#last.fm is also useful

[synthshenanigans]

Finally has been a full year since I started listening

Fuckin hate that guy eugh

[pitchburgh]

Shuffle your 'On Repeat'/Favorites playlist and list the first 10 songs that play, then tag 10 people

I was tagged by @qualitystart 💕 thanks for thinking of me! It's rare that I do stuff like this, but it was fun!

1. Black Moth Super Rainbow - Bad Fuckin Times

2. JamiroquI - Cloud 9

3. Waveshaper & LukHash - Alive

4. Maethelvin - New Morning (Cartridge 1987 Remix)

5. The Moody Blues - Ride My See-Saw

6. Karl Vincent - Summer in Santa Tropica

7. Two Door Cinema Club - Sure Enough

8. Four Tet - Loved

9. Brand X - Unorthodox Behavior

10. Electronic Visions & Hello Meteor - Dana Point

I like to tag people who have shown up in my notifications recently - feel free to do this, or not! Always fun to hear about friends' music tastes.

@ @sharkbaitouhaha @smackalicious @permanent-placeholder @hobbitron-3000 @arcticsnow @airedelalmena @acommoncrow @joeynewgarden @iwillwiggleyourears @notthebigspoon @peniswentz

@beaniegender and @werewolfmack liked this now they're getting tagged too

[jade-of-mourning]

anyone want to talk about zalinki with me… someone please please somebody i need to talk about when death was mine i—

FLIRTING THE MOON DRIVES ME INSANE. CUTEST SONG EVER OMG. IT'S SO. AUHSDJHGBAJHSDG omgomgodsagbsdjhkgbkfjkn "but i'm holding out hope for her… that maybe she'll take me the way i am… one part asshole, dreamer, and sad little man" HELLO. and the ending!

WE RAN OUT THROUGH THE BACK DOOR. i'm actually giddy. makes me want to be in love sooooo bad like abhgfkhjbshgj. or like. crushing hard on someone idk. someone to be obsessed with and obsessed over in turn. the WOOO! makes me almost crash my bike every single time and look stupid. i want to be Yearning and bailing on socials. do you get it

apropos;;;;; ohhh the song you are (comfort & devastation in one) "won't you tell me where the bedbugs go?"

and OF COURSE lampshade king and peach yogurt… old tracks but better than before tbh, especially in the context of the full album. idk how i was sleeping on the line "i've got time to spend the afterlife with all of my friends" until now but i am no longer sleeping on it. the ultimate motivator indeed!

burns,,, the soundscape,,, literally putting it in my mouth… exhaust fumes & <3,,, the verses of insane…

AND SEAMLESS. "i totally understand" WHEN YOU PHRASE IT LIKE THAT I DO. I UNDERSTAND. that's actually me all the time,, i totally understand (i do not understand i can't understand it hurts to try and i'm tired)

off the topic of wdwm. problems,,, i want to draw animatics to it so bad and now i have a couple weeks off from school so we'll see if that happens. but like i'm so obsessed with his delivery on that song. make right is such an edible track. millennium compendium the POTENTIAL. over it is so brainworming. what about the children? is still one of my favorite zalinki tracks ever though, longlasting. also sorry i only finally just listened to waking up without fingers and it's… actually really quite devastating. i have to resist the urge to dig through the zalinki server that i've been in for the past four years for lore, because i'll be spending full days scrolling through texts if i do.

also macaroni sunshine is such a fun song i really do quite enjoy it.

anyway that's my zalinki propoganda brain dump of the day. i'm holding myself back. apologies to anyone who actually reads through this. it's driving me insane (haha get it? haha get it get it get it hahhahahhaha)

[cheddar-baby]

Hi baby name of cheddar what music have you been enjoying lately 🤓💐

What i've been listening to for the past week :)

[cosmogyros]

It means so much when your friends recommend you music.

I don't like most of the music my friends like, because I'm weird and old (even older in spirit than in body), but if someone tells me "You have to check out this song, it's my favorite!" I'm going to have soft feelings about that song even if it's not my jam.

One of my friends is a big Last.fm nerd like me, and we keep an eye on each other's pages, because even though our music taste only overlaps to a certain degree, we both like exploring music and discovering stuff that's new to us. So whenever our music compatibility drops below "Medium", I message him in a panic and we both quickly listen to some of the other person's recent music until we've brought our compatibility back up again.

And honestly, who cares if I don't always like his favorite stuff? I broadened my mind a bit and got to feel close to my friend in the process. And it warms my heart every time I check his page and see that he's been listening to some artists he must have got from me, and I hope vice versa is true too.

The other day, another friend mentioned a certain artist and I said "oh I've been meaning to check them out but their discography is intimidatingly huge - do you have any recommendations about where to start?" And he gave me the loveliest, most thoughtful answer, really kind of taking my hand and guiding me into the world of this artist.

