#cobalt.tools

[skyberia]

here's a list of programs/sites/whatever that were helpful to me when i was moving away from using spotify & back to downloading music:

soulseek - peer to peer downloading program, has most music you'd want. there's "rules" to it though and the UI is a little confusing, but you can figure it out. there's tutorials. i believe in you

cobalt.tools, ytiz.xyz, yt-dlp - mp3 downloaders, for the songs that you can't find on soulseek

musicbee - music player, extremely customiseable. reminds me of when i used itunes back in the day. has a lot of good features, including syncing music over to your phone

lastfm & listenbrainz - sites that keep track of your listening stats. i'd recommend this even if you still choose to use a music streaming service

syncedlyrics - cmd thing that gets you timed song lyrics, like the ones spotify has. there's no UI but it's easy enough to use. just grab the lyrics and timestamps it spits out and paste it into musicbee

music presence - program that shows what song you're listening to in your discord status, in case you use discord and enjoy the thought of other people seeing what you're listening to, which i do for some reason

i'm not going to lie to you and say that switching away from spotify/streaming services is an effortless task, it took me half a whole day of nonstop Work to get all my music downloaded and sorted out, but i will say that it was worth it!! and you should do it 👍 if you want to

ETA: for more resources, check the reblogs! Plenty of different people have pitched in more sites/programs/etc that i didn't mention here that might be helpful to you as well

[theradicalace]

got too reliant on cobalt.tools and now youtube downloads are temporarily broken on it and i'm at a loss for what to use instead :(

[jothb]

i HATE when websites go "oh, you're from Russia? you're russian? your native language is russian? here's a localised version of the site you did not ask for. No we will not tell you how to switch to the main version, why would you want that?" GIVE ME THE BASE VERSION I DONT CARE HOW GOOD THE TRANSLATION IS GIVE ME THE WEBSITE IN ENGLISH

[dailypal]

today's pal of the day is meowbalt, the cobalt.tools mascot :)

[rapierdagger]

does anyone know if there are decent alternatives for youtube downloading besides cobalt.tools? it crashes literally every time I try to use it, on any browser, and I can’t seem to contact the devs

[faacethefacts]

if cobalt.tools crashes one more time something awful is going to happen to somebody

[stellophiliac]

how to build a digital music collection and stuff

spotify sucks aaaass. so start downloading shit!!

file format glossary

.wav is highest quality and biggest

.mp3 is very small, but uses lossy compression which means it's lower quality

.flac is smaller than .wav, but uses lossless compression so it's high quality

.m4a is an audio file format that apple uses. that's all i really know

downloading the music

doubledouble.top is a life saver. you can download from a variety of services including but not limited to apple music, spotify, soundcloud, tidal, deezer, etc.

i'd recommend ripping your music from tidal or apple music since they're the best quality (i think apple music gives you lossless audio anyway. .m4a can be both lossy and lossless, but from the text on doubledouble i assume they're ripping HQ files off apple music)

i also love love love cobalt.tools for ripping audio/video from youtube (they support a lot of other platforms too!)

of course, many artists have their music on bandcamp — purchase or download directly from them if you can. bandcamp offers a variety of file formats for download

file conversion

if you're downloading from apple music with doubledouble, it spits out an .m4a file.

.m4a is ok for some people but if you prefer .flac, you may wanna convert it. ffmpeg is a CLI (terminal) tool to help with media conversion

if you're on linux or macOS, you can use parameter expansion to batch convert all files in a folder. put the files in one place first, then with your terminal, cd into the directory and run:

for i in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "${i%.*}.flac"; done

this converts from .m4a to .flac — change the file extensions if needed.

soulseek

another way to get music is through soulseek. soulseek is a peer-to-peer file sharing network which is mainly used for music. nicotine+ is a pretty intuitive (and open-source) client if you don't like the official one.

you can probably find a better tutorial on soulseek somewhere else. just wanted to make this option known

it's bad etiquette to download from people without sharing files of your own, so make sure you've got something shared. also try to avoid queuing up more than 1-2 albums from one person in a row

tagging & organizing your music

tagging: adding metadata to a music file (eg. song name, artist name, album) that music players can recognize and display

if you've ripped music from a streaming platform, chances are it's already tagged. i've gotten files with slightly incorrect tags from doubledouble though, so if you care about that then you might wanna look into it

i use musicbrainz picard for my tagging. they've got pretty extensive documentation, which will probably be more useful than me

basically, you can look up album data from an online database into the program, and then match each track with its file. the program will tag each file correctly for you (there's also options for renaming the file according to a certain structure if you're into that!)

there's also beets, which is a CLI tool for... a lot of music collection management stuff. i haven't really used it myself, but if you feel up to it then they've got extensive documentation too. for most people, though, it's not really a necessity

how you wanna organize your music is completely up to you. my preferred filestructure is:

artist > album > track # track

using a music player

the options for this are pretty expansive. commonly used players i see include VLC, foobar2000, clementine (or a fork of it called strawberry), and cmus (for the terminal)

you can also totally use iTunes or something. i don't know what audio players other systems come with

i personally use dopamine. it's a little bit slow, but it's got a nice UI and is themeable plus has last.fm support (!!!)

