I am using Lidarr, so the pool of options is somewhat limited. Naturally it would be preferable to have access to one or two private trackers, such as Redacted or Orpheus, but life is what it is (invites are understandably hard to come by).
Don't despair if search results carry a [private] prefix. Some of these people just got frustrated once upon a time and decided to whitelist peers rather than blacklist. Often they just want a polite PM asking for access. It pays to be inquisitive, so check their User Info for information.
Chat rooms don't need to be occupied to obtain or download search results. In fact it's usually better to ignore them.
99 per cent of users would rather you share 3 albums than 500 system files.
I'm hosting slskd and Lidarr on Unraid and pretty much only using slskd as a download client. That way I can use Lidarr to rename/organize/tag everything like I want. Only drawback is still having to download stuff from the slskd web ui and then go back to Lidarr, so some of the automation benefits are lost. But soulseek has provided better quality and access to the music i'm looking for, so it's been worth it.
Soulseek is cool but I've found a lot of the flacs on it to just be transcoded. (You can check with spectral analysis, frequencies dont extend all the way to 22 kHz)
Thanks for this - I was completely unaware of Soalseek.
I now have it installed, with the necessary port forwarding in place, seems relatively straightforward to use. Unfortunately the (perhaps obscure) artists I’m looking for are not well serviced, but I presume it’s a case of checking back from time to time.
Honestly I gotta second SLSK here. More specifically nicotine+ since it's better. That and yt-dlp works on bandcamp and youtube music (if this whole youtube bullshit hasn't fucked it up, I haven't checked but I also haven't noticed the outcry I'd expect.)
It's not torrenting but for music it's better. Protip, slap just over 1k files in your "shares" folder to evade the autoban jerks.
What is shared is less important than "whatever it is" just being shared. The bans are usually automated plugins that check your files when you dl from the user and if it returns
(note this is different from the other rutracker so make sure it's .org) is a Russian tracker with a lot. From what I've seen, most of their flac is from Quboz but I mostly go for popular stuff so idk about about more niche music.
Honestly, even though it's a pain, it might be worth it to just bite the bullet and try for the Redacted interview. I've been thinking of this for myself.