I basically use slsk these days for individual tracks and when I see a cool album on a blog somewhere with a dead d/l link.
― Ⓓⓡ. (Johnny Fever), Saturday, 20 July 2013 16:20 (ten years ago) link
It's still very handy for seeking out rarities, I think.
― I wanna live like C'MOWN! people (Turrican), Saturday, 20 July 2013 16:47 (ten years ago) link
still pretty good for dance 12"s
― the late great, Saturday, 20 July 2013 17:16 (ten years ago) link
is the mac version still rubbish?
― PaulTMA, Saturday, 20 July 2013 17:31 (ten years ago) link
every cool person i know gets all the idm, microhouse and grime mp3s they need in primo 160kb/s from slsk these days, dont know why l4m0rz still actually buy music IMHOhttp://l.yimg.com/lo/api/res/1.2/_qIwROO2K4kFM.sCuxDb2Q--/YXBwaWQ9bWtihttp://www.5foq.com/vb/images/Smils%20For%205foq/rolleyes.gif
― the most promising US ilxor has thrown the TOWEL IN (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Saturday, 20 July 2013 17:36 (ten years ago) link
the mac version is now fantastic
― maven with rockabilly glasses (Matt P), Saturday, 20 July 2013 17:44 (ten years ago) link
TIP
soulseekqt
― maven with rockabilly glasses (Matt P), Saturday, 20 July 2013 17:45 (ten years ago) link
hooray!
― PaulTMA, Saturday, 20 July 2013 17:53 (ten years ago) link
ya i'm all over this add me i have 2 accounts for my laptop (roiheenok) and pc (flopson)
― flopson, Saturday, 20 July 2013 20:40 (ten years ago) link
I have been using it on and off since early high school!
― Simon H., Sunday, 21 July 2013 03:02 (ten years ago) link
can you still use slsk (and get away with it) if you're in the USA? I've downloaded practically nothing since 5 strikes took effect.
― Remember! The cormorant is a big brrd. It has got a long neck. (unregistered), Sunday, 21 July 2013 03:09 (ten years ago) link
requires snow leopard (10.6 or up) : /
― j., Sunday, 21 July 2013 03:13 (ten years ago) link
do you know of anyone who has ever gotten a strike?
― flopson, Monday, 22 July 2013 22:20 (ten years ago) link
felt "safe" because my isp isnt on the "list"
― maven with rockabilly glasses (Matt P), Monday, 22 July 2013 22:28 (ten years ago) link
I usually have an ILX room up if I'm online (elvis_telecom)
― Elvis Telecom, Monday, 22 July 2013 23:17 (ten years ago) link
still going strong
― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Saturday, 28 November 2015 10:08 (eight years ago) link
Here hereJust used it yesterday
― calstars, Saturday, 28 November 2015 14:24 (eight years ago) link
First rule of slsk, don't talk about slsk.
― Gerald McBoing-Boing, Saturday, 28 November 2015 16:21 (eight years ago) link
do you know of anyone who has ever gotten a strike?― flopson, Monday, 22 July 2013 22:20 (2 years ago) Permalink
That's the thing--it's been going long enough that it can't possibly be a secret at this point. The agencies that monitor this stuff, haven't they decided that, for whatever reason (primarily music rather than films?), soulseek just isn't worth bothering about? I only use it for occasional songs now, but it does come in handy at times.
― clemenza, Saturday, 28 November 2015 16:28 (eight years ago) link
second rule.
― Elvis Telecom, Monday, 30 November 2015 13:19 (eight years ago) link
The agencies that monitor this stuff, haven't they decided that, for whatever reason (primarily music rather than films?), soulseek just isn't worth bothering about?
I think this must be the case. I remember a few years ago the search results for major label releases used to be swamped with obviously fake users, but that doesn't seem to happen any more.
― Just noise and screaming and no musical value at all. (Colonel Poo), Monday, 30 November 2015 13:33 (eight years ago) link
man, i used to love SOULSEEX on os x before the lion update a few years ago. once you got used to it, it made the most sense of any version of slsk. it was better than the windows client. people used to complain that it used too many windows, but i always felt like its heavy window usage was a virtue - it felt like it kept keeping multiple chatrooms/user messages/user shares/downloads etc. well organized, and, because i had exposé set up with hot corners, i always kind of had fun switching windows.
such fond memories of SOULSEEX - browsing through user shares and randomly chatting with people played a major part in my formative music exploration in my late teens/early twenties.
those days are gone, though. ah, memories. i just have the regular mac client now + it looks exactly like the windows version = lame.i never did bother with nicotine on os x, by the way. i was all about SOULSEEX, all about ssX.
anyway, how long ago was it? seven, maybe eight years ago, that the main port number changed, and many, many people didn't update their client/port number and just assumed slsk went to shit and abandoned it? yeah, what a shame. i updated my shit, at the time, and although slsk's been a little different since then, it never really stopped being COMPLETELY AWESOME for me. it's still GREBT for all sorts of oddities and obscurities, and, albums, too...
ah, the SOULSEEX days on os x. what a time to be alive. good times, good times.
