So far I really haven’t had musicbrainz be missing any artists or songs, idk if its different if you listen to indie or niche music though

You should check out last.fm (or musicbrainz, which I prefer since its open source). You connect your apps to it (Plex, tidal, Spotify, etc), they send over songs as you listen to them, you can rank them as love or hate (and some other stuff) and they curate playlists and artists that they think you’ll like based on your listening habits

There are some really awful captchas out there. I miss the days of just typing out some stretched and tilted numbers and letters.

I always use i because I’m too lazy to type out iterator when I’m making my garbage spaghetti code that will support infrastructure for years

Sounds like a radio station where there community submits songs

Step 1: multiply all inches by 2.54 on the plans and not mess up or miss any of them
Step 2: have fun cutting on fun cm decimals like 6 inches = 15.24 cm

As a note, their application process is super easy, free, and they do it every weekend. Not paid or super exclusive, just makes sure you read the rules basically

Like the other comments, I use qbittorrent. I recommend running your VPN with gluetun and routing the traffic from your qbittorrent container through it. If the gluetun container is down, no traffic at all. If it’s up, everything goes through the vpn

Time machine + $100 for a lifetime subscription to nzbgeek. I got a lifetime subscription a couple months before they removed the option, only had it for a few months now but well worth the money already. Most of my shows, movies, and music come from it (supplemented by torrenting)

My brother in Christ, we sail the high seas here.

Usenet is usually a lot faster, for most things you can basically max out your bandwidth (or whatever the max you set your download client to) instead of it being determined by the number and quality of seeders. Newer releases torrents also download very fast, but after a few months or years the seeders drop off a lot, usenet is always the same speed even if it’s super old and most keep stuff indefinitely or for 10-20 years or so (longer if it’s being grabbed a lot still)

Also one nzb site is usually enough, you don’t need to check a bunch of different torrent sites since it’s basically one massive one. I use prowlarr so I have it check nzbgeek for everything first and a bunch of torrent sites as backups in case it isn’t there, but almost everything gets grabbed from usenet

I’ve been using nzbgeek for a few months and have a friend that’s used it for a few years, no complaints and pretty cheap

For books and music, I pirate them and if I genuinely like it and would buy it myself then I donate the cost directly to the artist (unless they’re an artists with a stupid amount of money). For music it’s kind of depends on how much I like their music, but usually I’ll donate the cost of an album or something (I don’t donate if they already have stupid amounts of money though). For books, I’ll usually donate the cost of a paperback (5$-$10) if I liked it, or a hardcover ($25-$30)

It comes with multiple benefits: I don’t pay for something I don’t like, the entire cost actually goes to the people I want to support instead of 40% or whatever going to whoever prints the books or releases the music, and I no longer have to pay subscriptions to support platforms that take advantage of small artists and pocket a significant amount of what I pay for the subscription (looking at you Amazon and Spotify)

I looked into it, bazarr does have an option for looking for forced subtitles so it can handle that automatically for you too! (Also hearing impaired and exclude audio options). You can set it on a per-language basis too if you happen to speak/read multiple languages

Ahh, that’s more difficult, but should be doable in theory. It will likely have to be done manually (not sure if bazarr has a setting for it), you’ll be looking for subtitles that have “forced” in the name somewhere. I know the subtitles you can get natively in Plex sometimes offer forced versions, but I don’t watch many shows with foreign language in them

The bazarr tip is great, especially if you use radarr and sonarr. Even without it, Plex will let you search for subtitles and can find decent ones most of the time. I ran into enough cases where tv shows didn’t have subtitles so I made a bazarr docker-compose, pointed it at my movies and tv directories, and have had zero issues since. Automatically grabs it and everything, if you want subtitles on something you just downloaded you can go into the webui and search immediately instead of waiting too

That’s the fun part, it still is!

I pirate a lot of books since I love to read, if I particularly liked a book or an author then I donate the cost of the books if the author has that option (most do)

I personally have my torrents default to 2:1 ratio or 7 days of seeding, whichever comes first. I have unlimited Internet so I don’t worry about it, I’ll only remove them before that if they’re 50+gb (entire seasons, some movies, etc) just to keep my storage amounts down on my os ssd

I’ve actually had zero issues with tidal since I switched a couple of months ago, it pays artists better and I think it has more artists on it. I don’t use the mobile app much though if that’s what’s buggy, I mainly use the desktop app (on Linux) and occasionally the Plex integration to listen from my tv