Digital Library

[n0Mad]

Hey all. Almost all of my goth/industrial/etc music is low bitrate mp3s pirated from Limewire and Emule back in the day. I have a few CDs, but my computers don't even have an optical drive anymore so I can't rip them. So, I'm looking to curate a digital library of high bitrate mp3s. I buy all my EDM from Beatport, but that's what they specialize in. Where is a good place to get all my City Club favorites?

[Scary Guy]

Okay, so first off you don't want .mp3, you want .flac which is lossless audio (meaning the compression doesn't compromise the quality.) High bitrate .mp3 files are still okay, but it's no longer the gold standard.

 

If you're on Windows there used to be a program called Audio Identifier that I'd use.  I think it's only 16 bit, but it would tell you information about the files.  I remember Xing and Blade being the worst codecs to encode with and they're not really used anymore.  The other two were LAME and the official encoder which the patent ran out on long ago, so I think you can use either if you want without worry.

You can always just buy a USB CD drive for $60 if you want BluRay and just use that to rip your collection in high quality.  There's a program called ExactAudioCopy and you can guess what that does.  Uses CDParanoia too I think, but I haven't used it in years (haven't really needed to.)

 

For legal means there's Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and a few others.  I hate them all for different reasons.  I think Napster pays the most at 0.012 cents for every stream according to this article.  Soundcloud / Mixcloud are the best options here IMO.  I'm not sure what they pay but they seem to be very pro-artist.

 

If we're talking about piracy then Slsk/Nicotine++ are still around and useful.  Torrent trackers exist too if you know where to look, or if you know someone you may be able to gain access to a private tracker group.  The only thing is you need to seed and not just leech or they kick you out.  Not that I do any of this myself of course, I just know a lot of information.

[et-novum]

For purely informational purposes, you could check out metal-tracker. It's primarily a metal tracker (duh) but there are other genres there too but not as much of it. It's Russian site, but they have an English version. They generally have quality files, including FLACs and quality MP3s.

 

Alternatively, if those artists have bandcamp pages, you can use youtube-dl to get the highest quality they've uploaded there. Also, Bandcamp has the best artist cut so I recommend you buy music from there. On the first friday of the month, Bandcamp waives their normal cut and all of the profit goes to the artists. And through Bandcamp, you can actually download the files and keep it unlike some other places.

 

While FLACs are higher quality, they take up a ton of space. I have the discography of Blind Guardian on my hard drive and it takes up 10% of the total space despite being one of hundreds of artists with a similar discography size. So be wise with how you allocate your disk space.

[Scary Guy]

4 hours ago, et-novum said:

While FLACs are higher quality, they take up a ton of space. I have the discography of Blind Guardian on my hard drive and it takes up 10% of the total space despite being one of hundreds of artists with a similar discography size. So be wise with how you allocate your disk space.

 

Wow, how small is your hard drive?  You can get a 20TB drive on Amazon for not a lot of money these days (or two 10s which is cheaper and then you have a backup drive.)

[et-novum]

5 minutes ago, Scary Guy said:

Wow, how small is your hard drive? 

It's 2TB and it shares with a lot else. It's plenty for me. I meant that one band makes up 10% of the size of the music library, not the total storage. And it's not a small library.

 

Also if they're so cheap, you should buy me one 😛

[Scary Guy]

Just now, et-novum said:

It's 2TB and it shares with a lot else. It's plenty for me. I meant that one band makes up 10% of the size of the music library, not the total storage. And it's not a small library.

 

Also if they're so cheap, you should buy me one 😛

 

Oh trust me, it's a small library.

Also I'm strongly considering it.  I have four 6TB drives that I need to throw in a RAID array and that should take care of things for a while though.  I'd rather avoid spending money if I can but that price is very tempting.

 

I remember getting two external Seagate 2TB drives for $60 which was like half price at the time.  Thought I hit the lottery.  That was 10-15 years or so ago though, so that was a sizable amount.