megmer's ebubbles

deezer deep dive (download deerix)

megmer — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 20:46:09 +0000

everyday since i made my second ebubble, entitled soulseek shenanigans (nicotine gluetun port forwarding script), fans have been swarming me daily asking me to talk more about how to get .flacs on the internet for free. usually i lay down a suppressive fire and the angry mob runs from my doorstep in fear, but in recent times they have realized that i dont have the heart to kill. as i type this out the mass of megmer.net users (love you guys) have found a battering ram and are actively trying to get into my house, not realizing i leave it unlocked. ha! oh wait i just typed that out and they all just read it. they just walked into my house. one of them has a gun to my head. i guess i have to talk about deezer.

in my afformentioned award winning ebubble, i said this:

i heard deezer lets you download flacs through some sort of api if you are a premium subscriber, and that there is a lidarr plugin that makes it all easy but wait wasnt i supposed to be pirating? it seems kinda weird to pay 10 bucks a month to pirate music, but whatever, thats still a good option i guess. (i might still set it up someday who knows)

this singular paragraph, along with the fact that it was a blog post and not a play, lost me the tony nomination. i now understand the error of my ways and will work to do more research into the content i produce for this beautiful website.

after doing my research, i have found that you actually dont need a deezer subscription, you can just get a deezer arl from this link and it works perfectly fine. i also thought that the only way to get stuff from deezer was through a closed source, no longer developed app called deemix, but it turns out there are a lot of different implementations, so let’s run down a few.

before we do that, what i want from my deezer downloader is this:

ability to monitor a list of artists, so that when they release something it will download
proper folder management (ability to make it so each artist gets a folder and each album/ep/single gets a folder inside that folder)
can get every release on deezer
runs on linux with a webui or cli
is good

lidarr has a mod called docker-lidarr-extended which adds many features, including deemix support. it looks amazing and it would be my pick if it didnt still use musicbrainz as it’s only database, leading to a lot of the obscure music i enjoy (i listen to music so obscure its not even on soulseek) not being addable.

there is a whole serperate arr called deemixrr (why not deemixarr? or deezarr?) but it does not work anymore and has not been updated for 2 years so thats obviously a no-go too.

now we must go into an area not yet traversed. we need to use the command line. now i know most of you just screamed “eek! oh golly! oh dear! but i am not a loser nerd! i don’t know the first thing about the command line! i am way out of my depth here!”, but let me dispell your fears. i am a loser nerd, but i didn’t think i could use the command line either. however, it is actually extremely easy and you will feel dumb for not having used it before, i swear.

deemon seemed pretty poggers but it just dumps all the music into one directory, with no option to customize it (that i have found)

streamrip is very cool but cant monitor artists for new releases

and that brings us to the one i ended up using, deerix. this was made by one guy “mainly for (them)self”, but it still has builds for windows, mac, and linux. all you need to do is make a config file and add artists via their deezer artist id. if you dont wanna go through all that trouble just type in their name into a tosearch.txt and the thing will probably get it right.

it has a few problems, namely that if you try to get it to download an album made by multiple people, it will split the album into all the seperate artist folders. in cases like these i just get it from doubledouble.top. it also doesn’t put cover.jpg’s into the directories, and jellyfin doesnt read the embedded album art, so i fixed that by switching to navidrome. finally, another problem is that deezer doesn’t have every song i want, so i also gotta go to doubledouble.top or soulseek.

