Nice, I think the world’s a little better when we can share our musical tastes. It’s definitely some work to get all that music organized, but I’ve been messing around with scripting with python and that can do a lot of the monotonous stuff like fixing filenames and what not.

And plus you never know, you’ll see songs being uploaded from your library and might think, “who the heck downloaded that?”, as I have many times. Every time I see unique music being downloaded, I feel a little better knowing eclectic music taste is still alive and well haha

Ahh, my bollywood folder is fairly small right now, under 20 tracks. I tend to fill my library either with albums I’m curious about, or with songs I’ve heard and really want to replay for the future.

Once in a while, you can find people who have some decent collections, but since not everyone logs on at once, it’s sometimes a game of cat and mouse. If I can’t find it on the soulseek network, I’ll grab stuff from places like doubledouble, usually for things that are very new.

my folder structure is like:

└── genres
    ├── Acapellas
    ├── Afrobeat
    ├── Ambient
    ├── BASSSSSSSSSSSSSS
    ├── Bollywood
    ├── Breakbeat
    ├── Chutney
    ├── Country
    ├── Dancehall
    ├── DUBSTEP

and people download my files just fine, sometimes they just download entire folders since I organize by genre, not artist.

I mean, I’m poor but can afford such things, I mean, $18 a month for a VPN+seedbox combo is well worth it for some digital freedom, and I could even go cheaper if I wanted less features. The seedbox alone is just $8 CAD a month, so I mean, it’s not crazy expensive.

Surprised no one has mentioned using a remote seedbox. There are providers who allow public torrent use, even if some of them discourage it. You can download torrents via a remote server, and then connect to that server via ssh, syncthing or sftp, which are all encrypted, and has the added benefit of giving you a shot at getting into private trackers, if you ever snag an open invite, where having a seedbox is almost essential.

I guess, but for $7 a month, it’s a steal especially if you ever join any private trackers in the future

can recommend ultracc, affordable and reliable

for the record, it doesn’t “just work”. After setting up the prerequisites, it failed on my first attempt create the docker container.

ehh, tried using it . . . and a

failed to create network winboat_default: Error response from daemon: all predefined address pools have been fully subnetted

happens. I’ll create a github issue, but at this point, I could have installed a full windows vm in less time than I spent troubleshooting this issue . . . so there’s that

the copyright police have no power on the open sea of the internet. They’d have to shut down the internet itself before copies of windows could go away.

it runs a real copy of Windows
then just run windows

umm, running windows in a container is still running windows so . . . . you would still just be running windows

A lot of music production software doesn’t rely on GPU acceleration. There’s also proprietary bullshit like software that controls specific hardware, like GPU control software, MIDI devices and other random devices like things for RGB control or printers. Oh yeah, and tax software, to do taxes and whatnot, most of them are windows or mac exclusive, so that would come in handy too. I used to run a full-fat windows VM for things like these, but winboat might actually be a more tidy solution.

There’s plenty of examples of software that either will never be created on linux or proprietary bullshit that devs simply can’t be bothered to reverse engineer for linux.

AirVPN does, I’ve been currently using it for the past couple months and it’s been pretty damn good. I set up the port forwarding about a month ago, and I haven’t had to touch it since, so p2p filesharing has been great so far.

Was using mullvad before, and it was great, except for the lack of port forwarding.

mkvtoolnix is pretty good. It doesn’t catch special features and other extras from the disk, but getting the main movie is usually not an issue.

Only thing I used matching your needs was an RSS feed coming from a private tracker I’m on. I’m sure there are rss feeds for public trackers too. I self-hosted an rss reader and aggregator, and I could specify which torrent categories I would get notified about.

comparison is the thief of joy