― LEGALIZE COCAINE (monster mash), Tuesday, 1 December 2015 00:54 (eight years ago) link
there's too many slsk threads for me to find the most recently bumped one, but so i got a record there the other day and when i went to play it whoever encoded the mp3s put a naked picture of (presumably) himself as the album art. two things surprising about this. first is that i haven't run across it before, because there are some skeevy people on the internet, and second is that i really can't imagine anybody else on earth giving a shit about this record. if you're an exhibitionist and want people to look at pictures of your cock, why the hell would you embed them in a long-out-of-print compilation of outtakes by bands like "touch" and "stray dog"?
― increasingly bonkers (rushomancy), Friday, 23 December 2016 02:11 (seven years ago) link
you could always msg them and ask!
― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Friday, 23 December 2016 02:13 (seven years ago) link
i thought about it but i'm already married and honestly he wasn't much to look at naked.
― increasingly bonkers (rushomancy), Friday, 23 December 2016 02:14 (seven years ago) link
also, he's not even online! it took me three weeks to download the damn album because he's never online!
― increasingly bonkers (rushomancy), Friday, 23 December 2016 02:16 (seven years ago) link
Maybe all his files are encoded that way, not just the album you downloaded.
― Ⓓⓡ. (Johnny Fever), Friday, 23 December 2016 02:56 (seven years ago) link
Still extremely useful to me around year-end time.
― clemenza, Friday, 23 December 2016 03:20 (seven years ago) link
Well, it's not called "Buried Treasures" for nothing!
― Gerald McBoing-Boing, Friday, 23 December 2016 04:02 (seven years ago) link
goddamn your locked files sir
― blood, loud screaming and nudity (GOTT PUNCH II HAWKWINDZ), Wednesday, 22 May 2019 09:45 (four years ago) link
Yeah, what's up with that?
― pomenitul, Wednesday, 22 May 2019 09:46 (four years ago) link
it brings the true free-leeching spirit of SLSK into disrepute, stingy arsey bastards!
― calzino, Wednesday, 22 May 2019 09:49 (four years ago) link
So annoying, as are those tl/dr scripts full of daft rules that pop up on occasion
― MaresNest, Wednesday, 22 May 2019 09:52 (four years ago) link
anyone who uses that auto message for anything other than 'if you can't download try browsing my files first' is a grade-a prick
― mfktz (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Wednesday, 22 May 2019 09:54 (four years ago) link
absolute bell ends.
― calzino, Wednesday, 22 May 2019 09:55 (four years ago) link
'TRADE ONLY' – go fuck yourself, buddy.
― pomenitul, Wednesday, 22 May 2019 09:57 (four years ago) link
just want to say bison2, harlemjazz and murdercitydevil - these are what I call proper SLSK'ers. lol I feel like I know them, but have never had any interactions with them.
― calzino, Wednesday, 22 May 2019 10:02 (four years ago) link
Amen to that.
― pomenitul, Wednesday, 22 May 2019 10:05 (four years ago) link
my hero = soulvent
― mfktz (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Wednesday, 22 May 2019 10:12 (four years ago) link
Bless all the Japanese music enthusiasts on there, so much amazing stuff I've found.
― MaresNest, Wednesday, 22 May 2019 10:28 (four years ago) link
Can only otm that. My obsession with Japanese music has been fueled profoundly by slsk. I wouldn't know where else to find stuff like that.
― Uptown VONC (Le Bateau Ivre), Wednesday, 22 May 2019 10:50 (four years ago) link
Not being able to wishlist an item + "flac" because it will just bring up the singular padlock cunt who has it (and is always online) is excruciating
― PaulTMA, Wednesday, 22 May 2019 12:01 (four years ago) link
can't you ignore that user? or does that do something else?
― StanM, Wednesday, 22 May 2019 12:08 (four years ago) link
murdercitydevil
top bloke, never spoke a word to him tho
rn I'm trying to find the Asper Bothrops EP and there are two padlock fuckers with it in wav format, it's torture
― blood, loud screaming and nudity (GOTT PUNCH II HAWKWINDZ), Wednesday, 22 May 2019 12:11 (four years ago) link
Can't believe I am still ssk-ing and ILX-ing fifteen years after I first started, someone help
― 5 favrite kind of animal. jaguar. giraffe. (Old Lunch), Wednesday, 22 May 2019 12:22 (four years ago) link
man i would totally crowdfund a new soulseek app for mac. the options are dire. isoul was decent but stopped working for me like a year ago.