afternote

i said in my last ebubble that they would not all be about tech but ya know what? it’s my website and i can do whatever i want with it. all three of these ebubbles have been about internet piracy and you should not expect anything different. you also shouldn’t expect the same thing forever! i can do anything! videos! music! music videos! look here’s an image

bet you didnt see that coming

a truncated guide to vpns

megmer — Thu, 23 May 2024 13:00:00 +0000

recently i was watching drew gooden’s youtube video “cars are getting dumber” where he makes great points and you should definitely watch it after finishing this ebubble and also read this article by mozilla and also watch the entirety of the channel not just bikes but that’s not what this ebubble is about. when i was watching that video i saw a sponsorship from him for the browser opera. now previously i knew opera as being the web browser that used it’s own browser engine but ever since 2013 they switched to chromium and now there’s only about 2.5 viable browser engines! (soon to be 1.5 if google gets their way) and there’s pretty much no reason ever to use opera except for the amazing features that they tout on their website, including an ai chat bot (wow!) a built an ad blocker (truly??) and a free vpn (theyre just gonna give it away like that?!?!). it took me about ten seconds to figure out if this vpn is safe, simply by conducting a internet search for “is opera open source”. nevertheless i read an article by them that looks like they fed an ai model hundreds of youtube vpn ad reads and told it to make an article filled mostly with fluff (but not even good fluff like this ebubble) about how great vpns are and why you should get one, specifically opera’s. the opening paragraph has this awe inspiring quote:

“If you lived in a house made entirely of glass, anyone who wanted would be able to watch everything you do. Not a pleasant thought, right? Unfortunately, that’s exactly the situation many people put themselves into by using the internet without a secure and trusted VPN connection. So, exactly what is a VPN?”

despite being genuinely hard to read and containing the word secure about once per paragraph, in the end the reader is not actually made aware of what a vpn is. now i could make fun of dumb tech stuff like this all day, and i might in a future ebubble, but this one is about vpns; what they are, what they aren’t, and which ones you should use.

i asked my friend summer (non techie) what a vpn does and she made it clear that the average viewer of youtube sponsorships only is given a faint idea what a vpn is or does. she said that vpns can:

let you access websites without tracking
block viruses
let you access illegal websites

which are all about half true. vpns obscure one identifier (the ip address), but they mostly do nothing else to prevernt tracking. if you use a closed source operating system, its like putting a bandaid on an amputee’s leg. also, some vpns do have antivirus software built in, but that is completely unrelated to the purpose of a vpn and im gonna save what i was gonna say about antiviruses for a future ebubble. the third claim is also false, you can already access those websites, but if you use other privacy methods along with a vpn, you can access those websites with peace of mind that nobody knows (see also: tor).

don’t get me wrong, im not judging summer for her lack of knowledge about something that doesn’t matter to her and that she knows about through youtube ads. im not judging anyone for that matter! it shouldn’t be up to every single end user to know all this weird computer stuff. it should, however, be up to internet autistics like me to know all this stuff and relay it to pathetic unremarkables like you.

so what is a vpn? in 1995 blah blah blah nobody cares. if you want to know the history of vpns just look it up. what matters is that modern ‘commercial vpns’ (im just gonna call them vpns) are a more fancy version of proxies. if you are connected to a vpn and you point your web browser to megmer.net, instead of requesting the service from your ip address (which is unique to your house or neighborhood), your device requests the vpn service to request the contents of megmer.net from a vpn server that uses a shared ip address and send it back to you. this has several positive effects, such as:

hiding your ip from the websites you visit*
hiding your browsing data from your isp†
allowing you to bypass website blocks‡
allowing you to bypass rate limits by changing your ip
allowing you to spoof your location¶ to access content from outside your country.§

*your identity can still be traced in a number of ways, plus an ip address is often shared anyway so it doesnt give off your identity as much as you might think it does.

†if you use https and other standard forms of encryption that are on by default, your isp already knows nothing, other than the domain names you are connecting to and the amount of upload/download. connecting to a vpn masks the first of these.

