soulseek

felt "safe" because my isp isnt on the "list"

I usually have an ILX room up if I'm online (elvis_telecom)

still going strong

Here here
Just used it yesterday

First rule of slsk, don't talk about slsk.

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.

second rule.

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.

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.

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"?

you could always msg them and ask!

i thought about it but i'm already married and honestly he wasn't much to look at naked.

also, he's not even online! it took me three weeks to download the damn album because he's never online!

Maybe all his files are encoded that way, not just the album you downloaded.

Still extremely useful to me around year-end time.

Well, it's not called "Buried Treasures" for nothing!

goddamn your locked files sir

Yeah, what's up with that?

it brings the true free-leeching spirit of SLSK into disrepute, stingy arsey bastards!

So annoying, as are those tl/dr scripts full of daft rules that pop up on occasion

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

absolute bell ends.

'TRADE ONLY' – go fuck yourself, buddy.

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.

Amen to that.

my hero = soulvent

Bless all the Japanese music enthusiasts on there, so much amazing stuff I've found.

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.

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

can't you ignore that user? or does that do something else?

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

Can't believe I am still ssk-ing and ILX-ing fifteen years after I first started, someone help

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.

Can't believe I am still ssk-ing and ILX-ing fifteen years after I first started, someone help

Some addictions are worth indulging. Ride the dragon till the bitter end.

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.

"TRADE ONLY - CHECK MY WISHLIST IN MY USER INFO BEFORE PM ME"

Fuck you, Scramouthca, fuck you

it's amazing these things are still the same. Mac version is fine, isn't it? I was using it a few months ago. Now using the Linux version. Seems same to me on all platforms.

I don't get the hoarders either. Maybe there's some people with too much money sunk into storage and high power/internet bills or something. Start going on a powertrip instead of just limiting the app's bandwidth.

The majority of people having a looser approach and looser collections are probably how it continues to get by. Well-curated torrent sites are just begging to be taken down

Had a fun exchange a few years back with some guy yelling at me that I had to be someone else that he had banned with a similar username

Well-curated torrent sites are just begging to be taken down

― maffew12, Wednesday, May 22, 2019 3:29 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Is this true though? Is hunting down private torrent sites still a thing? Seems the focus has shifted to the big free ones sharing the huge Hollywood trash. Those and stream rippers, apparently, according to TorrentFreak (which I visited just now for the first time in absolute ages, prompted by this revive).

Well they know better than me.

Regarding music specifically, streaming services make a lot more sense for most users than downloading MP3s. The heat has to be down to some degree. I pay for a service myself, and still buy physical releases, and Soulseek helps with things not easy to find any other way. I imagine this is a typical use case now? I'm glad it's surviving

I would think that is typical nowadays, yes (if only as it's my mode of music consumption, too). Slsk and some well-curated film trackers seem to still fly under the radar, fortunately.

Since waffles.ch (mainly stuck with it because of the community) died, this has been my thing. I came up in the Limewire / Kazaa / etc. period, so I was extremely skeptical when a friend was pushing it on me. Seemed archaic as hell.

His sell was "These are people who are serious about piracy and curation," and damn if that isn't the truth.

When Josh Fauver (formerly of Deerhunter) passed, a lot of the Army of Bad Luck (his record label) catalog went with him, and this is just about the only place you can find these things, legal or otherwise.

Seeing a bunch of replies on a Soulseek thread almost had me worried.

Denki Groove getting all of their music pulled from streaming services because one member failed a drug test is why I'll ride for MP3 collecting until I die

The biggest problem with Spotify, iTunes etc is the same as with Netflix, ie yes you can spend all your remaining days consuming what’s on it, but the vast majority of music worth hearing is not on it.

xp not familiar with Denki Groove but having just checked out the story can I say jesus fucking christ that's just about the most stupid thing I've read this year, and it's been quite a year, are they going to pull every other artist who's ever done drugs too?

That is wild o_O

Seeing a bunch of replies on a Soulseek thread almost had me worried.

― MarkoP

me too, i still try to be discreet about this shit because man slsk could go at anytime, fucking miracle that it's outlasted more or less everything worthwhile on the internet...

anyway, spotify isn't the celestial jukebox, and neither is youtube (and neither is slsk!). it's always going to be distributed to some extent.

I just checked and I seem to have two spare invites to JPopSuki if anyone wants them LBI, Frogbs?

Ohh that would be amazing!

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