A VPN is a must if you wanna go down this route

Soulseek (and I recommend the Nicotine+ client over the official one) is a fantastic source for all music in all formats, and particularly obscure off-label shit you won't get anywhere else. You'll even have some success finding audiobooks there, although this is very hit-and-miss. I wish audiobook pirates would use it more heavily. It's P2P, like Napster used to be. You'll have to share something or you'll get auto-ignored by most users.

RuTracker is a great non-private/non-ratio-monitoring torrent site for music (does require a free account though). I've never had a single torrent from there that wasn't seemingly seeded by a Godzilla's dick. Obviously it's in Russian, but there's really no difficulty navigating around. The only thing you might struggle with is signing up for an account, but just have your favourite translation tool open in another tab

If you don't mind slow download speeds (from the likes of RapidGator), I enjoy Exystence. It's a blog that shares link to the latest albums and offers both lossy and lossless versions. Nice RSS subscription to have.

If you do find yourself using RapidGator a lot, don't waste money buying a sub directly from them, it's insanely pricey. Instead, get a reseller like Real Debrid, which costs like 10% as much and also covers you for about two-dozen other file hosters. I highly recommend putting as much distance between your credit card and the company as possible, just for safety reasons. Using PaySafeCard is fine, as Real Debrid will never see your details in that case. I don't have any specific reason to be weary of them, I just don't trust random/small/hitherto unheard of companies as a rule.

There are online test you can do to see if you can successfully identify the FLAC from the MP3. I did one and failed miserably.

They say that if you have a very good DAC, amplifier and speaker / headphone system (as well as a good ear for audio), that you can hear it. But I would do the test first to see if it applies to your situation.

It could be the quality of your headphones.

I'm not an audiophile, but back-in-the-day I bought some analog "sennheiser studio monitors" as opposed to "just headphones".

I actually returned the first one and exchanged them, because when I listened to a live recorded CD, I kept hearing loud "pops" that I didn't hear with my "regular headphones". I assumed they were defective.

The exchanged sennheiser had the same "pop" in this CD. It turns out, most "regular headphones" didn't have the same depth in sound frequency as studio monitors and the "pops" were accidental artifacts that were mixed into the CD.

For other CD's, I'd hear telephones ringing and sirens in the background.

Eventually, I got use to it. Then after a few years, I replaced my CD collection with mp3's... and I could tell a different in songs/albums I was really familiar with. The base wasn't as deep, the high sounds weren't as high, I didn't hear telephones ringing in the background.

I had the same sennheiser, it was just that the nature of mp3's "flattened" the music.

Now, with Bluetooth and the disappearance of 3.5 mm jacks, there are too many layers of digital conversion happening. I've given up... and now just have some cheap ear buds I listen to.

Its not like every industrie can somehow lobby every consumer right away when someone wants to make a new law... oh wait they do...

Actually, I don't think this is industry mandated. I don't think it's in the interest of tech and content companies to create more friction to access their services. This one seems to have more to do with the governments wanting to exert more control over online affairs, and of course, over its citizens.

Same for me, I got tired of the same artists being played over and over. I've switched to Deezer who does a much better job. I will probably switch to Qobuz soon.

I keep getting advice of Flac > MP3 320 kbs.

I can't tell the difference to tell you the truth. Is it really worth it for audiophiles considering how much more space Flac files takes up?

Yea my point was if people stopped using the apps then the big players will lobby the governemt to revert shit like that. But i also think that long term all big players would love to normalize taking your picture to open their app. Every bit of information they can sell is a win for them.

I used to use and praise Spotify and their algorithm, but I was starting to find that it would insist on playing the same 20 or 50 songs regardless of the playlist I was trying to generate music suggestions from. I read a rumor somewhere that it was a way to decrease the load on their servers and rely more on the cached songs already on the device, and got sick of that enough to switch to Pandora after over 10 years of Spotify

I tried Tidal, and now I'm on Pandora. The 'radio' feature of Pandora more closely matches the way I want to listen to music (I feel like playing this, stay in this mood, but vary the artists), but I'm disappointed by the android app.
I should also try Qobuz, maybe even Deezer, but the real pain point is that I have literally thousands of playlists on Spotify. I can pay TuneMyMusic again, I guess

This age-verification bullshit is a fine example of how governments represent their rulers, not their citizens.

I tried Tidal, and now I'm on Pandora. The 'radio' feature of Pandora more closely matches the way I want to listen to music (I feel like playing this, stay in this mood, but vary the artists), but I'm disappointed by the android app.
I should also try Qobuz, maybe even Deezer, but the real pain point is that I have literally thousands of playlists on Spotify. I can pay TuneMyMusic again, I guess

Yes, I meant in case you have a library of FLACs. In that case it wouldn't be too problematic cause, well, it's just a script recursing your library, encoding from FLAC to Opus and if succeeded, removing FLAC files.

Never ran any tests here but the difference is so stark that I never really considered it a need.

Kinda like when I switched from SoundCloud to Apple Music. I couldn’t go back to listening to the songs I had in my SC library because it was just noticeably worse.

I’m sure there are ways to rip high fi YouTube audio but the basic options I used in the past yielded results worse than avg SoundCloud quality.

Will say it’s been a few years since trying and I never had any paid for YouTube subscription, don’t even have an account. So, while it may be acceptable, I just never had a need and if I wanted to rip music, I’d be torrenting .flac files, not ripping .mp3s from YouTube

It's not necessarily your music though, it's the closest that they found in their library sometimes. I have tons of tracks that I uploaded the explicit copy of to gmusic but my library downloads only had the censored/radio version.

Found that out the hard way after a drive crash a few years back. Have spent a bit of time reacquiring the stuff I cared about.

I have Sennheiser HD 25 I bought 15 years ago. I play music through my Pixel 5a with a headphone jack and my iMac. I have no idea if this is good enough for the test but I will try it anyway.

I did the NPR test.

I'm on my iMac and I chose 128 kbps four times... I chose 320 kbps once and Uncompressed WAV once.

I did so horribly. Lol.

This puts either my hearing limits or the limit of my tech. If I don't get better equipment, I have my answer forever.

This is truly great. Thank you for this suggestion.