know the provenance, don't know if it was ripped using EAC with error correction on or off a scratched disc with some windows spyware program.

music you've ripped yourself, however, i can see why you'd get obsessive, identifying the exact release on discogs... maybe you'd even go as far as scanning the album art yourself!

Hmm struggling to understand your hang up about the provenance. If the sound quality is good it's indistinguishable from any other digital album in my library whether I ripped it myself or not.

You mean distinguishing remaster from original - that kind of thing?

the basic fear is that the FLAC you downloaded is actually just transcoded from an mp3, or if it's mp3s you download, that it was ripped from a scratched up disc without error correction, which maybe led to it having artifacts etc. that you don't even know about until you compare it to a pristine, original copy. if you download a vinyl rip, are you really downloading the vinyl rip or is it a youtube-dl rip somebody did of somebody else's vinyl rip? itunes era gets even worse with itunes exclusive content - if you're downloading an album in FLAC that has the itunes exclusive content, it's probably been transcoded as for a certain time itunes songs were only available in 256kbps AAC. ever notice when soulseeking that every user's version of a track or album will be a different filesize? probably 95% of the time it's from different metadata, but maybe there is something different about how they sound?

sort of reminds me of how pirate groups used to include an actual photo of the CD they used for the release, maybe along with the encoder settings (LAME or die), to show it was a good rip.

even if you have a pristine source, there are certain albums that won't sound right when ripped unless the right settings are applied - see this discussion about CDs with pre-emphasis flags https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Pre-emphasis i believe there was discussion in the CDs thread about this too. or maybe it's a gapless CD but the gapless nature wasn't encoded right.

look, it all gets a bit neurotic and you sound like you're already pretty neurotic about the metadata, so sorry for introducing something else to get neurotic about, speaking as one neurotic to another. if it helps you can try to become a member of a group like redacted or something, where somebody else has done all the obsessing about the quality of the files before they make their way onto the platform.

(and yes, that's not even getting into the original vs. remaster, and whether the person who ripped it bothered to even doublecheck the musicbrainz or w/e ID3 tags their software automatically appended to the rip. but maybe if you're only into obscure indie releases for which there was only ever One Good Version then that doesn't matter as much.)

i search for flacs with logs/cues (although i rarely keep them in that format because lame v0 sounds perfectly fine to me and i'm running out of space). check the flacs with audiochecker; if for some reason it hates the flacs i'll check the log settings. but honestly if someone knows how to create and save an eac or xld log, they probably know what they're doing in general

also i grew up taping shit off the radio. i mean i'll try to get the best quality but i'm not too bothered if the stuff i'm stealing wasn't ripped with the correct drive offset

yeah i always download from users with logs/cues too

I can’t be bothered at all wrt providence, quality assurance, unless it turns out to be something that I get obsessed with and seriously can’t find any way else

ok actually I am more scrutinizing when it comes to finding rips of ultra specific cd pressings of albums I definitely definitely already own

“unless it turns out to be something that I get obsessed with and seriously can’t find any way else”

by “seriously can’t find any way else” I mean in a physical not-terribly-mastered/pressed format

yeah, see, I just can’t understand this way of thinking or caring about digital music files. seems like a massive time investment for what, to me, is pretty minimal scale of difference.

you should bump all the other threads involving things you don’t care about too, just so we know

Guess you wouldn’t stand for my rare Audiogalaxy 64kb transcoded rips then.

you should bump all the other threads involving things you don’t care about too, just so we know

you should bump all the other threads involving things you don’t care about too, just so we know

loool downloaded something that had an *enormous* selection of proust in the lyrics tag <3

got the dreaded socket error, anyone have experience with this? all their websites also seem to be down?

i think slsk as a whole is down

yep

keep on chugging little guy

kinda scary tbh

https://groups.google.com/g/soulseek-discussion/c/ZGepId6Sdqk/m/IR6qJuVvAQAJ

seems to be back up for me again

jesus christ you guys

oh ok i was trying to use it for the first time yesterday in forever and to download the most 2007 music imaginable but when it didn't work i assumed it was my ancient laptop

Is it back? I can't tell...seemed to be for a few seconds, then not.

it is

Thanks. I sometimes have to wait 30 minutes to reconnect--something to do with my settings. So I wasn't sure.

Message from the developer:

It looks like our main server ports are currently not responding, which is preventing most users from being able to connect. We are diagnosing the issue with our server host, but in the meantime, you should be able to connect by going to Server->Options, selecting a port other than 2416 or 2242, exiting the client completely and restarting it. If the port you selected doesn't work, keep trying different ones until it does. We're sorry for the inconvenience, and hope to resolve this as quickly as possible. Please go to our forum if you want to talk to us or to other users.

time to learn how to torrent, guys

Switching ports worked for me

xp Thing is, I guess because of the user base, there's a lot of music on soulseek that you just can't find on torrent sites, especially electronic music from the 90s

Like I'll hear a track that makes me remember some compilation album I used to have that's long out of print and hey presto! there it is on soulseek