I would like to move away from using spotify for music. Are there any torrenting sites where I can torrent music with high quality audio (~320kbps) tagged properly?
Soulseek is I2P not Torrenting, but I’ve found it to be the best place to find music by a long shot.
Edit: It’s actually P2P not I2P
Agreed but it is not open source, it depends on a central server, and personally enriches a man named Nil who went to Tel Aviv university. I would prefer a music tracker.
Plus, Soulseek has a lot of quirks that make it less reliable for slow downloads. It’s not a “fire and forget” solution to acquiring files in the same way a magnet link with at least one seeder lurking around is. Soulseek will not just start again when they come back, it has other rate limits that can be jumped with their “donations”
I2P?
But he updated to say he misspoke, he meant p2p
Totally agree here. For tagging I also reccomend musicbrainz picard
I can recommend Beets for tagging, with the Lyrics plugin. Perfect for my Navidrome server and synced lyrics work perfectly on Symfonium
I have soulseek/nicotine+ on my private server and I just use that. It’s really easy. If you ever used Napster or limewire or Kazaa or whatever it’s exactly like that.
I have never used soulseek. Isn’t this basically just Napster/kazaa/bearshare/limewire kind of deal? Wouldn’t it be loaded with garbage with bad tags?
Soulseek is popular with audiophiles, so there tends to be a lot of large, well-tagged FLAC collections
Eh. There’s also a bunch of bozos there that’ll literally rip 128 kbps mp3s from youtube and store them as FLACs. I saw it with my own 2 beady eyes right after the release of “The end of you” by Poppy, Amy Lee and Courtney LaPlante. So there’s no way of knowing what source they’ve used.
EDIT: I do like Soulseek a lot tho!
RED and OPS. If you want to join, try OPS first and after making decent ratio, you could try getting into RED.
Searching isn’t helping for these two terms, what’s “RED” and “OPS”?
Seconding the notion to get into OPS somehow if at all possible. RED’s economy is one of the few economies that is actually non-trivial, whereas OPS’s economy is totally trivial. A large amount of RED stuff is automatically mirrored to OPS, so you can just grab it at OPS and cross-seed back to RED (there are a few tools to do this automatically, e.g. nemorosa). RED is still definitely the more active and qualitative place to be, but cross-seeding shenanigans with OPS will keep RED’s economy in-check.
Is cross posting torrents like that allowed? I haven’t been on a closed tracker for a very long time, but in my time, that was a huge no-no that would get you (and possibly even the people who you have invited/person who invited you) kicked off of the site.
Yes, it’s allowed and encouraged between RED<->OPS. There are a few tools on the RED and OPS forums to automate most of the process (e.g. Transplant, REDCurry, Takeout, Orpheus-Populator, etc.). Cross-posting torrents on many sites is allowed and fine, you just have to be aware of the rules of the source site, e.g. some places don’t want their internals to be shared, or some have a literal timer countdown before cross-posting is allowed. On the other hand, most sites are not going to enforce other sites’ exclusivity demands (PTP explicitly has a note about this). If an exclusive file is cross-posted onto PTP, PTP isn’t going to take it down on anyone’s behalf.
I’ll note that private tracker culture has warmed up quite a bit in the past decade and a half that I’ve been on them. Trackers (and their users) don’t usually see other trackers as rivals/competitors anymore, release groups are respectful of each other, there are a ton of tutorials and help forums around to help low-skill members learn how to do the advanced stuff, and so on. There are recognizable usernames everywhere, and the general vibe is to cross-upload as much as possible and help build everyone’s trackers together. Cross-seed (the program) has helped a lot with this, and seedbases have become very strong even on smaller trackers as a result.
RED is great, if you have the time and money needed to get ratio for downloading. You have to continuously buy new music on day 1 of release and have an ultra low latency server to serve it because of the way their algos direct bandwidth.
It is not for the faint of heart, but it is the catalogue of choice.
A lot of people just rip Qobuz, Deezer, and Tidal FLAC for free using shared keys that you can find on the megathread (“Knowledge & Tokens”). Autosnatchers will give you at least one snatch per upload. No one is actually buying most of that WEB FLAC. There also might be a big batch of freeleech tokens during December for kickstarting a library. Also, I’d recommend just going full FLAC from the start; MP3 is easier/smaller to snatch, but it’s 2025 and no one wants MP3, so long-term you’ll get the best results by perma-seeding a large FLAC library.
What? Things sure have changed. Why would everyone want FLAC over mp3 vbr V0?
Mainly, HDDs are bigger and FLAC is future-proof for future audio formats, as well I think the death of What.CD has really impressed upon the next generation that preservation is of utmost importance. A lot of albums were fully lost during the transition to RED/OPS, and a good chunk of albums that used to have a lossless copy now only have lossy versions from those who kept MP3 libraries. IMO, piracy is ownership, and owning the master lossless copy so you can generate any other formats is that concept taken to its logical conclusion.
Thank you for your explanation. That makes sense. I stopped pirating music exactly due to oink and then what dying, getting disillusioned by private trackers.
I wonder what the in is to RED/OPS?
When WCD closed, it had over 1M releases. Now these respectively have 1.8 and 1.3. Requests are filled-up quickly thanks to Spotify downloaders. Most torrents are xseeded on both, so there is redundancy. I’d say it’s doing pretty well.
Rutracker
Private trackers
(Or soul seek but it’s not open source)
it’s not open source
Nicotine+ is.
The whole network behind it, isn’t.
Like a open source frontend for YouTube. It’s open source but relie heavily on non-FOSS softwares
I have less issues with a closed-source network than a client.
Maybe less, but still some
looks like its temporarily down atm but i like squid.wtf
Also this option is available.
