My guess is that they’d have a pool of accounts, and cache the most popular songs rather than streaming them from Tidal every time.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to say they’re the same. I meant to say that if all songs on an album are by one artist, the Artist and Album Artist will be identical. This is the case the majority of the time.

The major exceptions are collaborations (like you said), and compilations (which have “Various Artists” as the Album Artist)

Tidal would be seeing their site URL in the referer for the network requests.

Using it through Lidarr just uses the search feature in slskd, so it might not make it much better.

It’s even open-source! Nice site.

it had the ARTIST tag copied to the ALBUMARTIST tag

This isn’t wrong though - it’s a proper use of both tags. I think most of my music has both tags populated.

That site is pulling from Tidal, which is why the tags are good. All the legit streaming sites have well-tagged files.

Yes. The search results and music files are coming directly from Tidal, using someone else’s account. If you look in the network tab in the browser’s dev tools, you’ll see requests to Tidal.

Interesting design, since it’s trivial for Tidal to block something like this - they can see that the requests are coming from that site. I’m surprised they haven’t blocked it.

yt-dlp has a strict policy against cracking DRM

This is how it stays legal in the USA. Bypassing DRM is a DMCA violation (section 1201), but just downloading freely-available content is totally legal.

Its predecessor, youtube-dl, was subject to DMCA takedowns from the RIAA, and they had to get the EFF to help. yt-dlp doesn’t want to experience the same issues.

It’s also supported by Prowlarr if you want to automate downloads using Lidarr.

Having said that, note that many uploads on rutracker are raw CD dumps (ISO file, plus a CUE file specifying when the tracks start and end) which Lidarr doesn’t support directly, so you’ll have to manually convert to FLAC and split it yourself. Once you do that, you can manually import the files into Lidarr and it’ll tag and arrange the files for you.

Make sure you’re on the “develop” branch of Lidarr, as the stable one doesn’t have the plugins feature. If you’re using Docker, use the “develop” tag instead of “latest” (lscr.io/linuxserver/lidarr:develop).

Australia has been using tap to pay for around 15 years now, whereas QR codes weren’t in widespread use in the country until COVID. There’s no reason to switch from NFC to QR given practically every bank’s app natively supports NFC payments now (no need to use a third-party wallet if you don’t want to)

The US is a different story… It took a looooong time for NFC payments to be adopted. I’m an Aussie living in the USA, and some of the US banks I use didn’t support contactless payments until a few years ago!

My car uses UWB (BMW Digital Key Plus) to automatically unlock when I’m walking towards it, once I’m pretty close. Maybe 1 meter (3 feet) from the car, in any direction. It has NFC as a fallback too - if the UWB thing fails for some reason, I can tap the phone to the door to unlock it too.

Usenet. Plenty of music in lossless (FLAC) format. Use NZBGeek and DrunkenSlug as indexers. Sabnzbd to download. Lidarr and Prowlarr to automate everything. Add an artist, click to download an album, and it’ll search for the album, download the NZB file, send it to Sabnzbd to download, then tag and organize the files once it’s done downloading.

For music I’d just get a block account: https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki/providerdeals/. Essentially, you pay for some amount of data (can usually get 1TB for US$5-15), and they usually don’t have an expiry date, so it could last you for years. Some providers have monthly plans with unlimited data, but a block account will end up way cheaper if you just want music.

For rarer music, Soulseek is very good. It’s a peer-to-peer service from the KaZaA and Napster era, but somehow it’s survived until now. Since it’s peer to peer, downloads are quite a bit slower (you’re relying on the upload speed of individual users - each download comes from only one user) but it’s a great community.

If you have a home server, slskd is very good. Modern web UI and there’s plugins to integrate it into Lidarr (Tubifarry)

It’s worth noting that Proxmox uses Debian. It’s essentially a collection of Debian packages, and you can install Proxmox on top of an existing Debian system: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_13_Trixie

Proxmox lacks a Docker UI though, which is annoying. One of the reasons I’m using Unraid at home is because it supports KVM, LXC, and Docker, all in the same UI. (LXC is a plugin rather than being available out-of-the-box, but it works very well)

(and no, Proxmox’s new OCI container support isn’t it - that just converts the container to LXC and doesn’t handle upgrades)

Unraid is pretty beginner-friendly, so it’s what I’d recommend too.

I use it too. I have over 20 years experience running Debian servers and can write a docker-compose.yml file and Nginx config from scratch, but sometimes it’s nice to have a decent web UI that mostly “just works”.

Can still be messed with by the Isp

Not as easily though. It’s like regular HTTPS - if anyone, including the ISP, tries a MitM (man in the middle) attack, you’ll get a security error because the certificate won’t be trusted. The only real way for a MitM attack to be successful is installing a custom root certificate on the client system.

Like you mentioned, IP blocking is harder to bypass, but that’s unrelated to DNS blocking. IP blocking is harder to do if the site uses a CDN like CloudFront, BunnyCDN, Cloudflare, etc though, since a large number of sites use the same IPs.

Google already remove results in certain countries based on local laws, and as a response to DMCA complaints.

Best solution is not using dns in the first place though.

Use DNS over HTTPS (or TLS or QUIC). I think some browsers use it by default now. If there’s country-specific blocks, use your own recursive DNS server, or one in another country.

Copying my comment from the homelab community:

I haven’t tried it yet, but here’s some initial thoughts:

Does it support multiple separate docker-compose.yml files? It would be useful if it could pull the list of containers directly from Docker rather than having to paste the docker-compose.

Does it pull changelogs so that the user can tell if a change is a breaking change that’ll require extra work?

It would be useful to support Webauthn/FIDO2 2FA instead of just TOTP. TOTP is being slowly phased out due to its weaknesses (it’s phishable). Similarly, it’d be useful to support single sign on using OIDC (OpenID Connect) as a lot of self-hosters use Authentik, Authelia, or Keycloak to have one login for all their self hosted services.

Automatic updates for bug fixes (e.g. 1.0.0 to 1.0.1) are usually fine - it’s major and minor updates that are scarier. I’ve never used Watchtower so I’m not sure if it has an option to only allow bugfixes.