And now I'm listening to the albums he mentioned, and let's be real: if I'd just stumbled on this on my own, I wouldn't have been too impressed. Would probably have hit skip pretty soon. But! Because my dear friend put this effort into considering which albums to recommend me, I'm really enjoying listening to them. He's in another country but I feel so close to him right now.

Or here's another example: as a rule I never listen to the Billboard Hot 100 or anything that's on the charts really, but a friend sent me a playlist she'd made and I listened to the whole thing. Wasn't wild about most of it, but there were two songs I really liked, and one was a song that's been all over the charts lately. And now every time I see it mentioned anywhere, I think of her and the playlist she sent me and the way I messaged her about that song like "omg this is a bop!" and she was like "right?!" And it makes me smile.

I guess this post has no real point. But I love feeling closer to my friends through sharing music ❤️

[heeleryuta]

i need to explore more black metal i cant keep listening to the same 4 bands and the same playlists over and over

[fencethetrader]

my last.fm profile is pretty much a nostalgic digital archive at this point. (i collect random musical acts to old endurance drivers for instance.)

do u guys collect stuff (irl)? tell me what u collect

[damxnbaird]

Death, taxes, Shinedown and hurts being in my top 5

[wintercityghsts]

figured out how to delete artists from last.fm

[theairc0nditionednightmare]

hate that there are all these cool websites that do something interesting w your spotify listening stats (like I think there's one that judges you off your music taste. I could be totally misremembering) and i wish us mp3/youtube/non spotify ppl got something like that. like, I want a website that judges me on my last.fm stats or to do something cool w em y'know?

[luminiera-merge]

last.fm's users sure are comfortable both interacting with and "pretending" to be nazis huh

[oflgtfol]

in my feels rn

[stellophiliac]

how to build a digital music collection and stuff

spotify sucks aaaass. so start downloading shit!!

file format glossary

.wav is highest quality and biggest

.mp3 is very small, but uses lossy compression which means it's lower quality

.flac is smaller than .wav, but uses lossless compression so it's high quality

.m4a is an audio file format that apple uses. that's all i really know

downloading the music

doubledouble.top is a life saver. you can download from a variety of services including but not limited to apple music, spotify, soundcloud, tidal, deezer, etc.

i'd recommend ripping your music from tidal or apple music since they're the best quality (i think apple music gives you lossless audio anyway. .m4a can be both lossy and lossless, but from the text on doubledouble i assume they're ripping HQ files off apple music)

i also love love love cobalt.tools for ripping audio/video from youtube (they support a lot of other platforms too!)

of course, many artists have their music on bandcamp — purchase or download directly from them if you can. bandcamp offers a variety of file formats for download

file conversion

if you're downloading from apple music with doubledouble, it spits out an .m4a file.

.m4a is ok for some people but if you prefer .flac, you may wanna convert it. ffmpeg is a CLI (terminal) tool to help with media conversion

if you're on linux or macOS, you can use parameter expansion to batch convert all files in a folder. put the files in one place first, then with your terminal, cd into the directory and run:

for i in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "${i%.*}.flac"; done

this converts from .m4a to .flac — change the file extensions if needed.

soulseek

another way to get music is through soulseek. soulseek is a peer-to-peer file sharing network which is mainly used for music. nicotine+ is a pretty intuitive (and open-source) client if you don't like the official one.

you can probably find a better tutorial on soulseek somewhere else. just wanted to make this option known

it's bad etiquette to download from people without sharing files of your own, so make sure you've got something shared. also try to avoid queuing up more than 1-2 albums from one person in a row

tagging & organizing your music

tagging: adding metadata to a music file (eg. song name, artist name, album) that music players can recognize and display

if you've ripped music from a streaming platform, chances are it's already tagged. i've gotten files with slightly incorrect tags from doubledouble though, so if you care about that then you might wanna look into it

i use musicbrainz picard for my tagging. they've got pretty extensive documentation, which will probably be more useful than me

basically, you can look up album data from an online database into the program, and then match each track with its file. the program will tag each file correctly for you (there's also options for renaming the file according to a certain structure if you're into that!)

there's also beets, which is a CLI tool for... a lot of music collection management stuff. i haven't really used it myself, but if you feel up to it then they've got extensive documentation too. for most people, though, it's not really a necessity

how you wanna organize your music is completely up to you. my preferred filestructure is:

artist > album > track # track

using a music player

the options for this are pretty expansive. commonly used players i see include VLC, foobar2000, clementine (or a fork of it called strawberry), and cmus (for the terminal)

you can also totally use iTunes or something. i don't know what audio players other systems come with

i personally use dopamine. it's a little bit slow, but it's got a nice UI and is themeable plus has last.fm support (!!!)

