Agreed but it is not open source, it depends on a central server, and personally enriches a man named Nil who went to Tel Aviv university. I would prefer a music tracker.

Plus, Soulseek has a lot of quirks that make it less reliable for slow downloads. It's not a "fire and forget" solution to acquiring files in the same way a magnet link with at least one seeder lurking around is. Soulseek will not just start again when they come back, it has other rate limits that can be jumped with their "donations"

Totally agree here. For tagging I also reccomend musicbrainz picard

Soulseek is the opposite of "tagged consistently".

I use soulseek but still have no idea how to find quality sources. I just filter my search with .flac and scan the users's folder structure (the more organized the better odds at being a good rip?). Am I doing it wrong?

Yes, this. Torrenting music is not necessary. Slsk is a better option 99% of the time. Most of the tags are the automatic ones applied by the streaming service it was ripped from or MusicBrainz. But everyone seems to expect different things from tagging, so if you want every performer tagged and like every genre you're never gonna find that.

I2P?

Nicotine+ is an open source client for the Soulseek network. Soulseek/Nicotine+ does not use i2p or do any type of anonymization; it' uses direct connections. Guessing you meant "p2p." The network has a lot of music I can't find through torrents, and I can almost always find the music I'm looking for as FLAC files.

OpPS does not do interviews atm, so I'd recommend interviewing for RED.

RED is great, if you have the time and money needed to get ratio for downloading. You have to continuously buy new music on day 1 of release and have an ultra low latency server to serve it because of the way their algos direct bandwidth.

It is not for the faint of heart, but it is the catalogue of choice.

I'm totally blanking on the name of a popular older torrent site that was invite-only as well. Demon something? Do you know what I'm talking about?

Good but by no means consistent

slsk-batchdl is pretty powerful too, if you're not afraid of a little command line

I have never used soulseek. Isn't this basically just Napster/kazaa/bearshare/limewire kind of deal? Wouldn't it be loaded with garbage with bad tags?

So I actually made a python script yesterday that uses spotify's web api to make a list of urls of every song on every album that I've liked one or more songs on. I then wrote a shell script which takes the file with all the urls and fetches the songs as 320 kbps mp3 files with a tool called zotify using a burner premium account I made. Unfortunately, it can only download songs in real time and will probably take around a month to finish downloading all the songs so I just set it to run on my vps. The mp3 files are good quality and have proper tagging and album art. I think I may have done it.