this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2026
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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I know this is kind of baby pirate knowledge but ive always just used a downloader for my streaming service. I have since moved to Linux entirely (massive win BTW, patting myself on the back for that) but there is no Linux-compatible downloader for my specific service. At least not one with the bulk functionality I would like. Any downloaders for Tidal or other sources of high-quality audio, likely to have some relatively niche old death metal? I'm a nerd about the quality.

edit: Just looked at the megathread and there seems to be some tools compatible with Tidal. Regardless, are there any applications that are alternatives? I'd like to see ALL of my options <3

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[–] nkk@programming.dev 42 points 1 month ago
[–] Ilandar@lemmy.today 31 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Use Soulseek (you don't have to use their app, there are alternatives like Nicotine+). Free yourself from a reliance on streaming platforms.

[–] dan@upvote.au 17 points 1 month ago (11 children)

If you have a home server, slskd is very good. Modern web UI and there's plugins to integrate it into Lidarr (Tubifarry)

[–] Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works 3 points 4 weeks ago

X2. It can be a little janky because other people's naming conventions are terrible but it's a pretty great setup.

[–] GFGJewbacca@midwest.social 1 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

As soon as you said "Lidarr," you had my undivided attention. I'm definitely giving this a try

[–] dan@upvote.au 1 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

Make sure you're on the "develop" branch of Lidarr, as the stable one doesn't have the plugins feature. If you're using Docker, use the "develop" tag instead of "latest" (lscr.io/linuxserver/lidarr:develop).

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[–] nevetsg@aussie.zone 1 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I have slskd running as a server but hate it's search function. I will have to investigate this Lidarr plugin.

[–] dan@upvote.au 1 points 4 weeks ago

Using it through Lidarr just uses the search feature in slskd, so it might not make it much better.

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[–] chrisbit@leminal.space 15 points 1 month ago (3 children)
[–] cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I clicked on new to see what it had and saw the new album by a popular American rapper. I hit the download button, and inside of 30 seconds, it gave me a handful of FLAC files in a ZIP folder. Fed them to fre:ac, the metadata is good; however, it had the ARTIST tag copied to the ALBUMARTIST tag, which made the output a little messy (I have it output to ALBUMARTIST(YEAR) ALBUM), but I was able to expand all the folders, dump the m4a files I made into mp3tag, and straighten them up. Album cover was embedded and 1280x1280. No ads in the comments or even the filename of the zip file.

Bookmarked.

Oh, I also searched for an obscure(ish) Japanese band I like. It had most of their stuff. Not all, and not my favourite song by them, but it had a lot of stuff.

FYI to others, if you see the [HD] tag on something, I'm thinking that means they have it in FLAC, as opposed to MP3 or AAC/M4A. Though unless you have really good ears and/or an expensive hi-fi system, I doubt most of you can tell my m4a output from the flac input. If you can, I hope you have enough hard drives to support your collection. I don't need FLAC, but I'll use it to get the best possible sound at roughly a quarter to half the filesize (I use aac low complexity at the highest bitrate fre:ac supports).

[–] dan@upvote.au 4 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

It's even open-source! Nice site.

it had the ARTIST tag copied to the ALBUMARTIST tag

This isn't wrong though - it's a proper use of both tags. I think most of my music has both tags populated.

That site is pulling from Tidal, which is why the tags are good. All the legit streaming sites have well-tagged files.

[–] cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

No, those two tags are not the same. ARTIST is everyone performing on the track. ALBUMARTIST is who the album is credited to. So for example Santana's Supernatural, from the 1990s. The song "Smooth" that everyone knows. ARTIST would be something like Santana / Rob Thomas, or Santana feat. Rob Thomas, whereas ALBUMARTIST would be Santana.

Let me put it another way — do you want five copies of an album because four songs have collaborations? So one album is all the solo stuff, one album has one song with one collaboration, and so on... or do you want one copy of the album with all the songs on it as they appear on the album itself?

[–] dan@upvote.au 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Sorry, I didn't mean to say they're the same. I meant to say that if all songs on an album are by one artist, the Artist and Album Artist will be identical. This is the case the majority of the time.

The major exceptions are collaborations (like you said), and compilations (which have "Various Artists" as the Album Artist)

[–] cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 weeks ago

Oh, yeah, if there are no collaborations or additional artists to name, then yes, they will be the same, for sure. And even though it seems redundant, I still have ALBUMARTIST filled in).

[–] Kirk@startrek.website 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What's going on here? Is it just pulling from someone's Tidal account?

