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you’re hearing it more and more

Spotify Premium ad: “Imagine playing music without interruptions!
Infinite skipping! Replay the song you want! And even do it offline? No ads! Whatever songs you want! For a small monthly payme-”
Me: *nods, turns off Spotify and turns on my MP3 player and does all the things they offer, but for free and with songs they don’t even have*

For those of you who might not know how to do any of this:

• To convert CD audio into mp3s, you just follow the steps here
• To play mp3 files, you download an mp3 player like Winamp here and away you go
• On mobile? There are plenty of free mp3 players for your phone available, too, so check them out

You don’t need to be tethered to an online streaming service for your music. Be free.

You can also rip audio files from youtube and find files all over the internet. It is far easier to come across great and lesser known music if you dont limit yourself to spotify.

Here’s a tutorial on how to get the music and playlists you like with unlimited listening/downloads. This is a free way to do it that I believe is a balance between cost, time, and pros & cons:

If you have the CDs, it will be easier to rip them. Most music managers include this feature and you will have all the track information loaded into the file. There are also pirate websites where you can download entire albums with their metadata attached, but there could be risks associated (I would worry more about viruses than lawsuits these days, though). Deciding a method for acquiring music is a balance of the required time, the alternative costs, and other pros/cons like supporting the artist or taking the risk of pirating sites.

1. Find the song on Youtube. YT has pretty much every song at this point, usually in comparable quality to what you would get on a streaming service.

This is great if you already listen to music on Youtube, but there might be a better method for going direct from Spotify, though this will work either way. The main downside to this method is that official music (and even lyric) videos sometimes have non-music portions so you might have to listen to the whole thing to be sure. SponsorBlock will highlight non-music sections for most artists, so if you have it installed you can tell at a glance if this is the case.

2. Download the audio from YT. There are many ways to download YT videos completely for free. It’s probably against the YT terms of service, but you’re not going to get sued.

I like y2mate for downloading YT videos (or their audio in mp3s) because it’s a simple, ad-free website. You just paste in the URL for the video you want to download. Sometimes it’s laggy and you have to come back later, but usually after a few moments the video loads, you select your download quality (the highest), and then save it. For easy file management, download everything in folders for the Artist, and then sub folders for the Album, and name the MP3 file the “song name”.mp3.

3. Upload to your music player/manager of choice. The file will currently be lacking metadata (Artist, Album, track number, etc) and will be added to the library as a song with its title set as the file name minus its .mp3 extension. Various music players/managers have different ways to add metadata (usually accessed by right-clicking the song) with varying ease.

iTunes is free and and logical if you have an iPhone, but limited in its capabilities. I do all my management/listening in MusicBee (free for Windows) because of its playlist and management features, as well as having a very customizable interface. You can set it to scan the folders you download music to so it will automatically load things into your library, or do so manually. Once loaded into MusicBee, you can batch edit an entire album’s metadata at once easily with Auto-Tagging. Auto-Tag can fetch the details from the internet and fill in artist, tracks, album artwork, etc and save that information to the mp3 file. You can edit this manually if needed too. Drag and drop the edited songs to any other player you may want to add them to so it can find the files.

4. Now you can use the player of your choice to listen endlessly, form playlists, etc. Some free music managers also have music discovery/recommendation features for expanding your collection.

MusicBee allows you to create playlists with folders, subfolders, and dynamic features. You can export these playlists for cross-platform play on other computers with MusicBee installed. I think the playlist features on MusicBee are better than what is on streaming services. You can create an auto-playlist of your recently-added music so you can easily find the ones that are new and might need need editing, adding to other playlists, etc. I have custom tags for music by LGBT artists, sapphic love songs, and more. I also drag-and-drop these playlists directly into iTunes so I have them on my phone too (you can do this to make a new playlist or just edit/add songs to a current one).

There are many music managers/players, including cross-platform ones with streaming, though they usually have fees for that feature. Because you aren’t streaming the music and rather storing it, you’ll need space on each device you want to play the music on, but memory is cheap these days.

You can buy a 2TB external harddrive for less than Spotify or Youtube Premium costs for six months, so having to store the songs isn’t much of a downside. Plus, the song will never “leave the service”, you can listen to it offline, etc.

I do encourage people to pay for art, especially from small, independent artists. You have to pay for art if you want to keep it alive, but there is debate over if streaming services are really “paying the artist”. Alternatives include buying and ripping CDs, purchasing merch or tour tickets (where artists make a lot of their money), etc to support them with something other than streaming views.

