>>1989
Torrent, Bandcamp if I like it and have the money.

bandcamp, and doing the same thing you did but with Mega, also rbt.asia

Soulseek and Bandcamp.

>>1989
what.cd, jpopsuki, waffles.fm, kraytracker, rutracker, mutracker, soulseek.

I only just discovered rutracker so I went wild, downloading music I didn't think I'd ever own without paying for them. You can make an account and use that if you like.

>>1989
bandcamp, various forums with mediafire links to albums and torrents

>>2006
and obviously rutracker, great site

I torrent everything.

This thread needs an update. Everything listed here is invite only. I've been trying to find the Azumanga Daioh ost for over an hour now and I want to stab somebody in the neck. Some little fucking retard said
>there's complete torrents all over the Internet.
It takes 2 seconds to find the actual anime. THAT'S what "all over the internet" means.

>>2616
It's on rutracker, which requires sign up but doesn't need an invite.

>>2617
Wow, Ruskies are good for something. Thanks.

>>2617
You don't need to register if you just use the magnet links.

>>2616
It's on FLAC in bakabt too.

>>2620
>in BakaBT
Interesting, they seem to have irc based interview invites like what.cd used to. I've never used either myself, but I always appreciated that what.cd offered a way for people without any friends to join in as well, and the interview questions seemed pretty well structured to ensure that you had a baseline knowledge about encoding and such.

>>2621
>ensure that you had a baseline knowledge about encoding and such
Why the hell should tech-knowledge be a prerequisite for piracy?

>>2622
It's certainly doesn't need to be a pre-requisite for torrenting in general. However, if the goal is to build and maintain a collection, some amount of quality control seems necessary, so it shouldn't be too far-fetched to hope that someone should have a basic understanding of lossy vs lossless, sampling rate, etc. Maybe it would suffice to only impose this restriction on uploaders, but having most members be aware of them seems like it might help catch bad encodes/etc. sooner.

I have bought maybe 3 albums in my entire life. I have listened to over 1000. A nostalgic thread, back in the day you could get anything off of mediafire. I had a gap in my music listening when mediafire got canned, but eventually I just picked up soulseek. No sense in using anything else.

Just YouTube and SoundCloud.

>>1989
These days, I get most of it from Deezloader since it has a large libray in MP3/320 with proper tagging and no encoding shenanigans.

Most of the other new music I download comes from Jpopsuki, Bandcamp if the artist doesn't charge for it, Doujinstyle, or occasionally from a mirror of the Touhou lossless torrent.

>>2639
Sadly, Deezer just patched their API so all you can rip from it is 128kbps files. The dev has abandoned Deezloader because it was too poorly written to maintain, but he's working on a new program called Deemix which will have a workaround.

Private trackers and Doujinstyle.

Soulseek for the most part.

blogspot sites

Its getting harder to download free music.

Just googling and visiting those sketchy looking webpages.
>>2639
One interesting thing that I recently realized is that for some reason a lot of mp3 rips are encoded in 320kbps CBR even though encoding in V0 or V1 (max end of variable bitrate) would be imperceptible and result in slightly smaller filesizes (~30% smaller?). Or perhaps better would be using a newer codec like aac or ogg. Even the anime ost/album rips obtained from those sketchy sites use 320kbps CBR (which is quite odd since I don't think any modern software has that as a preset). Although I suppose in the end it doesn't matter too much since disk space isn't an issue (my modest collection of OSTs is < 2GB), and beggars can't be choosers.

>>2657
It certainly is.

I used to do as >>2654 >>2688 did but a lot of those have either died or became way too "sketchy" or complicated to download off. I also use rutracker and private trackers but none that are specifically for music and it's getting harder to find what I'm looking for. I don't have a bakabt account, what is the music selection like in comparison to animebytes?

>>2657
It really is.
I finally gave up on my pride this year and installed spotify with premium mod. I use soulseek for obscure stuff

>>2657
>>2722
What kind of music are you listening to? Isn't nearly all of it on youtube?

>>2723
I wouldn't use YouTube for music even if what I listened to was on there.

