One day (communities, localities or government libraries) will again host public goods information with free access. Fighting intellectual monopoly is fighting for the return of local libraries (just the modern ones).
The absurdity that western governments fight archivists is beyond insane. They should be helping to distribute and host the data.
The half life of data is getting worse not better in the digital age. These pirates are doing the work of the public good and being vilified.
At least, assuming there is a future, they will be vindicated. Future generations will greatly appreciate finding archives such as this.
why must every good site draw attention to themselves like this? Make alternative site for music if you must make such a spectacle out of it, so when the hammer falls it doesnt take out the books too. Or at least have some kind of plan on how to survive it, which i really hope they do.
The content is distributed across numerous torrents. It’s decentralized. Also there’s a reason pirate bay is still up, while the other centralized players aren’t… . design distributed systems that aren’t vulnerable to easy take downs.
Speed, security or cost, pick two.
News headlines in my country are like “Spotify attacked!!”, “Millions of music tracks stolen!!”.
Hilarious…
Not as dramatic but similar sentiment in german (tech) news.
My teachers were the biggest thieves in history, they would hand out copies to us multiple times a day.
Let’s go for a 300TB USB key on AliExpress
I feel like this will put them much more under the authorities target, music is much more sensible than books, simply because it moves more money…
Anyway I still am wondering how they managed to do this and how they still didn’t get caught, there must be reeeally good devs there.
now i just need a 300TB hard drive…
Correction: you need a 200TB hardrive. By now, at least 100TB is AI generated shit music that you don’t need.
Edit: these numbers are an (un)educated guess based on my vibes.
Where does that number come from?
Out of my ass. Its just commentary on the fact that spotify has AI generated music and that there is a growing amount of it. Maybe I should not have used such steong language.
Everyone knows the best jokes are moderate and impeccably logical.
Good luck filtering it out. Or are they tagged as AI?
Nobody knows that. We haven’t downloaded the archive.
I cannot be that much yet, seriously? Not flaming you on this, maybe you are right but it sounds unrealistic. Spotify has decades of music stored, AI has been round with ability to generate tracks just for a few years. Something like 10% of it sounds more reasonable to me.
Not even that. There’s decades of indie music from around the world on Spotify. I would be surprised if more than a few percent of the 200 million or so songs they scrapped metadata for are AI.
i believe they sorted by popularity so that the AI generated bullshits are mostly not included?
deleted by creator
So that’s already a sanitized version to download?
Link please
there isn’t
the best time to buy anything tech was 12 months ago. the second best time is right now, before prices get even worse, which they 100% will
Very cool, though the quality leaves a bit to be desired.
For popularity>0, we got close to all tracks on the platform. The quality is the original OGG Vorbis at 160kbit/s. Metadata was added without reencoding the audio (and an archive of diff files is available to reconstruct the original files from Spotify, as well as a metadata file with original hashes and checksums).
For popularity=0, we got files representing about half the number of listens (either original or a copy with the same ISRC). The audio is reencoded to OGG Opus at 75kbit/s — sounding the same to most people, but noticeable to an expert.
I listen exclusively to 96kbps opus and it sounds perfect. Not sure if 75kbps would be noticeable.
I don’t know if I have bad ears but I cannot hear the difference in 90K OPUS from FLAC.
If instead of a giant omnibus torrent they put a folder structure on IPFS, it would be essentially a fully available streaming Spotify clone with the ability for people to “pin” tracks or albums or artists to have them stay locally on their device…
Just saying…
You’re right, but that’s not their goal.
Don’t be too excited, guys:
Relatively popular songs are stored in their original 160kbit/s OGG Vorbis quality, while the rest use 75kbit/s to save hundreds of terabytes of storage.
75 kbit/s can sound pretty bad depending on the songs. If you listen to it on your phone speaker you probably won’t notice, but this isn’t for quality listening experience. Depends what they mean with popular though, maybe all “good” songs are stored in the higher bitrate.
I think the most interesting part is all the metadata. The audio quality is not fit for archival purposes, archives use e.g. flac
What I’ve read is it’s about: Preservation.
This aint just about piracy because free media.
And that’s why I think it’s an issue. The least popular tracks, which are the most likely ones to disappear from the internet, are the ones they store in the lowest quality. While I’m glad they made this huge effort for preservation, and understand the limitations of storage space, I also wish they would have at least preserved the original 160kbps streams.
Oh no! The free music is not top tier quality for my ears!
Getoutahere
The only songs reencoded to that quality is a sample of the 0-streams songs, which do make up a lot of the total count.
Everything that has been listened to at least once is in high quality.
0-popularity, not 0-streams, which are two different metrics according to the archive blog post. But nevertheless, the re-encoded stuff is stuff pretty much no one will miss. Also Opus at 75kbps is much better than Vorbis or mp3 at that bitrate.
I’ve literally never been unable to find ogg, flac or mp3s for any album on Soulseek. Why is scraping Spotify even necessary?
There is probably a lot of listening data that could be useful. Say you like a particular song, you could look at what other songs people who stream that do also streamed a lot?
Nice.
Would have been happy to pay but they just had to be a$$#oles
You can say assholes on the internet
Call me when it’s actually released. “We’ll release the music in the future” is worth exactly as much content as “we’ll release a Batgirl movie”.
“Well release a batgirl movie” sounds like a really ominous statement to make tbh
You don’t need them to release anything. Just download soulseek and search for anything you want.
LET’S FUCKING GO
Someone is getting assassinated over this. Watch and see. Just like that grooveshark guy.
