In the pre-streaming days I used to have a large collection of ripped and downloaded music. However as my taste in music is extremely wide and it became easier and more fun to use hacked streaming services (i.e. Youtube Music Vanced) to play music especially on the go, I decided to let my music collection go years ago. Plus… it was a big mess due to undiagnosed ADHD so let’s be honest it wasn’t a huge loss.
Now with the streaming ecosystem degrading and me now capable of keeping my things in order, I find myself wanting to start rebuilding a local music collection for the coming post-streaming era.
Wondering if there are any places I could find huge collection torrents that could be pared down to what I want, rather than spending my life downloading single albums or discographies? I’m ideally talking torrents that would be like 20GB of funk, but not just a shitload of tracks in a root directory with no tagging.
One of my favourite things about streaming services is getting to hear tracks or artists I haven’t even thought of in ages, and it’s hard to build a collection when you can’t think of exactly what to put in it!
Thanks, this sounds like a great way to start building a library and might actually be more effective than downloading massive torrents, especially as it claims to handle metadata and tagging effectively. Definitely will give it a try!
Lidarr is definitely worth a try (and also worth figuring out docker containers for).
Lidarr can be very effective at building a library, but be prepared for it to grab a bunch of stuff you maybe didn’t know you wanted and sometimes struggle to get that one specific album you need to go complete a set. It takes quite a bit of fiddling to get it going on it’s own. I’ve never really let it have free reign. I make it add torrents paused so that I can approve them individually and I don’t let it touch the part of my collection that I consider final and good. For example, I’d never want it to over write the stuff I ripped from my personal collection of physical media. So far as I can tell Lidarr is still also not the right tool if you have or want a bunch of live recordings or bootlegs.
I still buy a bunch of music, but now it’s almost all purchased as directly from the artists as I can reasonably manage; like live show merch tables, band websites, Bandcamp, etc. It wouldn’t be odd for me to grab a rip from Lidarr at the same time I buy a copy in my preferred physical format from the artist. Don’t forget to add that new stuff’s metadata to musicbrainz.org if it doesn’t already exist. Past me has definitely saved present me some hassle by doing this when I wanted to reorganize my library.