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Backing up Spotify

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Re: Backing up Spotify

#561

Post by thisisabore »

lurk2 wrote: post #365
toomuchtodo wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost recovery isn’t profit. Copyright is just a shared delusion, like most laws. They’re just bits on a disk we’re told are special for ~100 years (or whatever the copyright lockup length is in your jurisdiction), after which they’re no longer special (having entered the public domain). I think what is more ironic is we somehow were comfortable being collectively conditioned (manufactured consent?) with the idea that…

> that to evade such insanity is wrong in some way. There’s a commons problem at play here. Most habitual pirates couldn’t pay for what they are pirating even if they wanted to, so restricting their access just makes the world worse-off; but who is going to finance the creation of new content if everything is just reliant on completely optional donations? The 100 year period is absurd and does nothing to incentivize…

There are several labs and researchers with ideas on how to do this and published books on the subject (https://www.sharing-thebook.com/).

Long story short: workable solutions exist, it is entirely a question of political will and lack thereof.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#562

Post by rldjbpin »

Etheryte wrote: post #28

To put this into perspective, What.CD [0] was widely considered to be the music library of Alexandria, unparalleled in both its high quality standard and it's depth. What had in the ballpark of a few million torrents when it got raided and shut down. Anna's rip of Spotify includes roughly 186 million unique records. Granted, the tail end is a mixed bag of bot music and whatnot, but the scale is staggering. [0] https:…

about the scale, the same album in the tracker had several submissions, for dedicated format and regional editions.

while one can compare in terms of number of tracks, the quality used to be in another level altogether. from the article:

> The quality is the original OGG Vorbis at 160kbit/s.

meanwhile the tracker had 16/24-bit flac rips of vinyl, with decent quality control where the track's metadata was verified for any artifacts. for the given quality, one could rip youtube music (maybe not as easily anymore) and achieve a larger scale in a similar quality level.

now if hypothetically tidal had all the music of the world and was accessible this way, then it would be a comparable resource. insane regardless.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#563

Post by rldjbpin »

the metadata alone is a staggering couple hundred gb, however it contains quite handy information to play with. consider the following:

> /audio-features/{id} "Get audio feature information for a single track identified by its unique Spotify ID."

this combined with track metadata can finally allow those motivated enough to create their own personalized shuffle. potentially better than the slop we get nowadays. no generative ai required*.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#564

Post by vintermann »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #560
vintermann wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested in knowing that too, as far as I know Spotify doesn't publish details to the public at least. But I have no trouble believing some artists will be vastly overrepresented in the ad financed pool. Also, there are separate pools by country, and countries have different subscription prices - being big in Japan will be more profitable than being big in India. Payout per stream is a terrible metric. It's…

> Payout per stream is a terrible metric. It's almost like if you ranked grocery stores by payment per gram. CDs are usually similar prices. Per-stream isn't nearly as bad as wildly different products sharing prices. We could debate per stream versus per minute but I don't know if that's a particularly big effect. It causes some annoyance but it's mostly compensated for already. Anything that gives different value to…

CDs get wildly different number of plays. But the number of plays, whether from a record or from a streaming service, isn't proportional to how glad you are that this music exists and you can listen to it.

The present system favors big artist rights owners a lot, but most of all it rewards owners of music played on repeat, i.e. background music.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#565

Post by aqeelat »

thisisabore wrote: post #561
lurk2 wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that to evade such insanity is wrong in some way. There’s a commons problem at play here. Most habitual pirates couldn’t pay for what they are pirating even if they wanted to, so restricting their access just makes the world worse-off; but who is going to finance the creation of new content if everything is just reliant on completely optional donations? The 100 year period is absurd and does nothing to incentivize…

There are several labs and researchers with ideas on how to do this and published books on the subject ( https://www.sharing-thebook.com/ ). Long story short: workable solutions exist, it is entirely a question of political will and lack thereof.

This would work on niche segments and not for the masses. Look up YouTube subscribers to Pateon ratio.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#566

Post by aerozol »

gorbachev wrote: post #407

Quoting from their page: -------------- This is by far the largest music metadata database that is publicly available. For comparison, we have 256 million tracks, while others have 50-150 million. Our data is well-annotated: MusicBrainz has 5 million unique ISRCs, while our database has 186 million. -------------- If they truly are on a mission to protect world's information from disappearing, they should work with M…

It would be reasonably trivial to set up a bot that mass-imports metadata from Spotify to MusicBrainz (note that MB rules do not allow this, community cleanup from a single user doing this with another source, years ago, is still ongoing).

The value that MusicBrainz adds is the community editor who spent a few hours going through YouTube videos and wayback machine social links to figure out that Fog (Wellington, NZ, punk/post-punk) and Fog (Auckland, NZ, Post-Punk) are different bands - even if they share a Spotify profile. The editor that hunted down and listened to 5 compilations that have mixed up a radio edit and an original mix of a track, to find out which is which, and separate them in MB and make notes. [these are made up examples]

That's not to imply that these two projects are 'competing', or that the ISRC figure comparison isn't useful and correct. But community database + scraped data is apples and oranges. And a mixed fruit bowl is wonderful.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#567

Post by bgbntty2 »

Narushia wrote: post #233
david_p wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you share the name of that successor? I miss the old internet and would love to take a look.

It's Redacted.sh, a.k.a. RED. They have around three million torrents. But like What.CD, Redacted.sh is a private tracker, so you can't just jump in and see the content.

How does it compare to rutracker, especially for electrnic music? I've never used what.CD and rutracker seems to have lots of high quality music.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#568

Post by laughingcurve »

Etheryte wrote: post #28

To put this into perspective, What.CD [0] was widely considered to be the music library of Alexandria, unparalleled in both its high quality standard and it's depth. What had in the ballpark of a few million torrents when it got raided and shut down. Anna's rip of Spotify includes roughly 186 million unique records. Granted, the tail end is a mixed bag of bot music and whatnot, but the scale is staggering. [0] https:…

Wow, I have not thought about OiNK in ages... great memories! OiNK and WhatCD did something very special for the musical community

Re: Backing up Spotify

#569

Post by flexagoon »

kccqzy wrote: post #330
gyrgtyn wrote: post #290

is there a torrent client already that is be good at partial downloads? I didn't realize how popcorn time worked until I read this thread.

All torrent clients must necessarily support partial downloads because of the nature of torrents. The files are split into pieces which are downloaded and then assembled by the torrent client.

"Partial downloads" in the context of torrenting usually refers to downloading specific files from a torrent

Re: Backing up Spotify

#570

Post by squigz »

grishka wrote: post #472
squigz wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure that requirement is server-side?

What do you mean? You can still stream any song with a free account. It's just that there will be ads. Additionally, in mobile apps, there will be ridiculous artificial limitations to make sure your experience is as miserable as it could possibly be. My understanding is that the premium requirement is there to avoid having the repo taken down.

My understanding, based on a related comment in this thread, was that premium accounts get higher quality; in that case, I figured any such checks would be server-side.

If you were referring to a separate check in the above repo's code, my mistake.

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