[nightowl_games]

> I loved Napster and would run out and buy CDs to support the artists.

You realize how self-centered this is, right? How it isn't indicative of the general public? This is like saying "I love drunk driving. I live in Alaska where there's no one around so there's no one I can hurt."

[dtx1]

no, that comparison doesn't really work.

If your buisness model requires large scale censorship of the internet to remain profitable, then your buisness model is broken. This was true in the 90s where downloading a few thousand mp3s was the most you could get out of your modem and it's true today for complete 4k blueray rips.

Spotify and co have obliterated music piracy on the internet. It's hard to find torrents for music these days and even the best private trackers can't compete with Spotifys ever growing catalog. Add to that the availability of Spotify on linux, android and basically every other device that has a DAC in my household and i wouldn't even bother trying to pirate music anymore. There was a time, when this was true for netflix, or at least it felt true to a degree. But the movie and tv industry chose to split their catalog between an ever growing number of competing offers, thus movie piracy is alive and well. The same is true for most games these days. Why bother pirating a game, requiring complicated installation, slow download speeds and a lack of updates when i can buy it on steam and get the convenience of fast downloads, automatic updates, reliable only gameplay etc.?

The reality is that copying bits of data has become so trivial, it's impossible to monetize it. That's why everything's a SaaS in the cloud these days. Trying to restrict that is a fools errand at best. For piracy to die, it has to become inconvenient and the legal alternatives have to be priced reasonable.

[LordNight]

>Spotify and co have obliterated music piracy on the internet. It's hard to find torrents for music these days and even the best private trackers can't compete with Spotifys ever growing catalog.

Eh? Maybe it depends on a musical genre, but from my experience musical piracy is about as popular as it ever was, with a lot of new releases every day (although I admit that it didn't really grow). I can still find anything I'm interested in less than a minute.

I also think, that having your own musical library is more convenient than spotify. As an example - https://ibb.co/VLTh5fD and https://ibb.co/fnxnMmG

[aksss]

Lately I’m starting to miss the utility of MP3’s because reasons. So haven’t tried it yet, but it seems pretty trivial to pirate from Spotify, just a bit of a time suck to play an album/playlist, chop up the tracks, look up the metadata. There are tools to make all of this easier, virtual audio patch cables, audacity, metadata downloaders. No?

[dtx1]

Is it? I've been unsuccessful so far with the obvious exception of ripping the output stream and reencoding that. If you find a way to rip music from spoitfy, i'd be interested

[aksss]

Maybe I’m not saying anything different - you play the music and use virtual audio cables to harvest it into an mp3 file (or whatever format) with no DAC/ADC conversion. Digital to digital. https://shop.vb-audio.com/en/win-apps/19-hifi-cable-asio-bri...

[dtx1]

yeah that will probably work but since spotify is already sending a lossy compressed audio file, you'll still get some quality loss due to compressing it twice. Also seems really inconvenient, especially since i'd want to do this for mobile use to save on bandwidth. That quickly becomes really annoying if you want to do it for thousands of files.

[aksss]

Yep it works fine. Three basic steps - 1) configure your environment; 2) record; 3) process. Steps 1 & 3 take the most effort here, but once set up you don't really have to sweat over any of it again. Step 2 takes the most duration since it's realtime. But the cool thing is there's no DAC happening.

1) Configure Environment

* In Spotify set quality to Very High (nominally 320kbps)

* Using some virtual patch cabling (I use Voice Meeter Banana), set Windows to use it's VAIO input as the Spotify output device.

* Make sure B1 channel (the virtual output) is enabled in VMB

* Set A1 channel (hardware out) in VMB to your speakers if you want to monitor music, otherwise set to nothing if you want it to do all this in the background

* Set Audacity to to use the VAIO Output as the recording source

2) Record

* hit play in spotify, hit record in audacity

* Audacity should stop recording after prolonged silence when playlist ends - you can tweak the sensitivity of this.

3) Process * Select all in Audacity, then Analyze/Detect Sounds, set silence threshold to whatever (e.g. -60). Spot check your results for accuracy.

* Export this track list from Audacity (txt file)

* Use a tool like https://watsonbox.github.io/exportify to export your playlist details from Spotify (csv file)

* Use Excel or Python (or whatever your hammer of choice is) to merge your spotify playlist data with the audacity label export file, basically creating a new label file for audacity. For example, your audacity label name could be "artist-trackname".

* Import your new label file to update the track names;

* "Export Multiple" from Audacity using track name as file name.

* Use some media management tool to clean up and download all the metadata for the file. I used MediaMonkey for this. Basically imported detecting artist and track name from filename, then let it do its thing to look up additional metadata and album covers.

[aksss]

All this talk is probably going to force me to try it this weekend cuz science, right?

I don’t know if I’d really notice quality[0] degradation too much, my use case would be the local storage in my vehicle for long trips with dodgy cell coverage. I’ve been burned a couple times by Spotify auto-clearing previously downloaded playlists, only to find out after I’m without data coverage / in the air.

I have a couple ideas about making the process more efficient, as in process running in the background. You are essentially restricted to a 1x rip speed, but I shouldn’t think I’d need to babysit it much and the post processing can be largely automated, perhaps less time than I remember it taking to find equivalent torrents, dl and clean those up. I mean, duration would be longer but level of effort on par or less.

Will report back.

[0] https://support.spotify.com/us/article/high-quality-streamin...

[thatguy0900]

Are you really comparing downloading music to drunk driving? That's wild.

[nightowl_games]

Yes I am making that comparison. It is a reducto ad absurdium argument. I skipped all the steps where I illustrate the value of copyright law and the value of music and then draw a parallel between "but I buy the CDs" with "but I don't hurt anyone".

[orwin]

I didn't endanger people when "pirating" Metallica's (well, ACDC and Twisted Sisters rather) CDs when i was younger (and a lot poorer, single unqualified mom in a small city and all that).

Emule and bittorent helped me get access to a culture i didn't even know existed, brought me awy from TV shows and helped me learn english and to books i now own. I'm sorry for Butcher, Feist and Sanderson early years, but i think i have the whole collection now, and i couldn't afford to buy those books anyway (i don't think i could even find them in my country)

Drunk driving just made me gain 40 minutes while probably endangering a dozen people (and i immediately stopped after the first time).

Also every time i buy storage i pay a tax to Universal and other CP owner while not having any licenced music (unless they own Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Pachelbel, and a lot of pre-63 music in general) on those storage. Also they should give 40% of that tax to the Linux foundation since packer and weird images are taking almost half my disk space?

Anyway, i know how prod works, more than half of them are parasites and don't add any value (well, not exactly, they add their daddy political connections, that's something). It does not surprise me, what is surprising to me is that this many people defend them.

[thatguy0900]

One of those deprives someone of some money(maybe, if they would have bought the CD otherwise), the other has a real chance to kill or maim. You really don't do your cause any favors with the absurd arguments. As someone else brought up, the you wouldn't download a car type arguments only get you ridicule.

[Dma54rhs]

The music industry cartel made me pay them for empty cd's and such, no moral issue for me.

[Bakary]

It reminded me of those silly "you wouldn't download a car" anti-piracy ads

[AdrianB1]

By the color of your comment I think it is not self-centered, a lot of people agree with that.

[nightowl_games]

Basically I'm stating that I think it's fallacious to use your own willingness to support artists in your value judgement of copyright policy.