soulseek

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

it rules

torrenting as an experience is abysmal

slsk is one of very few amazing internet things that still exist

Yeah was just thinking that the other day like all similar apps went defunct over a decade ago right?? And yet this one still remains. I dunno what I’d do without it!

i stopped using it for several years and when i finally returned it felt like seeing an old friend who i hadn’t seen in years and picking up right where we left off

time to learn how to torrent, guys

― bored by endless ecstasy (anagram)

slsk has outlasted torrenting for me

i regularly find stuff there that doesn't pop up on torrent unless you're on one of them fancy private trackers

rutracker fucking rules, it's the best for lossless music

if i had to choose 1 i'd choose slsk, but they're a tag team. better together

what I love is finding movies and tv series on slsk that are on a faster connection that any torrent or nzb/usenet combo

i regularly find stuff there that doesn't pop up on torrent unless you're on one of them fancy private trackers

Yes, I am on one of those. The main one for music is not that hard to get into, actually.

what I love is finding movies and tv series on slsk that are on a faster connection that any torrent or nzb/usenet combo

― Elvis Telecom

elvis on the real shit

the thing about the private trackers is that ratio stuff. i don't know how anybody maintains a good ratio without a seedbox. sometimes a slsk user will ban me because my shares are disorganized crap - fair enough - but nobody's gonna kick me off soulseek

I've managed to maintain a healthy ratio on private trackers for years without a seedbox. You just need to upload stuff, fill requests for bounty, seed 24/7 and be selective in what you download. It's not that hard, really.

or you can just not do any of that and use soulseek

Just be a nerd like me and keep a small NAS running at home 24/7 for torrents, it’s handy for a load of other thing too. I also run Soulseek on it in a Docker container which also runs 24/7.

o ya? i will have to look into that for my NAS

thank you for your service. there wouldn't be much to soulseek if everyone just used it a few minutes at a time.

Colonel Pop otm even if I had the time and energy to do all that shit in 2024

Just be a nerd like me and keep a small NAS running at home 24/7 for torrents, it’s handy for a load of other thing too. I also run Soulseek on it in a Docker container which also runs 24/7.

― Chewshabadoo

at some point i stopped being able to figure out technology

i _have_ a nas running at home but i can't figure out how to use it to sync my important personal documents to the cloud

last time i tried onedrive decided that the best way to do that was to put copies of _all my important personal documents in the root directory of the virtual drive_

no microsoft. that was not what i was going for.

also, my nas files are horribly disorganized and i regularly move them around to try and make them easier to locate. it's just....

i mean look i'm old. if i was young i wouldn't download this shit at all, i'd just find some site to stream it on

people running little data centers in their house itt

I was one what.cd for a time and found it amazing but 1) downloaded WAY more stuff than I could ever hope to listen to and b) found it a total pain in the arse to manage the ratio stuff. Don't dare turn off your computer, let alone go away on holiday.

Short answer: slsk rules.

I was on what too for awhile and level of obsession with say, different pressings of Beach Boys stuff, was staggering, like a hundred varaitions of Pet Sounds from different countries, formats, etc...

Just be a nerd like me and keep a small NAS running at home 24/7 for torrents, it’s handy for a load of other thing too. I also run Soulseek on it in a Docker container which also runs 24/7.

This may be veering off-topic, but does anyone know a good beginner resource on this kind of stuff? I'm thinking about moving my plex stuff from my gaming PC to a dedicated, always-on mini PC so that my partner can watch stuff without having me be home to log in (an NAS seems a bit overkill for my needs, especially price-wise) but don't know the basics such as getting new content onto that remote PC's external drive, or anything about linux.

It does seem like there's a natural place for a designated nerd to run this stuff for a small cartel of fellow music nerds to give private access to. Soulseek as a Service?

For people in the US that still uses Slsk: have you ever heard of people getting legal notices for using it? Do you use VPN with it? When I came to the US, I stopped using it and any P2P/Torrent out of pure fear of being something that would screw my Visa/immigration status (I had friends who went through bad things in Germany, they also were on a Visa)...

I had a look at slsk once and couldn't get my head around it at all. It was all so messy and unstructured. The beauty of private trackers is that it's all well organised and you know you are getting exactly what you want, be it a flac or v0 mp3 or whatever. Everything is easily searchable, properly labelled and tagged, there's high resolution artwork, etc. As I said in my last post I have never had a problem with ratio. It's really not that hard to maintain a healthy ratio even without a seedbox.

ok soulseek is so simple tho, it’s basically Napster. But I don’t really care about rip logs and being 100% certain that the 192 thing I’m downloading isn’t a transcode

Yeah, it’s a search box

you can see the bitrates and extensions when you search, sometimes the bitrate ain't accurate but the file size is also there so you can do a little quick math (if you know roughly how long the songs are)

for the most part I think bad rips are a thing of the past, I haven't seen a 128kbps MP3 in like a decade

have you ever heard of people getting legal notices for using it

no, which is why i use it and don't use torrents, because i *have* gotten legal notices for torrenting in the past

you usually know what you're getting on slsk to a reasonable degree. there's a whole column that tells you what the files are. the biggest issue is whether something's been ripped from a scratched CD, which is something i encountered in torrents all the time too

