#last.fm is also useful

[deonideatta]

All of you complaining in the notes should just download Stats.fm for Spotify lol it gives you far more info on your music habits than wrapped, perhaps most notably the actual number of times you've played a song, ranked by plays or minutes (your choice), no algorithmy stuff

"for the most part" please i knew something was off (x)

[synthshenanigans]

Finally has been a full year since I started listening

Fuckin hate that guy eugh

[shitvixxsay]

most played vixx songs (insp)

[violasmirabiles]

anyway. theres a chance i might get to see nothing but thieves in helsinki for fucking free in february. brother and sister in law have tickets but shes gonna wait and see how she feels then cos shes gonna be seven months pregnant at that point and hes the one whos Hyped for this. i suggested a couple months back that i could go with him if she decides against it and it was a joke because we all know im broke as shit but. the two of them are very much Not broke as shit and theyre good people (fork found in the kitchen level news theyre great people and i love them). genuinely hope sister in law feels well enough to go but also this would 100% be one of those Legendary Stories their kid would hear about forever. also itd be the first time ever that the brother and i would do something like this with it being just the two of us which would certainly be an Experience

[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 ❤️

[sleepyjim]

can we blease shut up about spotify wrap for like . One Minute

[heeleryuta]

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

[showyoumyfavoriteobsession]

I've been moving back to local music and I've done my best but of course some of the album art gets kind of borked and this is my favorite so far

[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

[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

[haveyoulistenedtothisalbum-poll]

Something I was curious about, for the Spotify users in the audience:

If you don't know what your Obscurify rating is, you can check that on the website here plus it gives you some other fun insights about your recent listening!

If you don't regularly vote in these polls, please select the first option! I'm curious about the viewership of this blog only! Too much outside voting, and we'll just end up skewing back to the general distribution.

If you don't use Spotify, please also select the first option. Like most other obscurity meters, Obscurify also trends toward a userbase with higher obscurity scores since those are the people who are most likely to want to check their scores, but because its userbase is so much bigger than other tools (like last.fm Mainstream Factor), it's the best thing I can think of for this and keeps voting consistent.

Use your own discretion when selecting what country you're comparing yourself to:

If you listen to mostly English language music/music from Anglophone countries, it would probably make more sense to pick the country where most of the music you listen to comes from (or finds most of their audience) regardless of where you live.

But if you listen to music primarily from countries outside of that sphere, you can choose the corresponding country or your own if different (or the US if not from the US) and select the score that best fits your experiences with your music taste.

[prettyokwizard]

tagged by @good-wine-and-cheese to make a poll with your top 10 spotify on repeat~~✨

full disclosure I don't have spotify so these are just records from from the last 3 months I've had on last.fm! (except the joji song, but I know for a fact it's on my most repeated no questions asked)

Tags now? Uhh anyone who sees this and wants to do it! (But also looking at you @blindpapers and @winterjart)