soulseek

gotta keep slsk on the dl

there was a whole chapter on soulseek, but you have to be sharing at least 1gb of files to be allowed to see it

actually two chapters but you have to trade scramoutcha for the second one

i could see a book on the topic not bothering with it. Has it had any time on "top" of music file sharing? After the big programs were dead it became all about torrents with immaculate encoding and tagging. Pretty strange. Bless the seek

Though frigged if i know what the main torrent site would be right now... or is it all just fragmented into genre sites?

ime they are all shitted up now and practically unusable. I pay a few quid a month for a usenet nzb site for movies, but if I'm looking for something like Herbie Nichols complete blue note recordings then slsk is still the only place 100% guaranteed to have it.

i could see a book on the topic not bothering with it.

Kidding aside, that was my question: do I think Soulseek is better known than it actually is? The book dealt with all the famous torrent sites (never used one), Megaupload, etc., but not even a passing mention. And it still goes on...maybe it's just not prominent enough for anyone to bother shutting it down, or even to warrant a footnote in the book? (Plus streaming has taken over.)

I feel the author would have to know, and know of its sorta underground status.. and maybe consciously felt it best not to potentially draw undue attention to it.

re those Week xx flacs, I don't know, but:
- someone has a few of these Singles Week xx yyyy folders in a directory called "torrents"
- mostly these folders just contain flacs but a couple of people have some which include a file called "errors.txt", which is a list of track names, un-Googleable numeric IDs and the text "EBUSY: resource busy or locked, open '\T!D@L Music\New Tracks/WKxx/<filename.flac>" (I have Googleproofed the service name here)

So my possibly erroneous conclusion is: someone has a script to rip the new tracks from T!d@l every week and uploads them to a torrent site, but I have no idea how they do this or what torrent site.

(also the tracks have 90% English language titles and like 5% Dutch, so maybe that tells us something about the ripper's location, or maybe not)

I don't have a T!d@l account so I don't know if they still have that Burna Boy track, or whether there's an easy & legit way to get a weekly playlist of new singles releases there.

sometimes i look at what people have grabbed and i'll be like..... wtf i have megadeth albums??

Under the Music section on various torrent sites you'll often see a folder like "UK Top 40 WK 17-06-22" or whatever, which will contain all the top 40 singles for that week, so I guess someone somewhere is ripping them somehow xp

brad downloaded something off me today and i feel so validated

yr goddamn right those tags are immaculate

The other day I browsed the library of a user I was downloading from who had like 50% IDM, 50% 80s/90s Japanese music, and the full XTC catalog - it had to have been frogbs, right? if so, thank you for the Akiko Yano!

When I try to download stuff I mainly just get a red ABORTED message in the transfers window... what gives

not happening for me.

we should have a 77 slsk thread so we can share usernames.

good idea

I’ve been here since 09 and I still have no idea how to access 77 so I guess email me if you want mine I’ve got lots of underground indie post punk

I’ve been here since 06 and I still have no idea how to slsk

Evan, just leave a message here - Request Access to 77 Borad

I started going on this rant on the 77 username thread but probably better to put the posts here:

I've been obsessively curating the album art as well lately so most of my files should have nice clean square-shaped images of the album covers attached. I do this because it's my fussy little project to have my apple "Music" (iTunes) mp3 library as neat an symmetrical as possible. So that should be saved to the metadata of the files... (apple is weird about how it links artwork hence my slight uncertainty - pretty sure it's all there though).

This means some of the rare cassette / underground stuff I've been loading required me to "rebuild" album art into that square requirement that is otherwise seemingly not available on the web, so dorks like me that care about that sort of thing might appreciate this if they stumble upon one of those examples.

I've customized album art for some live albums, too.

― Evan, Friday, March 3, 2023 10:54 AM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Basically if it doesn't have artwork it doesn't go into my digital library, so if I care about it I'll make artwork from scratch as thoughtfully as possible.

― Evan, Friday, March 3, 2023 11:02 AM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

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

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.

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.

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

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.

mp3tag on windows is a fantastic ID3 editor. there's a mac version but I think it costs $.

I've been using mp3tag for years and years. I'm sure my version is many updates behind, but it still works great.

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.

EL Heath is a friend, really love his music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9dblAl5t8U

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.

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.

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.