If artists would actually get paid fairly by Spotify that would be a good model.

Until about 100 years ago music artists would get paid for playing live only. Then music reproduction became possible, and lo and behold, companies started making a profit off of popular musicians by reproducing their music and taking a share, just because they could afford the technology.

Then, reproduction came into the hands of regular people, and you could reproduce music at home, bypassing the companies that profit off of the musicians. So copyright laws were drafted to protect mostly the companies making a profit off of musicians.

Now we're going back to the situation of 100 years ago: musicians need to play live to get paid. But reproduction does still make them famous without them having to travel. So that's a plus.

And you can argue Spotify has to.pay for infrastructure and app development, but that technology is in the hands of individuals as well nowadays. So what do they actually offer, on top of the work of creative people making music? Not much. Yet they become more expensive every year. And the only people getting richer are their shareholders.

I ditched most streaming services well over a year ago now, but Spotify has clung on because I have a playlist of around 2000 songs. I've set up Navidrome but now need to transfer all my music in the highest quality possible as efficiently as possible.

I tried lidarr some time ago, but it seemed to be based more around artists than individual songs and my indexer failed to find most of my library.

I've seen a couple of apps that will look at a playlist and then try to yt-dlp the song from YouTube but I'm worried about having a lower quality or different version. I've wondered if automating an "analog hole" type approach where I just pipe the audio of each song to a file and leave it playing overnight for a couple of weeks might actually be the best approach but that does seem a bit insane at this scale.

So what do they actually offer, on top of the work of creative people making music? Not much.

OK, so I left Spotify for Navidrome a while back BUT. What Spotify sells isn't music. Spotify sells curation and recommendations. Most people aren't music lovers that want to hunt for cool new music. They just want a pre-generated list of songs that they'll more or less like. That's actually kinda huge.

A recommendation engine is something I wish fediverse or open source would tackle. I'm on Navidrome now, but I'm definitely listening to way less music now—access isn't an issue—I just haven't had time to hunt around for new music. Investigating new bands takes time. On Spotify, you do it without even really thinking about it.

So what do they actually offer, on top of the work of creative people making music? Not much.

OK, so I left Spotify for Navidrome a while back BUT. What Spotify sells isn't music. Spotify sells curation and recommendations. Most people aren't music lovers that want to hunt for cool new music. They just want a pre-generated list of songs that they'll more or less like. That's actually kinda huge.

A recommendation engine is something I wish fediverse or open source would tackle. I'm on Navidrome now, but I'm definitely listening to way less music now—access isn't an issue—I just haven't had time to hunt around for new music. Investigating new bands takes time. On Spotify, you do it without even really thinking about it.

I ditched most streaming services well over a year ago now, but Spotify has clung on because I have a playlist of around 2000 songs. I've set up Navidrome but now need to transfer all my music in the highest quality possible as efficiently as possible.

I tried lidarr some time ago, but it seemed to be based more around artists than individual songs and my indexer failed to find most of my library.

I've seen a couple of apps that will look at a playlist and then try to yt-dlp the song from YouTube but I'm worried about having a lower quality or different version. I've wondered if automating an "analog hole" type approach where I just pipe the audio of each song to a file and leave it playing overnight for a couple of weeks might actually be the best approach but that does seem a bit insane at this scale.

So what do they actually offer, on top of the work of creative people making music? Not much.

OK, so I left Spotify for Navidrome a while back BUT. What Spotify sells isn't music. Spotify sells curation and recommendations. Most people aren't music lovers that want to hunt for cool new music. They just want a pre-generated list of songs that they'll more or less like. That's actually kinda huge.

A recommendation engine is something I wish fediverse or open source would tackle. I'm on Navidrome now, but I'm definitely listening to way less music now—access isn't an issue—I just haven't had time to hunt around for new music. Investigating new bands takes time. On Spotify, you do it without even really thinking about it.

Ytdlp works with Spotify too iirc, and there are Spotify downloaders out there too.

