Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Spotify is dirt cheap for me(Less than a dollar per month) and I really like the recommendations.

But if they pull a Netflix then I'll just leave.

Deemix is how I get access to .flac downloads. Yea, I still am paying for Deezer, but it's also technically still piracy. I have 345.7 GiB of music downloaded currently on my NAS and I play it with DeadBeeF or foobar2k if I'm on Windows.

I'd love to hear about any places to look for this. I sometimes want to download some favourite songs, just in case they go down on any music services or youtube.

I used yt-dl for downloading, but since I have a decent flat, I switched to just using yt music with adblocker or revanced.

What benefits do torrents of music provide over just downloading from yt?

I personally download YouTube videos, convert them to MP3 and then add metadata to them.

I feel there is room for improvement over the soulseek network, though that's about the best there is right now. It doesn't take advantage of downloading from multiple peers (like torrents), quality is good in practice but hard to be sure until you listen, and is missing rare / non-western music.

While streaming apps offer a decent value, I don't like the level of lock in. I have music from CDs and other sources that are a first class part of my library, and using only a streaming app would make them harder to access.

finding FLAC or WAV with active seeders feels like striking gold

Not if you're on the right tracker(s)...really should try and get into RED and/or Orpheus.

I really like Apple Music. Actually supports lossless, unlike Spotify, and it just feels much more music focused. Spotify has become too bloated, and I view it more as a "sound" app than a music app.