don't let the github page fool you, you don't have to build from source. you can find the releases here

click the "assets" dropdown on the most recent release, and download whichever one is compatible with your OS

syncing

if you're fine with your files just being on one device (perhaps your computer, but perhaps also an USB drive or an mp3 player), you don't have to do this

you can sync with something like google drive, but i hate google more than i hate spotify

you can get a free nextcloud account from one of their providers with 2GB of free storage. you can use webDAV to access your files from an app on your phone or other device (documents by readdle has webDAV support, which is what i use)

disroot and blahaj.land are a couple providers i know that offer other services as well as nextcloud (so you get more with your account), but accounts are manually approved. do give them a look though!!

if you're tech-savvy and have an unused machine lying around, look into self-hosting your own nextcloud, or better yet, your own media server. i've heard that navidrome is a pretty good audio server. i unfortunately don't have experience with self-hosting at the moment so i have like zero advice to give here. yunohost seems to be a really easy way to manage a server

afterword

i don't know if any of this is helpful, but i just wanted to consolidate my personal advice in one place. fuck big tech. own your media, they could take it away from you at any moment

[kutyozh]

not only langblr music resources

people irl often ask me where the heck i find the music i listen to, so i figured i might as well make a handy resource masterpost!

Radio Garden: Listen to radio stations all over the world. You can save your favourite stations, explore radio playlists, and search for stations in specific countries or cities. Love this one. You can download the app (android and apple) or listen via your preferred browser.

Radiooooo: Lets you choose a country, a decade, and a 'genre' (slow, fast, or weird) to listen to. You can download the app (android and apple) or listen via your preferred browser.

Charts: Charts can be tricky if you're looking for music in a specific language since there are multiple languages present in most country specific charts. It is nevertheless worth checking them out. Top 40 Charts or Popnable are your places to go. Popnable has some additional features like playlists that you can find in the "Discover" section.

beehype: Filter music by continent or country. Main page shows featured articles to browse.

Tunefind: Heard a song in a film or tv show that you enjoy but can't find it in the credits? This is the website for you! I use it when shazam fails me or when I'm at the cinema and can't use it or w/e. The songs sometimes come with a description of the corresponding scene for easy checking. Just very handy to have on hand.

Last.fm: Copy this link template: https://www.last.fm/tag/[nationality]/artists and replace [nationality] with a nationality you want to explore, e.g. "french", "chinese" etc.

Wikipedia: Type into the search bar "music of [country]", e.g. "music of slovakia", "music of botswana" etc.

Local events: Check for concerts etc. in your area. I know this is not an option for everyone for a bunch of reasons, but if it is for you, visiting local concerts can be a gold mine. I got like ten whole new songs in spanish and one in rapanui from one event I went to (it was like a culture fest with singing, dancing, and poetry). Also listening to live music just connects you differently to the art imo.

Friends & Acquaintances: Last but not least; sometimes my nosiness beats my social anxiety and I simply ask people what they like to listen to. If I'm being extra confident, I ask if they listen to music in languages other than english. Go forth and ask people about their music, go go go!!

Spotify specific recs:

Every Noise At Once: Sounds overwhelming - and tbh it can be. For this reason I personally prefer to look at 'Genres by Country', although there are many other interesting playlists to look at, such as 'We Built This City On' or 'The Sounds of Places'. You can find more if you scroll all the way to the bottom. Unfortunately, due to the layoff of the creator of this site, some features are not available anymore. This website is entirely based on Spotify.

Discover Quickly: This one might become a game changer for me personally. How it works: Log in with your spotify account. Choose one of your playlists, saved albums, followed artists etc. All relevant songs will show up as tiny thumbnails. You will hear a sample when hovering over them. Klicking on one of the thumbnails will lead you to the artist's overall releases as well as related artists. You can add your finds directly to a playlist!

LindsayDoesLanguages: Individual language playlists + more

Shameless self promo - my own account with individual language playlists. Also on YouTube !

700+ Languages: A playlist by Matthew Bofenkamp that contains one (1) song per language, and as it says on the tin, Matthew has so far collected songs in over 700 languages. Might be a good starting point for more music in your language of interest! Accompanying g0ogle spreadsheet with youtube links here.

One Song in Every Language: A community playlist by looky_dooky that aims to collect one song in every language. Everyone with a spotify account can contribute.

Another research tip: If you're on desktop, a good way to find language specific playlists is to go to any artist's profile and scroll down to the "Discovered on" section, then click "show all". Voilà!

(These showed up when I visited Haleluya Tekletsadik's page)

[gr0undswell]

it's so funny that it's not even close actually. coma cinema sweep

slayyy

[cosmogyros]

.