‡your country or organization can still block the domains you connect to to access the vpn (but there are ways to sneak around this)

¶your location can be accessed through other means, and an ip address gives a very approximate location in the first place

§many websites, such as streaming services, ban the use of vpns, either due to someone else using that ip to get themself banned from the site, or from the website having a large list of vpn ips. this makes it a little harder to access content from outside your contry like the ads promise.

along with those benefits, vpns carry several downsides, such as:

slowing down your internet speed
not allowing you to access local network ports in some cases
blocking access to many websites,
requiring you to place trust in your vpn provider
adding a layer of complexity to your “stack”.

in my opinion, the reasons to use a vpn are:

you really care about your privacy and are already taking steps to protect it (if you run windows, macos, ios, chromeos, or most versions of android then this one does not apply to you)
you are a pirate (or you do other illegal things online)
you want to bypass censorship, website blocks, and rate limits
you are a 1337 hacker and you want to get directly into the government mainframe without the CyberCops busting down your Hypertext Door and gunning down your Metaverse Dog.

if any of those apply to you, you might already be reaching for your credit card and looking for nord vpn discount codes, but wait! don’t get just any vpn. most vpns are closed source and contain trackers, going completely against the point of having a vpn in the first place. check out this article to find out about the shady company behind some of the most popular ones. you can’t fully trust anysoftware that doesn’t run on your machine, so every vpn could just be a honeypot, but there are a few ones you can (probably) trust.

so what vpns should you trust? well its a good thing you said that at your screen just now because i have three recommendations. however before i start, a better list than mine would the this one by privacy guides, because it is based on a set of strict criteria instead of what some guy on the internet thinks.

best vpn in general: mullvad vpn

mullvad vpn has a great pricing structure, at 5.41 usd a month, no matter how many months you buy. this is far better in contrast to pretty much all other vpns, which offer lower prices the more you buy, pushing customers into agreeing to longer plans. mullvad also doesnt require an email and password to sign up, instead giving you a random number that you are supposed to save (pretty much every other internet company take notes!). they are constantly developing new stuff for their vpn, making it better and better every year. it is very clear they care more about privacy than profit.

best vpn for cheapskates who like to steal from a nonprofit: riseup vpn

riseup vpn is a free vpn intended to be used only by people that really need a vpn and for some reason cannot pay for one. if you can, consider donating to them, especially if you use it. it has also not been through any security audit, so you need to really trust that riseup.net does not keep logs and has your best interests in mind. it is very barebones and doesnt have much to talk about, but it is free (zero dollars) and also it is free and open source so i guess its cool. this is the worst of the three.

best vpn for pirates: proton vpn

proton vpn is a little more profit centered than mullvad, but for the most part they are the same. they both accept cash mail payments, they both can be used with any wireguard or openvpn client, they both are foss, and they both have undergone security audits. however, mullvad wins because it has more fun little features, better linux support, it doesnt require email, and it charges a flat rate of 5 euros a month instead of only getting that rate if you pay yearly. mullvad was THE PERFECT vpn, until they disabled port forwarding. if you dont know what port forwarding is, you probably dont need it, but if you torrent or use soulseek, you will probably want it. proton vpn is the one i use, but if mullvad ever readded support for port forwarding, i would instantly switch.

afternote

so far both of my ebubbles have been about vpns. they have also both been about computers. i will obviously talk alot about computers here but this is probably not indicative of what will be here in the future! expect a lot of shorter posts about literally whatever i feel like, maybe even some videos, some instagram-like galleries, idk! its a website so i can put literally anything here and all you get to do is watch :]. part of this article was written with speech to text, and part was written with a keyboard. i might use speech to text more because i am a very slow typer but a very fast talker. i also used markdown and the text editor ghostwriter and now i feel dumb for not having used it before.

soulseek shenanigans (nicotine gluetun port forwarding script)

megmer — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 13:00:00 +0000

preamble

okay so i had been using sonarr, radarr, prowlarr, and qbittorrent, with gluetun to connect to proton vpn, so my isp doesn't send me a letter, as well as the gluetun qbittorrent port manager by snoringdragon to update the port, in order to download and organize content for my jellyfin media server.

that all works perfectly, with one hitch. i cant listen to music! i mean sure music piracy is trivially easy if youre okay with listening to youtube, mp3s, or otherwise compressed audio, but my ears are too good for that. no, i need a library full of lossless (or as close to lossless as i could find) audio files ready to stream at a moment's notice. the first thing i tried was lidarr, but that was underwhelming. the problem was that 1. torrent sites only really have mainstream music for whatever reason and 2. the database thingy that lidarr uses isnt very good, leading to a lot of music i enjoy not being listed, or being listed wrong.

