I ditched most streaming services well over a year ago now, but Spotify has clung on because I have a playlist of around 2000 songs. I’ve set up Navidrome but now need to transfer all my music in the highest quality possible as efficiently as possible.
I tried lidarr some time ago, but it seemed to be based more around artists than individual songs and my indexer failed to find most of my library.
I’ve seen a couple of apps that will look at a playlist and then try to yt-dlp the song from YouTube but I’m worried about having a lower quality or different version. I’ve wondered if automating an “analog hole” type approach where I just pipe the audio of each song to a file and leave it playing overnight for a couple of weeks might actually be the best approach but that does seem a bit insane at this scale.
I think you may have shifted the argument a bit.
We’re not “back to where we were 100 years ago”. Bandcamp exists and pays artists for song purchases. It’s not perfect, and the selection of Bandcamp and the few other services like it are sometimes limited, but there ARE ways to buy digital music and have a non-negligible amount of the money go directly to the artist.
I think you’re trying to make an argument for just pirating digital format music. I would say, don’t just throw up your hands and go straight there by default, try to buy the music first, and then if you can’t or really can’t afford it, then by all means download the music in other ways.