ID. a tweet from Don Hughes @/getfiscal dated Feb 18 21. it reads, “Started imagining paying for Spotify for the next thirty or so years and got a bit dizzy, cancelled a bunch of subscriptions, installed Linux on my computer and then pulled out my old CDs to rip. Going caveman.” End ID.

Seconding MusicBee! Also, you can use a library subscription to access Freegal, which allows (depending on your library system) up to five free downloads a week. Completely free, actually legal, yours to keep, no DRM or any crap like that.

For indie producers, always check if they have something like Bandcamp! Bandcamp lets you download as well, and has significantly higher royalties going to the actual artists (Spotify pays them… very little).

Jsyk, winamp rips cds natively.  You can set whatever bitrate you like.  Been doing *that* since last century. 

please dont use the official winamp app. Use Wacup instead, it doesn’t have all the malware and tracking of the official app, and brings back the retro winamp interface.

Musicbee is also good and simple. foobar2000 is great but a pain in the ass to set up

https://getwacup.com/

The version of winamp I’m using is actually winamp5, the original older than shit build and it may accidentally fall out of my pockets for any interested parties to pick up.

Tumblr reblog chains are in danger.

It seems that the staff is actually going to go forward with their decision to remove reblog chains, where reblogs will basically work like regular comments on other websites.

This doesn't just make the site completely unusable, it removes the soul of the community that has managed to build up here over the years, and that I'm so happy to have recently joined.

It makes impossible the creation of great posts where many people build up a single thing, until it is a gem of expressed human creativity.

There will be no more world heritage posts, no more messing around with your mutuals, no posts worth remembering.

There will be no more Tumblr, and the Tikblr or TumbTube or whatever monstrosity is born from its corpse will soon die, as is probably the best. And then there will never be another place like this on the internet, no place anymore to run to, no more fun, no more community.

I recommend a simple course of action. When these changes get imposed upon us, stop using Tumblr. Get your mutuals' discords, your favourite artists' websites, and leave. If the Tumblr we have once known returns, we well too. If not, better let it die quickly than suffer a long and painful decline.

I beg you to reblog this, for the more people see it, the higher chanses are for this to work.

And add something, so we can show them what Tumblr is really for.

All of the funny or legendary posts you see reposted on other sites are almost always reblog chains. Seeing those posts on Pinterest is what brought me here to begin with!!! I understand wanting to stay competitive and keep the site afloat, but the best way to do that is to keep things the way they are!!! We like it this way!!! And if you do want to implement changes, take into account the things PEOPLE ARE ACTUALLY ASKING FOR!!!! @staff fixing the search function is one I see all the time. Like, I just feel you’re making it way harder on yourself than you have too and I’m just really wondering what the thought process is here.

“Wait, that’s not normal?” will be chiseled into my headstone.

the reddit blackout is just another incident in a long desperate fight to turn the internet into the most advertiser friendly capitalistic hell hole possible.

the Tumblr porn ban and features like Tumblr live, twitters implosion, the threat of a TikTok ban, twitchs new rules restricting streamers ability to advertise, discords new changes to make it more like social media instead of the messaging app it is, YouTube's ridiculous policy restricting content and banning creators for "the children" (advertisers), literally everything meta is doing

the whole internet is forcebily losing its creativity and uniqueness and being forced into bland corporate boxes and being censored in an effort to make the rich richer

I miss the old internet where we weren't all pushed to use the same few social media sites with the same bland layout and being used to make money off of every second

Pero buatefack

hey netizens! i'm not sure how many people are aware, but youtube's been slowly rolling out a new anti-adblock policy that can't be bypassed with the usual software like uBlock Origin and Pi-Hole out of the gate

BUT, if you're a uBlock Origin user (or use an adblocker with a similar cosmetics modifier), you can add these commands in the uBlock dashboard (under My Filters) to get rid of it!

youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false)

youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0)

youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, [])

youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)

reblog to help keep the internet less annoying and to tell corporations that try shit like this to go fuck themselves <3

Shout out to all your internet friends who are gone.

Those messenger screen names that haven’t logged on in ages, some before detailed profiles were a thing on those services.

Those emails that are long since abandoned, some with domains that no longer exist.

Those online friends you knew years ago and who then helped shaped you in some way, who you just can’t FIND anymore.

Those people who once were, and hopefully still exist IRL, that seem to have no known internet life anymore.

And those who have actually passed on, and their online lives are now a memorial to them.

I miss you all. I hope life is/was kind to you, and maybe one day, we’ll somehow connect again.

[gunshot]

Cameron Monaghan as CAL KESTIS in JEDI: SURVIVOR (March 17th 2023)

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (2023) | Official Story Trailer