Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

If you are a real music enthusiast then I'd recommend you to join Private Trackers for Music, REDacted (RED) and OrPheuS (OPS) are the two big ones. RED is pretty much the successor of What cd. You'd be able to find pretty much all the music you could ask for on RED/OPS and in the highest quality (FLAC). To join them, you'd have to attend their interview (text based) on their IRC. They'd ask you basic questions about music and bittorrent. You can find more information here - https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html

I'm just warning you, Do NOT, under any circumstance, visit their site while the interview is going on (i.e. while they're asking you questions), they monitor all the traffic coming on that site and if you're caught, you'd be banned from all the major private trackers forever. Don't stress it, all the information they're gonna ask is on the interview site, read it a couple of times and then queue for the interview, getting the interview is the hard part as the interviewers are voluntary members of RED so there are not many of them. Most of the interview happen on the weekends but you would need to queue in a few days ago to get a good position in the queue.

Step 1. Purchase 8-10 albums from your favorite artists on Bandcamp (Bandcamp typically has flac files)

2. Subscribe to Tidal with a VPN in a poor country for very cheap ($4).
3. Pay for one month of one of the music migration services ($5).
4. Use Tidal-dl to get all the FLACs your heart desires.

Honestly you can probably keep Tidal, it's cheap and good. But always download the FLAC files for anything you don't want to lose.

Soulseek is your friend. Setting up your library will be a tough step, but once done, you'll feel so free that it will be worth it.

FMHY has some good ones for high quality music. Organizing your Library will also be real easy with Musicbrainz Picard.

As for mass downloading there should be some Spotify downloaders out there. Every other way will proly not be able to get 100% of your library. Just make sure to use a trusted one, because you'll most likely have login with your account to access your saved stuff & playlists.

Personally I download from Tidal for HiFi (yt-dlp + hifi-tui) and Youtube Music (yt-dlp) for everything else.

Use https://squid.wtf/ qobuz downloader

Pay for one month of tidal premium, they have an official tool to migrate Playlists from Spotify, then you can use streamrip to download from tidal

https://squid.wtf/ for qobuz downloads!

I switched a while back, but grew frustrated with most of the solutions. Apparently while my music is on Spotify, some of it isn't in the MusicBrainz database, so automation and tagging/sorting tools just crapped out. The solution of submitting the data just wasn't work I was willing to put in (the guide on making a submission alone was too much).

Ultimately I did most everything manually and got a workable solution, but without added variety I lost touch with music and stopped listening all together over time.

When you have your library offline, check iBroadcast.com for convenience :-)

I search for " FLAC" in either TPB or rutracker.

~~yt-dlp should work great for this, though it is a command line program~~

EDIT: yt-dlp does not work for spotify, I was wrong

I had great success ripping from Spot with Tunefab. Haven’t used it in over a year (lazy) but it was worth paying for. It has a built in browser or w/e but it’s laggy AF. I would just sign in to a regular browser and make a giant playlist of everything I wanted to save and then log in through the program and do one drag & drop of the playlist to the download queue. IIRC you could download FLAC as well as any other lesser forma but don’t quote me on that.