# Music

By
scourgeofgrozny

# Content Resources

  • Soulseek - P2P network where people share music files of their own. Great way to find lossless music and a lot of relevant music.

  • Redacted - Commonly referred to as RED, it's the best source for music, and has everything in both FLAC and MP3. It's a private tracker, meaning you'll have to go through an IRC Interview to join. Thoroughly read the interview page.

  • Orpheus - Another music private tracker like RED. Music selection is smaller than RED but it's easier to join with a more lenient economy. You'll have to go through an IRC Interview to join this as well. Again, thoroughly read the interview page.

  • Jpopsuki - Asian music private tracker with an extremely easy economy but lacks quality control. The only way to join this is via invites on other private trackers.

# Spectral Analysis

  • Since Soulseek doesn't have strict rules regarding upconversion (lossy->lossless), many files may be of dubious quality. This can be verified through spectral analysis. A full guide for doing so along with the required software can be found here and here. In summary, you are looking for frequency cutoffs like the following:

  • (Recommended) Spectrogram generation can be achieved using popular audio command-line utility SoX. Some basic options to generate spectrograms like the ones shown above are:

    sox track01.flac -n remix 1 spectrogram -x 3000 -y 513 -z 120 -w Kaiser -o "track01-full.png"
    sox track01.flac -n remix 1 spectrogram -X 500 -y 1025 -z 120 -w Kaiser -S 1:00 -d 0:02 -o "track01-zoom.png"
    for %I in (*.flac) do sox "%I" -n remix 1 spectrogram -x 3000 -y 513 -z 120 -w Kaiser -o "%~nI-full.png"
    for %I in (*.flac) do sox "%I" -n remix 1 spectrogram -X 500 -y 1025 -z 120 -w Kaiser -S 1:00 -d 0:02 -o "%~nI-zoom.png"
    for file in *.flac; do sox "${file}" -n remix 1 spectrogram -x 3000 -y 513 -z 120 -w Kaiser -o "${file%.*}-full.png"; done
      for file in *.flac; do sox "${file}" -n remix 1 spectrogram -X 500 -y 1025 -z 120 -w Kaiser -S 1:00 -d 0:02 -o "${file%.*}-zoom.png"; done
  • How this works, in a nutshell, is that the user's input audio file gets downmixed into a singular channel with remix 1, followed by the input track being replaced with a null file by flag -n (since spectrogram is a command that returns audio information and does not modify it, the audio itself isn't needed for much else). -X,, -y, and -z is used to specify the spectrogram's dimensions, where X is the length, y is the height (both in pixels), and z is the range in decibels. -w Kaiser produces the spectrogram calculated with the Kaiser window function. -S and -d are options that allow for the analysis of audio snippets, where S is the start and d is the end of the audio snippet. Finally, -o "filename" changes the name of the spectrogram.

  • You can find detailed explanations on each option flag here as well a plethora of additional ones to fine-tune your spectrogram to your desire.

# Comprehensive Guides

  • The Mega Music Ripping Guide guide containing instructions on how to rip music from a variety of different popular sources.

  • Sharky's Music Google Docs is a massive document containing all sorts of tutorials and explanations for commonly-seen aspects of music ripping and uploading.