Could you write a guide on how you pirate your songs? Edit the metadata and such, the whole steps sort of thing. Thanks!!
so there's several ways to do this, but the basic process is very smilar to uploading any kind of media onto a usb stick. extremely simple. the most annoying and tedious and boring as shit part of pirating your music library is downloading and editing all your existing tracks for the first time, after that every time you want to add a new album or song it just takes a few minutes.
for almost every major streaming platform (apple music, spotify, soundcloud, youtube, etc) there exist many sites to download tracks from them for free. i primarily use these:
https://spotidown.co/en6
https://convertytmp3.org/
https://www.klickaud.org/en15/
using a site that downloads from a streaming platform is simplest because they will usually include some metadata (like artist, composer, genre, disc number, year, track numbers, etc) and album cover art with the file. downloading from youtube will only get you the audio and you'll have to add the metadata andcover art yourself.
to edit playback time, cover art, and metadata, i use itunes. for ipods this is most seamlessly done on a mac because apple integrates its devices so well, but you can also use the itunes app on a windows computer, or the windows file explorer and media player. although i don't have a windows device to demo it, downloading from youtube and editing metadata using the default windows media player and file explorer was how i pirated music in middle school so i'm sure it's still possible. if you have old cds lying around or access to a library or dvd rental store, you can also rip files from cds and dvds and download them.
all that being said, quitting streaming doesn't mean you *have* to pirate everything. if you want to monetarily support artists, iomoio and bandcamp are great places to purchase albums and songs from. pairing piracy with supporting an artist on non-streaming platforms like patreon, going to live shows, buying merch, etc is also a great way to make sure your favorite indie musicians know you love them.
anyways back to itunes! i had four albums i wanted to download today, three of them were available on spotify, one of them was only available for purchase through bandcamp, and i downloaded one additional audio from youtube that was never released as a track on streaming sites.
bandcamp is the simplest: after checkout you get a link to download in your preferred audio file format, and you get a zip file containing all the tracks with metadata attached as well as cover art.
downloading from spotify is second simplest and you don't need to have a spotify account. load up the spotify website, search for the album or song you want, right click, hit share, and select copy link to album/song.
paste the link into your spotify downloader site of choice and download the tracks you want.
on youtube, click share and copy the link to the video you want, paste it into a youtube downloader. make sure to download it to an audio format, not mp4.
once all your desired songs are downloaded, open up your file explorer or finder. control+select or cmd+select them by album and click open. on a mac, they should open in itunes/music app unless you've changed your default audio player. if itunes/music is not your default, click 'open with' and select it.
itunes will open and start autoplaying the album. it will automatically sort the tracks based on whatever metadata it already has, but you can change all of that. to edit the entire album, right click the album cover or click the three dots in the bottom left corner and select 'get info'. a dialogue box will pop up with tabs for details, artwork, lyrics, options, and sorting. on an official track from apple music streaming, this is where you would see the credits, lyrics, etc. it's also where you can edit them. to edit the metadata for just an individual song right click and select get info on the track title.
in the get info dialogue box, you can edit all of the credits, change the title, the year, you can assign each song in an album a number, separate it into discs, write in lyrics, change what time range the track plays back from, and much more. the first album i downloaded didn't have much i wanted to change, so i added in the genre, and let it be.
the second album i downloaded required some fixing. if the metadata indicates two artists or different artists on a track within an album, itunes will automatically split the album in two, making it difficult to search by artist on the ipod. this is what it looked like:
to fix this, you can simply delete one of the artists on the track that's split off:
and now my album is one. i already know in my head who the featured artist is, so i don't see the need to mark it in metadata and mess up my library organization lol.
last up is opening the track downloaded from youtube.
this one has zero info attached so it shows up empty except for the audio:
after changing the title, filling in the artist, genre, year, and all that, there were two other issues with the track: it was missing cover art, and theres a bit of dialogue in the beginning of the track that i wanted to cut out of the playback.
to add cover art, you can google the album or song and save the image from the image results. go back to the get info dialogue box, select the artwork tab at the top, and choose the image file you want to add.
to change the playback time frame, click on the options tab at the top, there you'll find the fields to change where the playback starts and ends from. select the checkbox on the field you want to edit, type in the minutes and seconds, and next time you hit play on the track it'll start from the specified timestamp.
now that that's fixed, we're ready to upload! if you have an mp3 player, the upload process differs depending on which device and model it is.
uploading to an older model of walkman is easiest. to upload to my walkman nwa847, i plug it in to my computer using the charging cable, and drag/drop or copy/paste the new files to the folder labelled 'music'.
the upload process for newer walkmans, like the nwa55, is pretty similar. once plugged in, you can drag/drop, copy/paste the files, and there's also the option to use a software called content transfer (which you can download online somewhere, i forget where exactly i downloaded it from), which additionally allows you to select whether to save the files to local device memory or sd card, and allows you to select and delete files from either location. to use content transfer, select which location you want to upload to, and drag/drop the songs from itunes to the app window.
to upload to an ipod, plug it in to your computer using the charging cable. on a mac, open finder, and the ipod should pop up twice in the sidebar. the disc labelled just 'ipod' is where non audio storage is located, so if you want to add notes you can upload those files there. the disc labelled "[your name]'s ipod" is where your music syncing options are. click there, and you can either remove and re-sync your entire library which will take some time (removing and resyncing ~9gb or about 1200 songs takes around 20-30 minutes. if you select automatically sync when connected, your ipod will add only the newest or changed items to your library and leave the rest alone, which just takes a couple of minutes. in the manage storage dialogue box, you can see how much space each song takes up and delete individual songs, similarly to content transfer with the walkman.
and that's about it! you honestly don't even need an mp3 player to utilize these tracks; once downloaded, you can play them from your laptop offline, you can also upload them to your phone if you have storage space there, and listen to them via your phone's default media player. you can also burn them onto cds, drag and drop them to a usb stick, email them to a friend, etc. they're fully yours now :D
