soulseek!

[dragongirl]

soulseek is awesome! in the simplest terms, it's a free peer-to-peer file sharing service. it is, by far, the easiest and most efficient way to find and download music that you don't feel like paying for or can't obtain otherwise. and since it's peer-to-peer, there are no fees for data limits! i'm currently hosting ~200gb of music, but i've seen people with well over 10tb. and because it's mostly populated by people who are also interested in music collection and preservation, you can find almost everything!

getting started is simple. there are two popular clients that i've tried; the official soulseekQT client, and the open-source alternative nicotine+. QT works fine, but nicotine is a little more streamlined and has a native dark mode theme, if that's your sort of thing! once you've downloaded a client, you just enter a username and password (don't forget to write them down somewhere!), make sure your port is configured properly, and you're good to go!

using soulseek is simple. you type a search term into the search bar, and then you can filter through the results for the album, ep, song, or whatever you're looking for, and then right-click to open the context menu and download your selected files. your pending downloads will all be displayed in a dedicated tab so you can keep an eye on them, and once they finish downloading, they're on your device for you to listen to as you please. some users will require you to have uploads of your own before downloading their files (to prevent against spam), but sharing files is easy! you just select your music directory or whatever other file you want, and set it as a sharing folder.

not only is it a great resource for music, but plenty of people also host other useful media on soulseek! i have a complete archive of every single club nintendo/mynintendo/play nintendo reward that i downloaded off of soulseek, and while it's not my go-to source, lots of people also host movies, tv shows, and roms on soulseek! one thing i would recommend is saving users to your user list (QT) or buddies list (nicotine+). this lets you save users who have collections that are relevant to your interests so you can go back and browse their uploads at any time you want! i have a handful of users i always check first when i'm looking for something, and i usually find it pretty easily.

personally, i have a lot of nintendo music, and more specifically, kirby music (every game and album as of this year!). i do a lot of my own high quality/lossless gamerips because i have the hardware and software to do so, and i'm always glad to help people out if they're looking for a more obscure game soundtrack! my soulseek username is dragongirldick if you're ever interested in taking a look!