I know this is kind of baby pirate knowledge but ive always just used a downloader for my streaming service. I have since moved to Linux entirely (massive win BTW, patting myself on the back for that) but there is no Linux-compatible downloader for my specific service. At least not one with the bulk functionality I would like. Any downloaders for Tidal or other sources of high-quality audio, likely to have some relatively niche old death metal? I’m a nerd about the quality.
edit: Just looked at the megathread and there seems to be some tools compatible with Tidal. Regardless, are there any applications that are alternatives? I’d like to see ALL of my options <3
monochrome.tf
I clicked on new to see what it had and saw the new album by a popular American rapper. I hit the download button, and inside of 30 seconds, it gave me a handful of FLAC files in a ZIP folder. Fed them to fre:ac, the metadata is good; however, it had the ARTIST tag copied to the ALBUMARTIST tag, which made the output a little messy (I have it output to ALBUMARTIST(YEAR) ALBUM), but I was able to expand all the folders, dump the m4a files I made into mp3tag, and straighten them up. Album cover was embedded and 1280x1280. No ads in the comments or even the filename of the zip file.
Bookmarked.
Oh, I also searched for an obscure(ish) Japanese band I like. It had most of their stuff. Not all, and not my favourite song by them, but it had a lot of stuff.
FYI to others, if you see the [HD] tag on something, I’m thinking that means they have it in FLAC, as opposed to MP3 or AAC/M4A. Though unless you have really good ears and/or an expensive hi-fi system, I doubt most of you can tell my m4a output from the flac input. If you can, I hope you have enough hard drives to support your collection. I don’t need FLAC, but I’ll use it to get the best possible sound at roughly a quarter to half the filesize (I use aac low complexity at the highest bitrate fre:ac supports).
It’s even open-source! Nice site.
This isn’t wrong though - it’s a proper use of both tags. I think most of my music has both tags populated.
That site is pulling from Tidal, which is why the tags are good. All the legit streaming sites have well-tagged files.
No, those two tags are not the same. ARTIST is everyone performing on the track. ALBUMARTIST is who the album is credited to. So for example Santana’s Supernatural, from the 1990s. The song “Smooth” that everyone knows. ARTIST would be something like Santana / Rob Thomas, or Santana feat. Rob Thomas, whereas ALBUMARTIST would be Santana.
Let me put it another way — do you want five copies of an album because four songs have collaborations? So one album is all the solo stuff, one album has one song with one collaboration, and so on… or do you want one copy of the album with all the songs on it as they appear on the album itself?
Sorry, I didn’t mean to say they’re the same. I meant to say that if all songs on an album are by one artist, the Artist and Album Artist will be identical. This is the case the majority of the time.
The major exceptions are collaborations (like you said), and compilations (which have “Various Artists” as the Album Artist)
Oh, yeah, if there are no collaborations or additional artists to name, then yes, they will be the same, for sure. And even though it seems redundant, I still have ALBUMARTIST filled in).
What’s going on here? Is it just pulling from someone’s Tidal account?
Yes. The search results and music files are coming directly from Tidal, using someone else’s account. If you look in the network tab in the browser’s dev tools, you’ll see requests to Tidal.
Interesting design, since it’s trivial for Tidal to block something like this - they can see that the requests are coming from that site. I’m surprised they haven’t blocked it.
If you see requests to tidal in your browser - they’re not going there from the server, are they :)
Tidal would be seeing their site URL in the referer for the network requests.
They must be doing some voodoo since Tidal doesn’t let you use the same account for multiple concurrent streams.
My guess is that they’d have a pool of accounts, and cache the most popular songs rather than streaming them from Tidal every time.
Never heard of this ,ty