Do I use a website to download songs off of YouTube or Spotify?
Where should I store the music? I haven't any clue about self-hosting. I'm running GrapheneOS, is it enough to save the songs in Files and play in an app like Auxio? Maybe sync with SyncThing?
What's the best way to compress mp3 files but still retain the quality (even possible)?
Could really use some help as I'm very inexperienced. :)
As far as where you get the music from, you’ll have to determine for yourself what audio quality you require.
To test this, use something like Soulseek to get a high quality version of a song you are very familiar with, and then get the same song off of YouTube with yt-dlp (better yet—do this for a few songs).
Then, open both songs in separate media player windows, randomize the layout of said windows so you don’t remember which is which, plug in your favorite headphones and see if you can guess which is which.
For me, I found the difference between a lossless or 320kbps download from Soulseek and a 128-196kbps download from YouTube to be negligible (or outright nonexistent) in most cases, so I mostly download off of YouTube, which is very simple to do.
Depending on where you get the files, you may need to add metadata yourself.
For this, I recommend MusicBrainz Picard.
Is there any program that downloads from youtube without me needing to find the URL I want? Ideally I would like to search a catalog of genre/artist/album and click the download button. It ought to maybe find the biggest youtube channel with the artist's name in it and then find the song.
To add to the audio compression: it isn’t possible to further compress an mp3 file without losing any quality. You can either:
Recompress to a lossy codec (mp3, aac, opus). This will lead to smaller file sizes if you set the bitrate lower than that of the input file, but it will always worsen the quality, no matter the bitrate.
Recompress to a lossless format (flac easily being the best one). Going from a lossy to a lossless format will increase the file size (sometimes by quite a substantial amount), while keeping the same quality. There is very little reason for you to do this
keep the original files (my recommendation)
If you’re willing to spend some extra time learning about audio compression, you can download lossless files and compress those directly to whatever format and bitrate you want. The quality will be better than option 1 above, as the audio is only lossely compressed once instead of twice.
FLAC is best if space is no concern. But when your collection starts getting very big, there are better options like AAC (which I use). It's a lot less space than FLAC and mp3, and higher quality than mp3 as well.
Check this website out, there's lots of options for obtaining music. I personally use Murglar on Android for high quality Deezer rips. Telegram bots work well too.
Spowlo and soundbound are essentially the same app that you just paste links to Spotify lists, artists, albums, playlists, whatever, then it'll find matches on YouTube to download as mp3.
Desktop zotify, you can downloaded the "high" quality level with premium account credentials.
You can do other methods, but this one is simple and effective. Set it up, tell it what bands you like, wait a day and you've got the entirety of your childhood favorites and nearly every discography you can think of. All for maybe an hour of upfront work.
Versus remembering every band/song you ever liked, tracking it down, downloading each individually... Like yeah, you can do that. It's what I do for shows and movies for curation. But for music, I have so much and so many that curating like this just isn't as worthwhile as checking off a band in Lidarr and having all of their stuff in a few hours.
I’m always curious why people do this. Music is the one item where it’s easier to just sub to something like Apple Music… literally $110/yr for all the music that exists. They gave us the solution we asked for and it’s super-cheap.
I pirate the shit out of movies and tv since those guys are gouging me, but musicians barely get by in the streaming era.
Hopefully this triggers nobody. I’m making no judgements.
My good faith response to your good faith question: because having a DRM-free copy on your own server or hard drive is the only way to be sure you will be able to play it tomorrow.
Streaming services are a complex collection of licensing deals that are by design temporary. You may not hear beforehand when your favorite artist's label's parent company's conglomerate's CEO decides to pull their content because they're going to start their own streaming service, or another service gave them a lucrative exclusive deal.
And while you're never going to have a hard time finding Taylor Swift, that one 70s esoteric album may become instantly impossible to find once it drops off a streamer.
In the end there are no promises with a streaming service. On the other hand, you put in a small amount of work to grab MP3s or FLACs, set up your own Plex server (or Emby, etc), and you're good for pretty much forever.
Similarly, support artists by buying their direct merch, going to shows, and so on, but they are barely seeing any Spotify money. Between Spotify and the labels, they are cleaning the plate and artists are getting whatever crumbs fall off the table (unless you're Taylor Swift or another global artist).
I’ve used Spotify for like 20 years now, and I’m finally going back to pirating.
They started “innovating” and adding shit I didn’t want last year to justify fee increases.
I can’t trust businesses to not enshittify, so might as well continue on with where I left my library all those years ago.
Plus: So much music isn’t available on there. I have a huge collection of Japanese Rock, Pop, Visual Kei from the 90s and 00s that you just can’t find easily.
I personally buy some music from Bandcamp, and I'm pretty sure those songs don't exist on the Apple Music catalog. So I don't want to handle multiple apps to listen what I want.
Also, streaming platforms have the internet constraints. Sometimes, like when I'm driving, I don't have a stable internet connection
What's the best way to compress mp3 files but still retain the quality (even possible)?
If you're not starting from a lossless format (like FLAC), you shouldn't really be compressing anything. When compressing from a lossless format to MP3, it's totally subjective. When I was more into ripping CDs, I'd do V0 or 320 - there's probably plenty of internet arguments by people more knowledgeable than me if you need a breakdown in different MP3 compressions.