[–] dan@upvote.au 5 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (2 children)

Yes. The search results and music files are coming directly from Tidal, using someone else's account. If you look in the network tab in the browser's dev tools, you'll see requests to Tidal.

Interesting design, since it's trivial for Tidal to block something like this - they can see that the requests are coming from that site. I'm surprised they haven't blocked it.

[–] UndergroundParking@lemmy.cafe 3 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

If you see requests to tidal in your browser - they're not going there from the server, are they :)

[–] dan@upvote.au 2 points 4 weeks ago

Tidal would be seeing their site URL in the referer for the network requests.

[–] Kirk@startrek.website 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

They must be doing some voodoo since Tidal doesn't let you use the same account for multiple concurrent streams.

[–] dan@upvote.au 1 points 3 weeks ago

My guess is that they'd have a pool of accounts, and cache the most popular songs rather than streaming them from Tidal every time.

[–] dan@upvote.au 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Usenet. Plenty of music in lossless (FLAC) format. Use NZBGeek and DrunkenSlug as indexers. Sabnzbd to download. Lidarr and Prowlarr to automate everything. Add an artist, click to download an album, and it'll search for the album, download the NZB file, send it to Sabnzbd to download, then tag and organize the files once it's done downloading.

For music I'd just get a block account: https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki/providerdeals/. Essentially, you pay for some amount of data (can usually get 1TB for US$5-15), and they usually don't have an expiry date, so it could last you for years. Some providers have monthly plans with unlimited data, but a block account will end up way cheaper if you just want music.

For rarer music, Soulseek is very good. It's a peer-to-peer service from the KaZaA and Napster era, but somehow it's survived until now. Since it's peer to peer, downloads are quite a bit slower (you're relying on the upload speed of individual users - each download comes from only one user) but it's a great community.

[–] alakey@piefed.social 11 points 1 month ago

fmhy.net for all your sailing needs.

[–] webkitten@piefed.social 10 points 1 month ago

Nicotine (soulseek) for rare stuff or live stuff is great; yt-dlp for popular stuff from popular music services. There's also ytDownloader for a GUI interface.

[–] LemonLicker999@piefed.blahaj.zone 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Soulseek and lucida.to are the best of the best

[–] Reznik@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Wait! lucida is still alive?

Definitely don't have a downloads folder full of rips rn! (Also, don't forget to support ur fav artists on Bandcamp btw :3)

[–] LemonLicker999@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

No shot someone's tryna DDOS the site rn 💀 It's so childish

[–] pelikan@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 4 weeks ago

relatively niche old death metal

I have no idea how much it should be "relatively niche" and "old" but here's a few sources i'm using myself for such type of content:

https://metalarea.org/forum/

https://en.metal-tracker.com/

https://deathgrind.club/

https://in-the-fog.ru/

https://vk.com/sbdm_community

Most of them require a sign-up

[–] Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Fun fact: you can write a Bash script to run yt-dlp on a playlist without much scripting skill

[–] unknownuserunknownlocation@kbin.earth 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

yt-dlp already supports downloading playlists. If it doesn't work for a specific site, you might as well write it in python and contribute it to yt-dlp directly, that way everyone else can benefit as well.

Mind you, yt-dlp has a strict policy against cracking DRM, so I have my doubts as to if it will work with Tidal in the first place.

[–] dan@upvote.au 3 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

yt-dlp has a strict policy against cracking DRM

This is how it stays legal in the USA. Bypassing DRM is a DMCA violation (section 1201), but just downloading freely-available content is totally legal.

Its predecessor, youtube-dl, was subject to DMCA takedowns from the RIAA, and they had to get the EFF to help. yt-dlp doesn't want to experience the same issues.

[–] marci@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 month ago

I use tidal-dl-ng, simple python gui app you can compile yourself or even just run in the debugger.

[–] Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 2 points 1 month ago

I normally use Deemix-GUI to download from Deezer, or fire up Nicotine.

[–] turangaleela@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 weeks ago

I've had about half my music on an SD card for the last 10 years but now I've finally canceled my streaming subscriptions and am comitting to having everything on there, are there any good front end apps for that? Rn I use poweramp but it's playlist making options are awful.

Also sorry if this is the wrong place to ask, if so please just point me to the right place

[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 weeks ago
[–] hexagonwin@lemmy.today 1 points 1 month ago

i think orpheusdl works for deezer/tidal/qobuz. you can also try running your windows-based downloader program under wine, it might actually run really well

[–] hurtn@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 weeks ago

https://github.com/NickvisionApps/Parabolic/releases

this is great for downloading from apple music, youtube music, ect