I’ve been building up my digital music library again after giving music streaming the boot. I was going to attempt to digitize my CD and vinyl collection, but I frankly don’t have the time for all that. So I thought I might turn to file-sharing and download digital versions of my physical collection. I prefer FLAC or WAV if the former isn’t available. Can you recommend good places to get started?
My list in order of desperation, lowest first
- Soulseek
- Public torrent trackers
- Private torrent trackers
- Spotify rippers (they come and go like waves on a beach)
- yt-dlp youtube rip (please god have mercy on my bit-crushed soul)
Spotify rippers (they come and go like waves on a beach)
Real ones? Seems like most of them use Spotify to identify music then rip from elsewhere like youtube.
I use Zotify when I get to the “rip from Spotify” level, but would be happy to add another couple options if there’s more solid ones out there.
Most of the publicly available ones that rip streaming services to lossless fail spectral checks. They can rip high quality MP3s which they then transcode to flac but if you were to upload this somewhere like RED you’d get shit for it. Literally every one I’ve found has failed the spectral check thread on RED
This MAY not apply for Spotify as they don’t stream lossless to begin with
The people that can actually rip fully lossless files from deezer, apple music, qobuz, tidal, etc guard that info like crazy. The second the method gets public you better believe all those companies are patching it out. Plus it probably doesn’t hurt that being the one with the keys to the method gets you like infinite ratio
I work part time as an audio producer. Converting MP3 to FLAC is like trying to upscale an image: you can use all the fancy algos to repair loss, but it’s still lossy.
Tidal-DL could rip Tidal tracks pretty reliably when I last used it. I ditched my Tidal sub when they split with Plex, so haven’t used it in 6 months or so. I know Spotify has lower quality, but I’ve got a .edu email so was able to subscribe for cheap. I mostly use it for music discovery, so actually listening to and ripping music from it is fairly rare.
