Tidal HiFi + tidal-tdl is the best combo
Yes I have to pay $20, but I basically get like hundreds of dollars of music downloaded at their highest possible fidelity for free. Slap that shit on my DAP.
Literally better than soulseek because you can get obscure music in 48khz/24 bit that doesn’t even exist as an mp3 on that platform.
Fyi: you don’t get the songs in the highest quality. They’re actually compressed, because Tidal HiFi isn’t actually lossless. This video goes more in deph: https://youtu.be/pRjsu9-Vznc?si=8Az9OhX-Y0dhEz2A
If you want lossless, use Deezer and something like Deemix. In my experience it also has more nieche music than Tidal.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/pRjsu9-Vznc?si=8Az9OhX-Y0dhEz2A
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
AAAAAAAAGH, you sent me down a rabbithole again! To be fair, a lot of the music I listen to probably only exists in CD quality at best, but if I’m going to pay money I want the option of having the best there is. Thanks for letting me know about this!
Well you won’t find anything better than CD quality on any streaming service since it’s pretty large. A single FLAC can be a few hundred MBs large and you won’t really be able to tell the difference. Also it’s extremely rare
There still are some services where you can buy lossless music in higher quality, but Tidal isn’t one of them
I just keep downloading albums of MP3s like I have since the late 90s. It used to take hours and half the songs were mislabeled and real sketchy quality. Now, it takes seconds to download an entire album, and they’re almost always correctly labeled and high quality. I tried Spotify for a while, but it really seemed like it was for attention span deprived people who want something different every song. Gimme full albums any day.
Eh, I’m a full album guy (Pink Floyd ftw) but I still enjoy Spotify. I’ve been introduced to a lot of good music I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise, and sometimes I’m just not in the mood to commit to a full album.
Maybe I used it wrong, but I joined for a few months, and just used it to search up artists I already knew and listen. And then, I found it less convenient than my MP3 collection which easily fits on an SD card or my phone’s drive. I only very periodically search for new music. And I usually end up obsessing over one artist for a long time before moving onto another. We’re talking months to years. I’ve been listening to almost nothing but Rush for a few months now. I was never a fan growing up, but decided to give their whole discography a fair shot. Now, I can’t stop listening to Rush.
Something you may be interested in is the “Artist Radio” feature. You start out by searching artists/song you know (like you said you already did) and then it will search out other artists that you may enjoy.
I’ve been introduced to a ton of great artists from all over the world this way. It’s one of the coolest features of the platform
What are you finding works well for that?
I download quite a bit from YouTube, but sometimes the quality is variable
Anything remotely popular will end up in a torrent somewhere. Anything harder to find, there’s Soulseek.
Wxcited to try this on my pos kindle from 2015
I use YT Music with UBlock Origin, NoScript, Cookie manager and Dark Reader. Works like a charm, no advertisements
You might like ViMusic. It is a 3rd party client for YT music. I started using it recently and really liked the UI.
Yeah ViMusic is pretty good for what it is, but it’s not really better than the original YouTube music client.
My main complaint is that the sound quality is worse than YouTube Music with YouTube premium and that you’re not able to cast to other devices
Also, I don’t like how lyrics are displayed
Let’s see how long until Spotify kills it.