this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2025
417 points (99.3% liked)

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

67603 readers
185 users here now

⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.

Rules • Full Version

1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy

2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote

3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs

4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others



Loot, Pillage, & Plunder

📜 c/Piracy Wiki (Community Edition):

🏴‍☠️ Other communities

FUCK ADOBE!

Torrenting/P2P:

Gaming:


💰 Please help cover server costs.

Ko-Fi Liberapay
Ko-fi Liberapay

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
all 44 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] kami@lemmy.dbzer0.com 116 points 1 month ago (2 children)

News headlines in my country are like "Spotify attacked!!", "Millions of music tracks stolen!!".

Hilarious...

[–] comrade_twisty@feddit.org 40 points 1 month ago

My teachers were the biggest thieves in history, they would hand out copies to us multiple times a day.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 month ago

Not as dramatic but similar sentiment in german (tech) news.

[–] U7826391786239@lemmy.zip 59 points 1 month ago (2 children)

now i just need a 300TB hard drive..

[–] abbadon420@sh.itjust.works 46 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

Correction: you need a 200TB hardrive. By now, at least 100TB is AI generated shit music that you don't need.

Edit: these numbers are an (un)educated guess based on my vibes.

[–] Damarus@feddit.org 18 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Where does that number come from?

[–] abbadon420@sh.itjust.works 27 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Out of my ass. Its just commentary on the fact that spotify has AI generated music and that there is a growing amount of it. Maybe I should not have used such steong language.

[–] yakko@feddit.uk 33 points 1 month ago

Everyone knows the best jokes are moderate and impeccably logical.

[–] freeman@feddit.org 16 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Good luck filtering it out. Or are they tagged as AI?

[–] _cryptagion@anarchist.nexus 5 points 1 month ago

Nobody knows that. We haven’t downloaded the archive.

[–] bonenode@piefed.social 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I cannot be that much yet, seriously? Not flaming you on this, maybe you are right but it sounds unrealistic. Spotify has decades of music stored, AI has been round with ability to generate tracks just for a few years. Something like 10% of it sounds more reasonable to me.

[–] _cryptagion@anarchist.nexus 5 points 1 month ago

Not even that. There’s decades of indie music from around the world on Spotify. I would be surprised if more than a few percent of the 200 million or so songs they scrapped metadata for are AI.

[–] hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

i believe they sorted by popularity so that the AI generated bullshits are mostly not included?

[–] kbobabob@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 month ago

So that's already a sanitized version to download?

Link please

[–] undefinedTruth@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] U7826391786239@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)

the best time to buy anything tech was 12 months ago. the second best time is right now, before prices get even worse, which they 100% will

[–] undefinedTruth@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Actually, the best time was around 4 months ago. I paid around $100 for my 2x16GB 6000 M/T CL30 DDR5 kit. The same kit right know costs over $500.

[–] dil@piefed.zip 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

yall keep saying that but prices were down not consistently going up

[–] U7826391786239@lemmy.zip -1 points 1 month ago

i was just saying you can pay $X now, or $X+whoknowshowmuch later.

it is true that the price of tech has historically gone down as technology advances, however, right now AI demands all the supply, which providers are only too happy to provide for. supply down = demand up = price up

at the end of the day it makes absolute zero difference to me whether you buy anything or not. do you

[–] m33@lemmy.zip 54 points 1 month ago

Let’s go for a 300TB USB key on AliExpress

[–] bonenode@piefed.social 38 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

Don't be too excited, guys:

Relatively popular songs are stored in their original 160kbit/s OGG Vorbis quality, while the rest use 75kbit/s to save hundreds of terabytes of storage.

75 kbit/s can sound pretty bad depending on the songs. If you listen to it on your phone speaker you probably won't notice, but this isn't for quality listening experience. Depends what they mean with popular though, maybe all "good" songs are stored in the higher bitrate.

[–] floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 43 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The only songs reencoded to that quality is a sample of the 0-streams songs, which do make up a lot of the total count.

Everything that has been listened to at least once is in high quality.

[–] hietsu@sopuli.xyz 19 points 1 month ago

0-popularity, not 0-streams, which are two different metrics according to the archive blog post. But nevertheless, the re-encoded stuff is stuff pretty much no one will miss. Also Opus at 75kbps is much better than Vorbis or mp3 at that bitrate.

[–] potustheplant@feddit.nl 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I've literally never been unable to find ogg, flac or mp3s for any album on Soulseek. Why is scraping Spotify even necessary?

[–] Mondez@lemdro.id 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

There is probably a lot of listening data that could be useful. Say you like a particular song, you could look at what other songs people who stream that do also streamed a lot?

[–] potustheplant@feddit.nl 2 points 1 month ago

True. An "open source" music discovery algorithm would be nice. They could've just scraped the metadata for that though.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What I've read is it's about: Preservation.

This aint just about piracy because free media.

[–] black0ut@pawb.social 5 points 1 month ago

And that's why I think it's an issue. The least popular tracks, which are the most likely ones to disappear from the internet, are the ones they store in the lowest quality. While I'm glad they made this huge effort for preservation, and understand the limitations of storage space, I also wish they would have at least preserved the original 160kbps streams.

[–] figjam@midwest.social 3 points 1 month ago

Oh no! The free music is not top tier quality for my ears!

Getoutahere

[–] alsaaas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I think the most interesting part is all the metadata. The audio quality is not fit for archival purposes, archives use e.g. flac

[–] dontblink@feddit.it 31 points 1 month ago

I feel like this will put them much more under the authorities target, music is much more sensible than books, simply because it moves more money..

Anyway I still am wondering how they managed to do this and how they still didn't get caught, there must be reeeally good devs there.

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 30 points 1 month ago (2 children)

If instead of a giant omnibus torrent they put a folder structure on IPFS, it would be essentially a fully available streaming Spotify clone with the ability for people to "pin" tracks or albums or artists to have them stay locally on their device...

Just saying...

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 month ago

You're right, but that's not their goal.

[–] XTL@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 month ago

Be the change you wish to see.

[–] Cherry@piefed.social 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Nice.

Would have been happy to pay but they just had to be a$$#oles

[–] FUCKING_CUNO@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 1 month ago

You can say assholes on the internet

[–] reksas@sopuli.xyz 17 points 1 month ago

why must every good site draw attention to themselves like this? Make alternative site for music if you must make such a spectacle out of it, so when the hammer falls it doesnt take out the books too. Or at least have some kind of plan on how to survive it, which i really hope they do.

[–] prismatic@ttrpg.network 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Very cool, though the quality leaves a bit to be desired.

For popularity>0, we got close to all tracks on the platform. The quality is the original OGG Vorbis at 160kbit/s. Metadata was added without reencoding the audio (and an archive of diff files is available to reconstruct the original files from Spotify, as well as a metadata file with original hashes and checksums).

For popularity=0, we got files representing about half the number of listens (either original or a copy with the same ISRC). The audio is reencoded to OGG Opus at 75kbit/s — sounding the same to most people, but noticeable to an expert.

[–] DavidDoesLemmy@aussie.zone 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I listen exclusively to 96kbps opus and it sounds perfect. Not sure if 75kbps would be noticeable.

[–] Spider89@piefed.social 5 points 1 month ago

I don't know if I have bad ears but I cannot hear the difference in 90K OPUS from FLAC.

[–] veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Call me when it's actually released. "We'll release the music in the future" is worth exactly as much content as "we'll release a Batgirl movie".

[–] potustheplant@feddit.nl 11 points 1 month ago

You don't need them to release anything. Just download soulseek and search for anything you want.