Soulseek is good for downloading albums and discographies, soundiiz, qobuz-dl and deemix-gui are good for that and also playlists of whatever. It’s also a good way to get FLACs. I download genre mixes, pitchfork’s top albums, it’s a good way to get 80gb of music in a night. It’s taken me 3 months to get that much off Soulseek. Sometimes you want to try out artists without downloading their whole discography.
Nicotine+ is OK, I upload about a tb a month on there and occasionally I find a missing track I can’t find on Deezer, Qobuz or Bandcamp. Turns out other people aren’t just imperfect versions of you.
2023 was absolutely the year I dove back into music piracy. I started with downloading youtube playlists but the real game changer was soundiiz, which allowed me to import text, m3u, csv, spotify, xspf playlists into qobuz and deezer so i can download whole playlists of FLAC with qobuz-dl and deemix-gui. My collection went from 20,000 to 100,000, downloading playlists from qobuz and deezer, xspf playlists from my remaining lossy music. I used streamripper on a few web radio stations just to get a list of songs to pull down this way. I only bought music for years and years, but that got me a narrow type of collection.
I just tried it. I can’t bulk import external playlists, so I’m not using it. I keep my playlists in with the music directories so I have to scroll past 3,000 artists to get to any of them in musicolet.
It’s a CLI tool, it’s a great generalist tool for converting video and audio but you have to script it if you want to do a recursive batch job.
I use FRE:AC https://www.freac.org/downloads-mainmenu-33
It can do bulk conversions with a recursive directory search and works in most OSes
I had the exact same use case as you, 1TB of FLACs onto a 256gb phone. Because you prefer minimal quality loss, Opus is the format for you, not MP3. You can maintain transparency-level quality with 128kbps, Opus is roughly equivalent in quality to a mp3 twice its size. AAC and Vorbis are also preferable to MP3 in this aspect, but inferior to Opus. At this point, mp3s are only useful for devices that can’t decode any better codec.
Then i do a search-replace for *.flac -> *.opus on the playlists. I use PowerAmp on android to play the tunes, can recommend.
I don’t game much but I’d try to stay closer to the debian ecosystem, or one of the more well-known distros. There are a lot of cases where there’s a debian and ubuntu installer for something and otherwise you gotta compile or hope for an appimage or flatpak. Ubuntu’s out because snaps are horrible, although you can get rid of those. Personally I install debian on all my boxes. It’s a really minimal distro and things tend to go pretty fast because of that. Debian or I hear Fedora’s great.