>>2724
Why? You can download the audio.

>>2725
Presumably because of the audio quality being terrible

Question: do you guys bother getting flac or are you guys fine with mp3 rips downloaded from the random online sites? I'm honestly not that picky about music quality (and I probably couldn't even hear a difference through my laptop speakers), but lately I've been getting the feeling that not storing the lossless version makes it in principle "imperfect."

>>2737
loseless is a meme. Thought I do like to keep a copy of my all time favorite albums in flacs, just in case.

>>2738
Yeah I just went back and downloaded the flac versions of the few albums that I _really_ like. But other than considering I download my songs from those anime ost sites (that always seem to only have 320k CBR mp3 rips – don't know why they won't use V0 or even more modern codecs), I probably won't bother with much else.

>>2737
I get flac when I can but I'm fine with lossy stuff if that's all I can find. The benefit with flac isn't so much the quality itself as it is being able to encode it into whatever format you want with no quality loss.
For example, I like using opus for its good quality to size ratio but there are rarely, if ever, any opus rips. That's not really a problem with flac since I can just encode it myself, but if that's not available then I'm stuck with bloated 320kbps cbr mp3s, which aren't terrible but I'd prefer to choose the format myself.

>>2748
Why flac and not ogg?

edit:
I see flac is loseless. Converting an mp3 to flac gave me a larger file.

Post edited on 6th May 2022, 6:06pm

>>2749
Yeah, flac is lossess. Although, if you convert something from a lossy format like mp3 to flac then the flac file will also be lossy despite the bigger file size.

i use soulseek for all my pirating needs, that if the album isnt already free on bandcamp/ive purchased it. there are probably better torrents out there but soulseek is what ive been using for years and what im most used to

Does anyone else like to own music on physical media? I'm not a complete hipster about it, but I still get most of my music from going into record stores and picking up CDs. I like to go through the bins where CDs are like $2 each and look for strange random stuff that I probably wouldn't otherwise hear. A lot of my favorite albums are just things I picked up at random. I download stuff too but the vast bulk of my mp3 collection is ripped from actual discs. Even stuff on Bandcamp I will usually spring for the physical copy if one is available. Also to answer the topic of the thread I usually torrent when I download.

Soulseek has everything no reason to use anything else

I have found some anime/videogame music on KHinsider that I wasn't able to find on SoulSeek. I think you need to donate to gain access to mass downloads though, otherwise you'll have to download each file in an album seperately.

>>2755
Yes but I rarely do it because I’m a jobless hikikomori
If I could afford to I would only ever buy cds and would never pirate
I’ll get into why I love physical in a thread later right now I just want to drink beer and listen to jazz

>>2805
>listen to jazz
Good taste.

I found a couple more sites while looking through my old bookmarks just now.
Videogame music: https://www.zophar.net/
Anime music: https://www.rippersanime.info

By typing "[artist] [album name] blogspot" on Google. sharemania.us can be pretty good sometimes

YT to MP3 is easy to find
Spotifymate.com for downloading off Spotify
Internet Archive for other stuff
https://downloads.khinsider.com/ for Video Game music

Not a lot here et, but you can upload and download music at the new heyuri uploader

https://up.heyuri.net/m.php

It doesn't log ips and works like a charm for uploading

In the past, "artist+album site:blogspot.com" in search engine, Mediafire, Rapidshare, Pirate Bay, Kickass, Isohunt, BakaBT, Zophar, KHInsider, etc. Old forums where East Asian music, video game and anime soundtracks were posted.
Now, Rutracker, batch torrents, Soulseek, Nyaa, KHInsider, JPopsuki.

>>2737
I keep flac if it's available in flac.
>>2755
I like to own CD and vinyl, but I don't buy much and never play them.
I would, but it's not appreciated when living at home and also having neighbours.
If something is hard to find I'd buy the album and rip it. Looking through CD selections of thrift stores and buying something random was fun, but the prices have increased and the selections gotten smaller with mostly garbage.

I personally use a combination of soulseek and yt-dlp.

Soulseek, Soundcloud and doujinstyle (for jcore stuff)