― anza808, Wednesday, 22 May 2019 12:41 (four years ago) link
Some addictions are worth indulging. Ride the dragon till the bitter end.
― pomenitul, Wednesday, 22 May 2019 12:48 (four years ago) link
More than that even, I can't believe that they're still basically the same given how much the world (particularly the internet world) has changed in that time.
― 5 favrite kind of animal. jaguar. giraffe. (Old Lunch), Wednesday, 22 May 2019 13:04 (four years ago) link
"TRADE ONLY - CHECK MY WISHLIST IN MY USER INFO BEFORE PM ME"
Fuck you, Scramouthca, fuck you
― groovypanda, Wednesday, 22 May 2019 13:15 (four years ago) link
Anyone else have their little metadata file curation obsessions or does nothing matter except the quality of the sound?
― Evan, Monday, 6 March 2023 15:00 (one year ago) link
I cannot be doing with incorrect id3 data, "various" as artist name is a particular non-favourite.Also for selfish reasons I need everything to be labelled with year of recording, if people did this it would save me literally a week of work every year.
― Camaraderie at Arms Length, Monday, 6 March 2023 15:03 (one year ago) link
Yeah, you can blame Musicbrainz Picard for that. Lots of people use this tag editor now because it conveniently auto-tags everything using Musicbrainz.org - but it annoyingly writes album (re)issue dates into the Recording Date field, which means it's often off by decades.
― Siegbran, Monday, 6 March 2023 15:07 (one year ago) link
I tried to make that work a few years ago, but gave up, it could do LPs but not compilations, and the LPs are the easy ones to sort anyway. idk, maybe it works better now, I do have to remind myself that I am probably the only person out there to whom this matters quite so much
― Camaraderie at Arms Length, Monday, 6 March 2023 15:15 (one year ago) link
I cannot be doing with incorrect id3 data, "various" as artist name is a particular non-favourite.
Also for selfish reasons I need everything to be labelled with year of recording, if people did this it would save me literally a week of work every year.
― Camaraderie at Arms Length, Monday, March 6, 2023 10:03 AM (twenty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink
I hate "various" as artist name too! In "itunes" (I hate calling it Music now), sometimes the fix is just deleting that common "artist" name and making sure compilation is check-marked. But often I'll have to fix every track so that the artist is extracted from the song name and inputted properly.
I haven't bothered adding the year to all my albums, but I'll probably start doing that too... so far all I've cared about is accurate album/artist/song/artwork info. Year is important to me in general but I've not been compelled to clean up my files to include it.
― Evan, Monday, 6 March 2023 15:34 (one year ago) link
mp3tag on windows is a fantastic ID3 editor. there's a mac version but I think it costs $.
― 龜, Monday, 6 March 2023 15:37 (one year ago) link
I've been using mp3tag for years and years. I'm sure my version is many updates behind, but it still works great.
― ⓓⓡ (Johnny Fever), Monday, 6 March 2023 18:04 (one year ago) link
i genuinely try to be obsessive because i can't find shit in my library if i don't do some proper genre and year tagging but i just don't have the _time_, hell, i don't even have the time to _listen_ to music these days. i'm trying to hold down a day job and watch anime and write a novel and sleep and i'm bad at all of these things. so i'll be looking at some record i don't recognize like dream eye colour wheel's s/t and trying to figure out what genre it is. how about dyzack? how about, uh, dzhavanshir kuliyev? e.l. heath? i burned through a _lot_ of music in '18 and '19.
and then there are the tags that are really shitty, like just the name of the country it's from, "indonesia" is not a musical genre. some of the tags though i keep just because they're so bizarre or off-base. "my favorite things" from the Olatunji Concert came tagged as "hard bop". gate's _saturday night fever_ is tagged as "Rock: Noise, Experimental, Hardcore". ok. i don't know what else to re-tag that record as. it's the only record under that tag, but it'll just have to stay that way. and that's why i have 642 genres in my library.
then there's year. like there's albums are tagged with the date of reissue, like trying to tell me the kinks' _face to face_ is a 2002 release. worse are the albums from '66 that are tagged as '67. like why would you fuck with me like that? and what do i tag an archival live record as, anyway? it feels weird to group a live album from '73 under "2022", but if i'm looking for archival releases, it comes in handy.
ultimately i just gave up and i have a big pile of great records that i can't find and haven't heard. fuck it, i'm gonna go listen to some more dead tapes.