don't let the github page fool you, you don't have to build from source. you can find the releases here

click the "assets" dropdown on the most recent release, and download whichever one is compatible with your OS

syncing

if you're fine with your files just being on one device (perhaps your computer, but perhaps also an USB drive or an mp3 player), you don't have to do this

you can sync with something like google drive, but i hate google more than i hate spotify

you can get a free nextcloud account from one of their providers with 2GB of free storage. you can use webDAV to access your files from an app on your phone or other device (documents by readdle has webDAV support, which is what i use)

disroot and blahaj.land are a couple providers i know that offer other services as well as nextcloud (so you get more with your account), but accounts are manually approved. do give them a look though!!

if you're tech-savvy and have an unused machine lying around, look into self-hosting your own nextcloud, or better yet, your own media server. i've heard that navidrome is a pretty good audio server. i unfortunately don't have experience with self-hosting at the moment so i have like zero advice to give here. yunohost seems to be a really easy way to manage a server

afterword

i don't know if any of this is helpful, but i just wanted to consolidate my personal advice in one place. fuck big tech. own your media, they could take it away from you at any moment

[elbiotipo]

what you PIRATES don't realize is that there is a limited number of mp3s in the world and every time you use cobalt.tools (don't ever use it) to download a song by The Smiths you're PERSONALLY breaking into a house and stealing from Morrisey himself and now he doesn't have the song anymore IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT?

[the-roachh]

now i use cobalt.tools and i can never go back

[catboybeebop]

ykw cobalt.tools was kinda ass anyway

[franticbindings]

My Twin Peaks + Revolutionary Girl Utena ruminations have been fed by locating a video essay comparing them with less than 300 views. It's region blocked because of copyright, but I managed to download it with cobalt.tools

It's been a long time since I've seen Twin Peaks so the connections I was drawing between the two were mostly from the surrealism/symbolism and a bunch of ways Laura Palmer and Anthy are similar; the gradual unpeeling of their identities, the nature of their torments and the way that suffering is fuel in the engine of their respective shows' story. There were some connections I didn't consider though, which was neat.

(region locked, not responsible for anything that happens in your attempts to circumvent that. I managed it with https://cobalt.tools though the audio was very quiet.)

[cephandriusnimi]

Letting everyone know that cobalt.tools is perfectly legal for downloading Youtube music and videos

Also works on most other social medias (including this one)

It also has a GREAT API, I've written a Python script where you paste in a playlist link and it downloads each individual video as an MP3

I have a discord bot version plus a few other things coming up

IDK if that's something anyone's interested in though. Let me know, please! Reblog for visibility! It helps a lot!

[balllsboy]

do you own an android phone perchance cause I might have an app to recommend

does anyone by chance know a good place to get albums digitally aside from bandcamp (a lot of artists deleted their bandcamp over the years for many reasons) cuz a lot of places only stream now or its like, buy my cd and rip it

[corviisquire]

does anyone have a safe and sound, won’t download malware, no suspicious .exe mp3 converter

trying to put some music into cybergrind

edit: here’s the link for anyone who wants it https://cobalt.tools/

[nohoperadio]

more advice from the advice requesting post

@caprice-nisei-enjoyer:

1. Buy three phone chargers: one each for home, work, and travel 2. Use a password manager if you don't already. Share the master password with someone you trust in case of emergency 3. Schedule a reblog of this post for a year from now, when people will have fresh ideas

Charger thing is sensible. I guess I should use probably use a password manager, it feels spookily eggs-in-basketty though, but then I don't actually know the first thing about it. I don't think I have anyone it wouldn't be weird to give my password to. The reblog for next year is now scheduled!

@native-to-entropy:

Get a salt grinder, not a salt shaker. Bigger crunchier pieces of salt on food, especially on eggs, adds to the overall experience If you haven't had it before, bread machine bread is better quality than you might think. And you can load the ingredients before going to work and set a timer so that the bread is done and warm when you get home I recommend keeping a carabiner of useful things clipped to your keys. I keep bus fare, painkillers, instant coffee, and Gatorade powder clipped to my house keys, so if I'm out of the house I have the essentials no matter what You can grow green onions in a pot on your windowsill by planting the ends of grocery store green onions in soil Dried mushrooms are good in instant ramen. And they rehydrate while the ramen cooks Download songs from youtube and such using cobalt.tools. it's my favorite mp3 maker

This is a lot and sadly I can't use most of it I don't think!

salt grinder, I will try

bread machine, my home is extremely poor-in-space and my kitchen has no room for inessential medium-sized objects. possibly in the future when I have become prosperous

carabiner, I could maybe be convinced but idk what I'd put on it and your list of objects doesn't tempt me (currently I keep my keys inside my wallet which is probably unsafe but ehhh)

I'm not much of a green onion user and I'm skeptical that much of anything would grow in my frosted kitchen window that gets very little sun

dried mushrooms sounds good

I have no use for mp3s I don't think

@medlinka:

When cornering on a mountain bike, brake before the corner, look through the turn, and shift your weight to the outside. This is good advice that I’ve used a lot in the past several years.

I will look out for opportunities to apply this in my daily life!

[irusanw4]

Smh my head these guys don't even know about Musicolet

I just panicked because my song faded away into silence and I forgot that I'm broke and can't afford Spotify premium and that songs end.