I’d say yes VPN, even if piracy were legal I don’t need my peers knowing my IP. For slsk port forwarding is more important than it is for torrenting as well, so I’d reccomend one that lets you do that, like AirVPN (who I will also soon be switching to, Mullvad the one I have now recently removed port forwarding, I’m just too poor to switch yet) or protonvpn.
If your port isn’t forwarded you can only connect to those who’s port is forwarded, effectively locking yourself out of peers who also don’t have a port forwarded as well.
If the only reason you want to use soulseek is to save money, then paying for a VPN wouldn’t work out that much cheaper than Spotify premium as far as I’m aware. As you are appear rather paranoid, perhaps a modded Spotify frontend would be best.
However, a VPN isn’t really necessary for soulseek as it is ptp.
But, I would actually (obviously) recommended switching to soulseek as that allows you to build your own library of lossless audio files, which then of course involves spending large sums of money on high capacity drives but is a fun hobby to have.
You say that a VPN isn’t needed for Soulseek because it is ptp (peer to peer I assume?), but I thought that was the same “thing” as torrents use, which I’m fairly certain you pretty much need a VPN for?
With a torrent you’re downloading from many unknown peers, one of which could be a rights holder lawyer who will log your IP and send a threatening letter to your internet service provider. With Soulseek you are downloading from only one peer.
With a torrent you are downloading and uploading chunks at the same time. With Soulseek you have options about what you share for upload. If you were to get in trouble legally on Soulseek, it would probably be for what’s in your shared library, not for what you downloaded.
However, it’s not super polite to download from others without sharing. Some users block uploading to peers who aren’t sharing anything. My advice would be to go to your local library and find a few rare CDs of local music. Rip them to MP3 at a good bitrate and share them. Or maybe classical music? I’m not a lawyer, but just think of what music you can share where the artist or record label isn’t going to sue you. Independent and smaller record labels are probably not going to sue you.
Or maybe classical music? I’m not a lawyer, but just think of what music you can share where the artist or record label isn’t going to sue you.
Classical isn’t necessarily non-suable. You can share the sheet music Beethoven wrote, since he’s been dead for a long time and his work is in public domain, but each new performance and recording of a given composition is also copyrighted by the musicians(s), since they have invested creative effort into its realisation.
Not that you’d be remotely likely to get fined either way, unless the publishing label is very prestigeous, Warner Classics or maybe Deutsche Grammophon (though even then if you’re outside of US/UK or Germany I don’t think they’d care).
idk, a debrid service is so cheap, it costs less to pay than to buy the hard drives and server + power. And it has pretty much everything already, so it’s more convenient, too.
It’s hard to justify dropping a pile of cash on 3 drives for a RAID when it will take about a decade to pay for itself vs. debrid, by which point I’ll need to replace the drives. Plus, it takes more time to set up, maintain, and load the desired media.
Isn’t that just asking for trouble? From the Real-Debrid TOS:
The User acknowledges not to use our service to download copyright infringement digital files punishable by a suspension of his account and reporting to competent organizations and authorities
Logging policy is not great:
Files links that Users download are stored in a database for legal concerns and our internal use. All saved links are erased within 1 month for security reasons and service needs. However all requests made on our site are stored for 1 year, the legal retention period.
Doesn’t look like you can sign up anonymously (unless you consider bitcoin and email anonymous, which they’re generally not).
I’ve found that for single person purposes, a RAID array is unnecessary. I just buy beefy 8TB drives. If it dies, just download any recent torrents again or pull a backup
For some it is. It used to be a point for me. It still is a factor, but it is no longer the main point. Service and convenience is the most prevalent point for me right now.
What it comes down to for me is that I don’t want to subsribe to and pay for 7 streaming services to be able to watch everything I want. I had gotten used to Netflix being the primary streaming service which offered “everything” (it didn’t but it was plenty). I stopped being a pirate in that time. Then every asshole company pulled their shit from netflix and started their own streaming service. That’s when the convenience stopped and I went back to priacy. Funny how that works, right?
I can’t imagine any company every wanting to do it the way I would want. I want a single service/platform that houses all the content, that way the experience is the same. For example I don’t know if in one app I can double tap to the right to skip ahead and does it work on the other apps as well? probably not.
I only pirate because it is more convenient than any alternative.
The best example I experienced was when I tried to watch an apple tv original show with my cousin (who has family access to the service). He wanted to log in to his account on my laptop and needed to verify his dad’s credit card to do so. No problem, but it took a while. After that we still couldn’t watch, because the player didn’t load the video for some reason. Cue my cousin fiddling about trying to fix the issue.
In the meantime I had started to download the first two episodes and copied it on a thumb drive.
Based on the screenshot I assume that you used youtube premium lite (what ever this was…) on your smartphone. Therefore, here the obligatory recommendation for NewPipe. Quasi Youtube Premium as apk. It has all the features you need:
no ads
you can close the app and your videos keep running in the background
you can turn off the screen and your videos will continue to run in the background
There is also the fork NewPipe x SponsorBlock (link to repository) which integrates SponsorBlock into the app. (duh…) This will also skip the creator’s ad blocks in the video.
I’d also like to plug ReVanced. You do have to provide your own copy of the YouTube APK (easily downloadable from APKMirror), but it allows you to install multiple patches into the app, including Return YouTube Dislike, SponsorBlock, and other stuff. It allows background play and blocks ads, too. (You can see the list of available patches here.)
Problem with that is that I want to use my subscriptions but using that app might get my user potentially banned and I do not want my google account banned.
I’ve used ReVanced every day for over a year now and nothing has ever happened to my Google Account. I also used regular Vanced for at least two years before that, never had any issues.
piracy
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.