― Kate (rushomancy), Monday, 6 March 2023 20:24 (one year ago) link
EL Heath is a friend, really love his music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9dblAl5t8U
― MaresNest, Monday, 6 March 2023 20:46 (one year ago) link
Because I've used itunes since: forever, I have trouble imagining a mp3 library interface without album art etc. I would be way less invested in my library if I wasn't able to browse it by album cover. Totally spoiled.
― Evan, Monday, 6 March 2023 21:00 (one year ago) link
The iPod was a wonderful device. The biggest annoyance was getting the album art right. That grey box with the note bugged the shit out of me.
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Monday, 6 March 2023 21:05 (one year ago) link
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.
― Evan, Monday, 6 March 2023 21:12 (one year ago) link
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.
― Shard-borne Beatles with their drowsy hums (Chinaski), Monday, 6 March 2023 21:15 (one year ago) link
Love Soulseek though - just more relaxed about keeping things pristine and up to date.
― Shard-borne Beatles with their drowsy hums (Chinaski), Monday, 6 March 2023 21:17 (one year ago) link
I love curating collections. You have to be into that sort of thing.
― Evan, Monday, 6 March 2023 21:17 (one year ago) link
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).
― Evan, Monday, 6 March 2023 21:20 (one year ago) link
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.
― maf you one two (maffew12), Monday, 6 March 2023 21:20 (one year ago) link
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?
― Evan, Monday, 6 March 2023 21:55 (one year ago) link
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.
― maf you one two (maffew12), Monday, 6 March 2023 22:05 (one year ago) link
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.
― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Tuesday, 7 March 2023 12:18 (one year ago) link
My comments here don't summarize the way I love music, it's just a thing I like to do with my digital library.
― Evan, Tuesday, 7 March 2023 12:47 (one year ago) link
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.
― Camaraderie at Arms Length, Tuesday, 7 March 2023 12:51 (one year ago) link
i'm mostly dinking around on Spotify tbf
― maf you one two (maffew12), Tuesday, 7 March 2023 13:25 (one year ago) link
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).
― FRAUDULENT STEAKS (The Cursed Return of the Dastardly Thermo Thinwall), Tuesday, 7 March 2023 14:51 (one year ago) link
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 backgroundAlso 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
― treefell, Tuesday, 7 March 2023 18:29 (one year ago) link
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.
― the absence of bikes (f. hazel), Tuesday, 7 March 2023 18:35 (one year ago) link
I will never trust AI, not even for album cover art
― calstars, Tuesday, 7 March 2023 19:41 (one year ago) link
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.
― blatherskite, Tuesday, 7 March 2023 19:53 (one year ago) link
― Siegbran, Wednesday, 8 March 2023 11:56 (one year ago) link
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.
― maf you one two (maffew12), Wednesday, 8 March 2023 12:33 (one year ago) link
logged on today and had the dreaded crash that makes you lose your queued files and chat history :(
― boxedjoy, Friday, 10 March 2023 07:24 (one year ago) link
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!
― 龜, Friday, 10 March 2023 12:59 (one year ago) link
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.
― Evan, Friday, 10 March 2023 14:12 (one year ago) link
You mean distinguishing remaster from original - that kind of thing?
― Evan, Friday, 10 March 2023 14:13 (one year ago) link
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.)
― 龜, Friday, 10 March 2023 15:31 (one year ago) link
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
― mookieproof, Friday, 10 March 2023 16:49 (one year ago) link
yeah i always download from users with logs/cues too
― 龜, Friday, 10 March 2023 17:01 (one year ago) link
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 elseok actually I am more scrutinizing when it comes to finding rips of ultra specific cd pressings of albums I definitely definitely already own
― not too strange just bad audio (brimstead), Friday, 10 March 2023 17:29 (one year ago) link
“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
― not too strange just bad audio (brimstead), Friday, 10 March 2023 18:39 (one year ago) link
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.
― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Saturday, 11 March 2023 13:24 (one year ago) link
you should bump all the other threads involving things you don’t care about too, just so we know
― mookieproof, Saturday, 11 March 2023 15:25 (one year ago) link
Guess you wouldn’t stand for my rare Audiogalaxy 64kb transcoded rips then.
― Chewshabadoo, Saturday, 11 March 2023 16:40 (one year ago) link
― calstars, Saturday, 11 March 2023 17:28 (one year ago) link
― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Sunday, 12 March 2023 00:50 (one year ago) link
loool downloaded something that had an *enormous* selection of proust in the lyrics tag <3
― mookieproof, Saturday, 17 June 2023 03:57 (ten months ago) link