I have got to admit I canned Spotify subs years ago - but how are they managing to grow their subscriber base whn it is now going to be £11.99 in the UK? That is way, way too high for what it offers…
I have got to admit I canned Spotify subs years ago - but how are they managing to grow their subscriber base whn it is now going to be £11.99 in the UK? That is way, way too high for what it offers…
There are ways you can use a Spotify account registered in another country and you basically pay about £2 a month. I’m mainly into 80s and 90s music and used Spotify to discover music, and once I come across a song I like I add the album name to a list (i.e. note it down) and find the CD from a second hand shop or failing which obtain the FLAC files some other way. This way I now have an offline library that has most of the songs that I love. Spotify will be there as long as I can just pay £2-ish but the moment they try the age verification or raise prices, its bye-bye for them.
They age verify in the UK already…
For most people though they won’t be hacking things to use Spotify. I agree £2 a month is OK but for me the issue is they charge a fortune yet pay artists a pittance
True. For me it hasn’t come up so far, possibly because my account is registered in a different country. It’s going to be a bit inconvenient but probably time to give them the finger and look elsewhere.
I ripped CDs to FLAC, put them on a Plex server, and use Plexamp on my computer and phone. Now I’ve got my own personal streaming service.
Not everyone will do that though… plenty of people I know have zero idea about that kind of stuff
Unfortunately true. It’s the uninformed (and who don’t care enough to get informed) that allow the violation of rights and privacy continue.
I have a 50TB library of movies and TV, Plex, the *arrs, a dedicated server, and even I dont bother with music because its a huge pain in the ass to deal with. I have a bunch of songs from before music streaming was popular and a few I’ve gotten from SoulSeek since then, but that’s about it. Ripping CDs, labeling and tagging each track, and sorting them into a properly named folder structure is just too much work especially when you get into thousands and thousands of songs. There are software solutions to this but they don’t work very well because music is much harder to deal with when you can have 50 versions of the same song floating around out there.
Somewhere out there is a person with a single folder named “music”, with zero sub folders, containing thousands upon thousands of tracks with names like “1.mp3” and “1 (1).mp3” and they’re totally okay with it.
Just thinking about it makes my skin crawl.
IMO it makes more sense to rip and download music than movies. Music is small files that you listen to dozens or hundreds of times, whereas movies are large files that you might only watch once or twice.
You need to do the same thing for movies and TV shows though.
Lidarr will do this for you, mostly automated.
To rip CDs, I use abcde (“a better CD encoder”) on Linux. It automatically tags the tracks based on CDDB or Musicbrainz data.
There’s probably a basic app that’ll move it to the right directory structure, but I find Lidarr pretty easy to use. I copy the album across to my server, then in Lidarr I add the relevant album then click the button to manually import it, and point it to the right folder. Lidarr will automatically sort it into the right directory structure. I have it configured to use the structure that Plex wants - folders per artist, then folders per album inside those.
That’s assuming it has data on Musicbrainz. For MP3/FLAC files from albums that aren’t on Musicbrainz, it’s a bit trickier. I sometimes use kid3 (KDE audio tagger) as it can pull from other sources like Discogs and Amazon.
I think you do have a point about the replayability of music versus movies but at the same time I share my server with about two dozen friends and family so its good to have some variety in there along with having a good selection for when you get that random thought about a movie and want to watch it rather than spending 20 minutes finding and adding it to your server
Radarr and sonarr also handle the naming and organization but this all relies upon the files being properly named which can be a chore with music as you regularly see remixes, sample albums, compilation albums, singles, covers, extended play, radio play, censored, uncensored, etc not to mention the quantities of songs out there by artists of varying popularity, which is the root problem with music databases not always finding a match, matching incorrectly, or your downloaded album having songs from multiple different sources that the uploader lumped together. You very occasionally run into this with movies too but its typically because TMDB or whatever source not matching the studio on the release year when a release is delayed.
This probably isn’t much of an issue for you if you’re ripping your own music but that’s becoming more and more rare these days with the transisition away from physical media. I actually bought a blu-ray RW drive for my PC with the intention of ripping DVDs and Blu-rays but gave up because of the work involved (encoding in HandBrake) if you wanted anything but Remux quality.
I honestly wish the days of Napster came back, but I have had good luck with SoulSeek and have read that its possible to integrate with Lidarr but haven’t tried yet. Im sure things will get better in time as these streaming services try to squeeze their customers more and more.
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This is the way to go!