Struggling to find a lot of music with Lidarr (New/Recent/Modern). Have a few general public/private trackers set up but still not getting many hits. From what I gather Usenet isn’t much better. And I’m not really confident in transcoding, bit rates, etc… to attempt an interview.
Basically what are my options? Is there something I’m missing or is music just getting harder to find?
If you’re familiar with What.CD and its shutdown, the power users and their local copy of that music archive moved over to redacted.ch (stats) and orpheus.network (stats). They’re private torrent trackers so they’re invite-only, but TMK they both still offer interviewing as an entry option: RED, OPS. The interviews mostly consist of technical audio information and private tracker rules. The main downside is that these trackers expect you to seed an equal amount back, so you don’t get a free pass to download everything without limits. Of the two, Orpheus is a lot easier to maintain “ratio” on since it gives you incremental credit just for having a large seedbase (even if no one is downloading from you). Ideally you should be on both if you’re serious about music collecting, but these days they are largely just mirrors of each other.
If you don’t want to get dirty in the private tracker world, I’d recommend Soulseek and RuTracker.
I’m just not confident that I’d be able to pass an interview with either of them. No issue with rules or ratios, I simply don’t have enough time to study up on the technicals. I used to be on a decent tracker years ago, but didn’t pay enough attention when they shut down and missed out on the open invites.
I’ve tried RuTracker in the past but it hasn’t worked very well for me so far. Soulseek sounds interesting, especially if they get a Lidarr integration working.
There’s no soulseek integration yet, but that would be a game changer, the collections in there are incredible, especially when trying to find EPs, singles and rarities. We’ve been waiting for a good long while though.
In the meantime, it’s a lot of work to build a collection, even with lidarr, torrents, semi-private, private trackers and usenet.
For soulseek, I’d recommend setting a blackhole torrent client that points to the soulseek download folder, them always make sure you download the folder not the files from the share. That will make importing the files a lot easier into lidarr if you choose to keep that as your centralized download tool.
There are also extended scripts for lidarr that will pull music from various sources as well.
It’s really not that bad, both interviews are nearly identical, and both sites provide all the study material necessary. If you really want to get sneaky, you an look up the questions in advance. You get a reasonable time to answer, and an unlimited number of attempts. OPS I passed immediately, RED failed me the first time but passed the second. 50-60% of the answers I had no clue about before reading the study material. The worst part is waiting for an interviewer / the queue to get a test, but they’ve got systems to keep your place in queue as well.