https://perfectmediaserver.com/ This is the guide that really gave me the confidence to take ownership of my self hosting. My setup now is simple (I use ucore from the universal blue project as a rock solid base) and I use small tools that I can understand (snapraid, mergerfs, borgmatic) to make things robust as well as podman and quadlets (docker also works great) to enable easily hosting basically anything I want through containers.

Everyone gave good alternatives for where to buy music. As for the pipeline for getting them into your music server, I have Picard running in a container (a couple projects do this, search docker picard) and I have the settings all configured so that when I drop in files to my NAS (though samba or whatever), then I just double click the folder in Picard and hit save and it moves it into my music server’s directories, all properly and nicely tagged (I have the container volumes all set up properly as well)

You can look into beets or wrtag for more automation friendly tagging services.

Well I can agree on the fact that the arms race situation we’re in sucks. It’s an old problem, seen in malware attacks and defenses. I’m just glad we have people fighting on our side in their spare time :’)

And it’s all good on the tone, thank you for your clarifications

That solution still introduces lots of friction. At the volume and rate that these bots want to be traversing the internet, they probably don’t want to be fully graphically rendering pages and spawning extra browser processes then doing text recognition to then pass on to the LLM training sets. Maybe I’m wrong there, but I don’t think it’s that simple and actually just shifts solving the math challenge horizontally (i.e., in both cases, the scraper or the network the scraper is running on still has to solve the challenge)

I’m sure you meant to sound more analytical than anything… but this really comes off as arrogant.

You make the claim that Anubis is negligent and come and go, and then admit ton only spending minutes at a time thinking of solutions yourself, which you then just sorta spout. It’s fun to think about solutions to this problem collectively, but can you honestly believe that Anubis is negligent when it’s so clearly working and when the author has been so extremely clear about their own perception of its pitfalls and hasty development (go read their blog, it’s a fun time).

ucore (soon to be cayo) on my home server!

Here’s my “low complexity, medium effort, full legal, full quality” solution:

Start actually buying your music. I go down the list in descending order of convenience:

• Bandcamp
• Qobuz
• Apple iTunes (not Apple Music)
• Physical CDs (for ripping)

Tag all your music with Picard (or wrtag if you only buy full releases, there’s a GH issue for other cases) or beets. Picard is the simplest and most feature complete right now and has a nice GUI. Then upload your tagged music to your Navidrome.

Then use a tool like

• https://github.com/WilliamNT/tunesynctool
• https://github.com/blastbeng/spotisub (check my fork for a better functioning version) These will match songs from your spotify playlists to songs in your subsonic-compatible server (which Navidrome is) and recreate your spotify playlists using the music it finds in your Navidrome. These syncing tooks can have misses and you may need to do some log-digging or issue-opening to find out why, but I’ve gotten them working fairly decent and plan on doing some work to improve them some day.

It’s a nice, fully legal, fully self-hosted stack. Not NEARLY as convenient as having them auto-ripped for you from youtube, but like you said, there are quality and metadata concerns when ripping from youtube.