Here's the not really legal way I have heard of

1. Get a Deezer trail and cancle the sub right after. Migrate your relevant playlists to Deezer.
2. Use Deemix to download the playlist any anything you are interested in in the quality you desire. Make sure the DL settings are also what you want.
   You can also use other tools to download from Qobuz.
3. (Optional) Use Musicbrainz to identify and tag your files with unique IDs. You can also use custom scripts to give the artist field seperate entries for every artist. Makes it more convenient then separation by a ; or something. You can use ChatGPT for the script.
4. (Still optional) Import the music to a Lidarr instance for better management and automatic naming. The IDs make this step easier. This allows you too track new or missing releases from artists.
5. Import to Navidrome.

The optional steps can be more involved and need a lot of manual work. Also, the migration to Deezer will have issues, it's not perfect.

If you want lyrics, I recommend using LRCGET or importing to Jellyfin and using it's lyric plugin to automatically download them that way. The app SongSync on android also allows downloading lyrics automatically and manually from a variety is sources, including Apple and Spotify. Not on FDroid or Play, use GitHub or IzzyOnDroid.

As for a music player on android, I'm currents trying Symfonium. Not FOSS and actually paid, but so far it's the best I have seen.

EDIT: Minor clarification.

You can script download stuff via Soulseek. There's a script on the sidebar of [email protected]

Ytdlp works with Spotify too iirc, and there are Spotify downloaders out there too.

You are only going to be able to get 320 mp3s from Spotify at the very best, I use soggfy to intercept the audio and rip the tracks so you need to let the playlists run (although you can up the speed they play at) and there will also consequently be some organisation needed of the files afterwards so it is far from automated but works fairly well.

A lot of the tools around take your playlists and find what it thinks are the correct tracks on YouTube and then rip from there so be wary of the quality you might get from those.

I compared a track I ripped from Spotify with a 320 mp3 of the same track I had bought with a spectrometer (I think that is the correct name) and they looked identical

You know the songs on Spotify are not yours, right? You were just renting them?

I'm not saying you shouldn't try to collect them now for use in Navidrome, but calling them "your songs" is just grating on me for some reason.

Also, I am a Spotify subscriber and just now tried to use yt-dlp with it but got this error:

ERROR: [DRM] The requested site is known to use DRM protection. It will NOT be supported. Please DO NOT open an issue, unless you have evidence that the video is not DRM protected

Theres tools like Zotify (and I am sure several others) to directly download the music files from Spotify.
No need to get yet another subscription.
They may not be lossless but who really cares when the first priority is getting away from it at all.

What good is it to rip the audio?
Use tools like zotify to just dl the stuff.

Don't be a leech and download several thousands of songs from other without sharing.
If you don't share back, at least only get hard to aquire content.

In my experience, most of these tools usually only search the equivalent song on YouTube ans download it from there. Which can cause some trouble when the algorithm finds some cover etc instead of the original thing.
Plus the lossless issue. For me personally, it was easier to just get the better version outright instead of upgrading afterwards.

Don't be a leech and download several thousands of songs from other without sharing.
If you don't share back, at least only get hard to aquire content.

Soggfy was just the first thing I tried that worked without crawling for shitty yt downloads of the same things and so I stuck with it. If the audio quality is the same then I really don't see what difference it makes in the grand scheme of things.

I will try out zotify so thanks for the name but it isn't like it will be any quicker as I'll still do everything in "real time" as I want to maintain my account and not get banned as it is a family plan and I don't want to negatively impact the other people that use the same plan.

Also I know people love to use command line but soggfy is just a modified Spotify client so I can just open it up and start what I need in a couple of clicks

In my experience, most of these tools usually only search the equivalent song on YouTube ans download it from there. Which can cause some trouble when the algorithm finds some cover etc instead of the original thing.
Plus the lossless issue. For me personally, it was easier to just get the better version outright instead of upgrading afterwards.

I ditched most streaming services well over a year ago now, but Spotify has clung on because I have a playlist of around 2000 songs. I've set up Navidrome but now need to transfer all my music in the highest quality possible as efficiently as possible.

I tried lidarr some time ago, but it seemed to be based more around artists than individual songs and my indexer failed to find most of my library.

I've seen a couple of apps that will look at a playlist and then try to yt-dlp the song from YouTube but I'm worried about having a lower quality or different version. I've wondered if automating an "analog hole" type approach where I just pipe the audio of each song to a file and leave it playing overnight for a couple of weeks might actually be the best approach but that does seem a bit insane at this scale.