I’m coming into this area as a practical and philosophical result of:

  1. me wanting to own my music
  2. CDs are barely being made
    2.1. If they are - they’re not being shipped to my corner of the world
  3. Torrenting often failed me in terms of variety.

However - I am absolutely ignorant about equipment, maintainance, and know-hows of the audiophile world.

  • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
    28·
    18 days ago

    Another perspective:

    1. You can own your own music in many more formats than just vinyl.
    2. CDs are still being made, and cheap. Second hand CD trade is huge, and they are always cheaper than vinyl to buy and ship. Digital ownership is even cheaper (eg Bandcamp), and the same or higher quality.
    3. RuTracker has an enormous collection of FLAC well-seeded, as do other sites (but they require invites). Soulseek has an enormous collection and requires no account.

    Regarding equipment just get some good speakers and an amp, you’ll need that regardless of what format you end up getting your music in.

    Vinyl is often a trap. Expensive, fragile, degrades, difficult to resell unless you live in a big city (postage & packing), and the quality is ultra subjective and varies wildly between pressings. Just look up a couple of popular albums you know on Discogs or rateyourmusic and browse the comments see what they cost and how many people bring up complaints on pressings.

    I’m all CD and FLAC and loving it. Bandcamp is my first port of call, then CD (new or second-hand), torrent if rare or OOP or unavailable anywhere I frequent.

    Something else that may help - if you really think vinyl will sound better, enormous FLAC rips (2GB+) of popular high quality pressings in 192kHz/24-48bit rips are not uncommon on torrent and Slsk - vinyl enthusiasts often make a high quality digital capture of their purchases while the vinyl is new, so that they have a near-new copy in case their vinyl ever degrades with wear - or simply so they can use digital for convenience, but keep the analog hiss and increased frequency range of vinyl pressings. Best of both worlds.

    (Edit: rutracker, not rutorrent)

    • ReginaPhalange@lemmy.worldOP
      3·
      19 days ago

      Thank you for the soulseek tip, never heard of it, will try.

      So far, DDGing RuTorrent tell me it just another torrenting client. Do people mean the russian site called rutracker when they say RuTorrent?

      • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
        1·
        18 days ago

        Oh yeah my bad, i meant rutorrent. The site is in Russian but easy enough to navigate as it uses the same forum template as a lot of sites, band names are all in original language so searching is simple enough. I sometimes use a translation browser extension to help.

    • WhirlpoolBrewer@lemmy.world
      1·
      19 days ago

      As someone who is flirting with the idea of attempting to own my media, I have a question for you. If I couldn’t find a torrent for some song I wanted, is there a recommended tool or path for “collecting” my own version of a song? I don’t see myself getting into such a situation where I want some super obscure song, but knowing I have a path for getting a version from one of the major streaming services to bridge any gap I come across would be nice. Where would one go to learn how to safely collect rare/difficult to torrent music files?

      • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
        2·
        3 days ago

        Oh hey, sorry I just remembered I never replied to this.

        If you have a song in mind that you can’t find anywhere - which definitely happens sometimes, no matter the artist - then you can always grab a copy to keep locally as long as they have it streaming somewhere eg Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc. The quality will only be whatever the streaming provider offers, but it’s usually good enough if it’s nowhere else.

        So for instance YouTube has heaps of easy to use downloader apps such as Grayjay, yt-dl/yt-dlg on desktop pc. Or if on android there’s ‘yt-dl kivy’ on the IzzyOnDroid repo for F-Droid, or Grayjay, or Gyawun Music.

        If you need advice for downloading from specific platforms there are plenty of Lemmy communities that have knowledgeable people like the piracy community on dbzer0. This is their wiki - https://wiki.dbzer0.com/piracy/megathread/music/

        P. S. its not a bad idea to download streaming files only from a VPN by the way, just in case you get your IP blocked by the service (very rare and usually temporary, but i thought I’d mention).

        • WhirlpoolBrewer@lemmy.world
          2·
          9 hours ago

          Man, love all the options 🤣 I assumed there would be one or two, but it seems we have tons of options. Thanks for the great info!