deezer deep dive (download deerix)
published on
<== megmer ebubbles
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