i heard deezer lets you download flacs through some sort of api if you are a premium subscriber, and that there is a lidarr plugin that makes it all easy but wait wasnt i supposed to be pirating? it seems kinda weird to pay 10 bucks a month to pirate music, but whatever, thats still a good option i guess. (i might still set it up someday who knows)

soulseek

in comes soulseek (with the client nicotine+ behind this docker container), my personal messiah in terms of getting music for free. the way soulseek works is everyone (a good few of us) shares their files (usually music) to be indexed by the soulseek server and downloaded peer to peer by whoever wants it. you can think of it like bittorrent, except there is only one tracker and you are morally obligated to share all your obscure crap, making content easier to find. it doesnt work with lidarr or anything, so you gotta sort everything yourself, but thats not really a big deal to me.

also just like torrents, 2 clients can only connect if at least one of them has an open port. its still possible to use soulseek with a closed port, but you will have less to download and less people will download from you.

since i am pirating behind a vpn with an assigned port that changes every reload, i would have to change my settings every time the vpn restarts, which is often. qbittorrent has the same problem, but there are several scripts to update it. i searched online, but there were no scripts out there, so i decided to make my own.

the script

the script i made is a fork of this script. the prereqs for running it are:

you have nicotine plus and gluetun up and running
your vpn allows port forwarding
you have /tmp/gluetun from the gluetun container and /root/.config/nicotine from the nicotine container mounted
manually changing the port works

this is the first script i have ever written, so if its bad tell me. the important thing is it works. for best results, set a crontab to run the script every 12 hours or so.


#!/bin/bash



PORT_FORWARDED='YOUR/GLUETUN/TEMP/DIRECTORY/forwarded_port'



docker restart gluetun



update_port () {

  PORT=$(cat $PORT_FORWARDED)

  sed -i "29s/.*/portrange = ($PORT, $PORT)/" YOUR/NICOTINE/CONFIG/DIRECTORY/config

  echo "successfully updated nicotine+ to port $PORT"

  docker restart nicotine

  exit 0

}



while true; do

  if [ -f $PORT_FORWARDED ]; then

    update_port

    inotifywait -mq -e close_write $PORT_FORWARDED | while read change; do

      update_port

    done

  else

    echo "couldnt find file $PORT_FORWARDED"

    echo "trying again in 10 seconds"

    sleep 10

  fi

done

my first ebubble!!

megmer — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 17:00:00 +0000

hey dudes welcome to the first ebubble on megmer's ebubbles!!!!

"why did you move off of instagram?"

instagram sucks because of their endless data collection, being owned by facebook, being designed for people to get addicted to it, and no api except for some specific use cases. (also they design their app like they dont want you to use it, i mean like whats this "snooze suggested posts in feed for 30 days" bs i just dont want to see stuff from people i dont follow.)

"okay i get that but why not just move to a open source federated social media like pixelfed or mastodon?"

erm... yeah that does kinda make sense but like. a blog is much cooler in my opinion because it is made for the type of long rants i love typing. i was going to use and customize an instance of ghost or writefreely, but ironically it didnt give me the freedom i wanted, as i could not figure how to embed it into my site or change the font to comic sans. but speaking of the fediverse (stupid name i hate it so much), i am working on a feed2toot instance that will post all of my blog posts on mastodon so you wont have to learn what an rss feed is

"i also dont like the social media im on right now, what would you suggest i do?"

well probably not what i did. it took a while to learn how html and 11ty works and make this site. you should probably switch to a federated social media (meaning all the posts on one social media like diaspora can be viewed on any other such as pixelfed). the most popular one is mastodon but you should just pick whichever you like most because they can all* view the posts of eachother. if you specifically want a blog, use writefreely, ghost, flatpress, or any of the other amazing open source blog engines out there that im too good for.