I've been a heavy user of torrents for over a decade and I've never had a legal notice, although that may be because I only use private trackers not public ones.

look I’m a massive nerd so I have my own preferred way of naming files, I refuse to follow some torrent’s falsely objective standard

i pretty much only ever used private trackers too, but i'm just always terrified bc it happened once, lol

I've only had one notice ever, for a torrent when I forgot to turn on the VPN. Generally use VPN for both torrents and slsk, better safe than sorry.

people running little data centers in their house itt

― calstars

i mean i'm paranoid, shit disappears and one of the best ways to keep shit from disappearing is to have a personal... i wouldn't even call it a "library", it's not curated very well at all. i save what i can save and when the stuff i'm interested isn't endangered then one can worry about things like curation and organization. it's one of the reasons i fixate on obscure shit nobody else cares about. cuz that's the shit that's endangered. yeah i download youtube videos that have like 100 views. not systematically or comprehensively, but if something's niche and i'm interested in it, i do make a personal copy of it. it was interesting, i was watching geoff thew's videos and he has changed his mind on piracy, does recognize that it's an important form of preservation. personal archives are _important_. shit will always get lost and weirdo internet nerds are key in keeping that from happening.

no, which is why i use it and don't use torrents, because i *have* gotten legal notices for torrenting in the past

― ivy.

same. i mean the thing about slsk is that even as wonderful and sprawling a place as archive, they _do_ get copyright takedowns and slsk doesn't. it's a pretty useful underground information economy, in part _because_ of its unstructured nature and 1999-era user interface. it's a lot like ilx itself, really - still a viable place _despite_ its obvious technological obsolesence. whereas a torrent site like DIME, that was a really useful place for niche content for me for a while, but it doesn't really serve that purpose for me right now. a lot of that is the interface. i don't know how to use that to find useful stuff, and less and less useful stuff gets posted. it gets drowned out by the latest remaster of some old zep bootleg. back when i could check the new torrents every day, i found some cool stuff, but i can't do that, and if i'm not just looking at the new torrents, i can only view them 25 torrents to a page. excruciating! so there's a case where technological reasons mean that i can't use a site that i use to use really enthusiastically.

with slsk, i do find a lot of my downloads coming from a few users. just like for legal streaming services, there are different services with different things, so there are different underground services with different things, with distinct advantages and disadvantages. for some people, it's NZB files, for some people, it's torrents, public trackers, private trackers, for some people it's rutracker. in my case, shit, i've been using slsk continuously for 22 years and i don't see any reason to quit. it's a low-risk way of accessing the sort of information i'm looking to experience.

I had a look at slsk once and couldn't get my head around it at all. It was all so messy and unstructured. The beauty of private trackers is that it's all well organised and you know you are getting exactly what you want, be it a flac or v0 mp3 or whatever. Everything is easily searchable, properly labelled and tagged, there's high resolution artwork, etc.

― bored by endless ecstasy (anagram)

see i look at that and say "yep, that's why i use slsk and not private trackers". i'm a messy and... _inconsistently_ structured kind of girl. there's a lot of stuff i struggle to find on my nas. i download a lot more than i watch. i kinda love it, not being in complete control. i love the mystery, the novelty. i love not having to spend a lot of effort _deciding_. uwu.

as far as notices... the companies have gone after slsk in the past, but it's only ever been sporadic, and they don't seem to have found it worth the bother for the most part. that can always change, but it's been a _long_ time since i've heard of people getting notices from slsk shares.

look I’m a massive nerd so I have my own preferred way of naming files, I refuse to follow some torrent’s falsely objective standard

are you browsing Soulseek hits for files named how you like? ...cuz you need to get mp3Tag or something! Fantastic complement to all this business

lol what was I even saying there, what a mystifying post by me. I used to use mp3tag, bulk renamer to do it when I had more time, yeah, now I have too many to really deal with it. I guess I was thinking back to the stringent encoding/logging/filening requirements these sites often have for uploading stuff

I wonder if there's a point in an artist's career where they get big enough that even the small risk of blowback from being found out running a soulseek client makes them wistfully close their connection forever.

or conversely who is the biggest artist who is reckless enough to shout out their soulseek username unprompted?

twice I've been messaged by artists whose work I'd downloaded, it was like "hey glad you're interested in our stuff but uhh if you like it maybe consider buying a copy...", both times I did because I felt guilty. obviously they could use the money.

One of my biggest uses of the thing is getting digital copies of new releases i bought on vinyl. Remember download cards?? Slsk's easier anyway!

but yeah to rush's point I think we're at the stage where stuff is just permanently disappearing from the internet, particularly as certain users leave soulseek it feels like there's just stuff you can't get anymore, maybe not everything deserves to live forever but I do get kind of a lonely feeling now listening to something that just doesn't exist online anywhere anymore

One of my biggest uses of the thing is getting digital copies of new releases i bought on vinyl. Remember download cards?? Slsk's easier anyway!

― maf you one two (maffew12), Thursday, June 6, 2024 11:46 AM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

I do the same, when soulseek was down a bit ago I remember thinking "uhhh am I actually gonna have to use these things now?"

plus if you ever sell the vinyl, you could advertise the download card as unused?! lol