MP3 Downloading in 2023

[SilkSkull]

As the talks of MP3 players continue, I find myself wondering where I can still reliably download mp3s. I used to use SoulSeek on my computer but I have no way to download mp3s easily on my phone, any recommendations?

[Memory]

I just use youtube-dl.

Once you installed it, 'yt-dlp -x <link to playlist or video>' in the terminal, and audio we got. No reason to dabble with shady websites.

Assuming you use GNU/Linux ofc.

[TheFrugalGamer]

Believe it or not, there are still a lot of places you can get MP3s if you're willing to look around. Amazon still sells them, although sometimes you have to do some extra clicking in order to get past the "listen via streaming" crap they put up on every page.

I also like to go to thrift stores and pick up cheap CDs to rip onto my PC. Nobody really wants them much, and you have to dig through all the crap, but you can still get some good finds. Discogs.com also has a second hand marketplace that usually has really good prices on most albums.

If you're into JPop, here's a blog with a ton of downloads:
https://jpop80ss2.blogspot.com/
Archive.org has tons of weird rips from cassettes and old vinyls:
https://archive.org/details/cassettetapes?tab=collection
There are also game soundtracks:
https://archive.org/details/folksoundomy_gamesoundtracks?&sort=-week&page=2
Free Music Archive is slowly becoming more corporate, but they still have free music downloads:
https://freemusicarchive.org/home

Bandcamp still offers downloads for (almost) all of their albums. A good number of artists have free albums as well. You can sort by free stuff here:
https://bandcamp.com/tag/free?tab=all_releases

I'm a bit of an mp3 hoarder myself. I keep most of my music on an SD card in my phone and listen locally rather than streaming. I'm picky about what I listen to and I like the freedom of being able to listen to things I love regardless of whether or not I'm online.

[Memory]

If the artist/company doesn't sell it officially via their own website or Amazon, I'll usually try looking on archive.org or use a YouTube converter.

[sig]

I don't know about a site for MP3's in general, but I'll pitch in with the site I get my videogame music from: https://downloads.khinsider.com/

You can download songs individually, and if you want to download entire albums at once you either need to donate or send referral links.

[worldwidewar]

I use yt-dlp to download songs and FFmpeg to convert and tag them into MP3s. It's the same process I use for cataloging my needledrops, but with albums I don't own on vinyl or own at all. The only MP3 sites I can think about that aren't sketchy are archive.org and Kingdom Hearts Insider, either of which don't really provide as much as YouTube / Soundcloud do depending on your taste in music.

[ol1vi4s-corner]

i use this website：https://dirpy.com/

[voupie]

I actually use spytify [https://jwallet.github.i:ha:spy-spotify/overview.html], which is an app that records spotify audio as you play it, so as long as you stream with the best quality you can passively archive the music you listen to while you're just streaming spotify! super cool and convenient for me! other than that i want to build some sort of large archive to upload all of my mp3 archives! the spytify tool uses spotify's track data s well so you can have fully tagged mp3s from the get go! was the reason i chose it actually.