audiobookbay.nl is great for audiobooks, i listen to a lot of them & i get them all from there

Games: don't mess with trying to dl PC games from random sites, it only takes 1 virus to mess you up bad. Stick to console games. The Switch is a perfect system, it takes hardly an amazing PC to emulate it. Nsw2u and ziperto are nice places to go. Keep track of which DL sites are good (1fichier!), and bad.

Games from older systems might exist on IA. Sometimes they're bundled under release groups like GoodCONSOLE. Do you know how many zillions of games fall under the MAME project?

Keep in mind that PC games can also be cheap AF, you can also just buy a lot of decent stuff through bundles (itch.io, fanatical, sometimes even humble). When you have DRM free stuff, trading with your friends is a nice kind of piracy too. I hear there's even a "Goldberg emulator" out there for your Steam titles.

Movies & TV - instead of torrenting, consider usenet. You'll need a usenet provider (buy a 1TB block from somebody like newsgroupdirect for about $10 to start), an NZB service (which indexes stuff into something like ".torrent" files, otherwise handling the mess of usenet is awful. Nzbfinder.ws is okay, I'm sure there's better out there), and Sabnzbd.

Media server - Plex is naaah. How much do you really need to serve stuff around? Maybe you'd be happier hooking LibreElec on an old PC up to a TV. Or get a plain cheap as chips brand-new intel n95 box (Beelink is pretty decent here), they run under $150. Don't bother with white-box Android set top boxes - to get a decent one you are looking at close to a PC puck price, and you're getting a skeevy as hell Android loadout.

Great writeup, I'd also like to add that Plexamp is a really great mobile app for streaming the music on your plex server, much better than the regular plex app. Basically feels just like spotify but for your personal music collection, I love it.

I can vouch for rin.ru. i've gotten some good games from there

Pretty sure Fitgirl isn't trans, the transphobic ultra-bigot Empress made it up when beefing with her. But don't quote me I don't have a source.

it's also worth mentioning that if you DO get a VPN, you can very easily set up qbittorrent to ONLY download when you have your VPN on, which basically eliminates the chances of you fucking up and forgetting your VPN or whatnot. here's a guide: https://www.reddit.com/r/VPNTorrents/comments/ssy8vv/guide_bind_vpn_network_interface_to_torrent/

thank you for this, i'm going to pore over some of the places I didn't know for for reference - and it might even get me closer to trying to sort out my music files.
(also, driveby love for Musicbee - it is just so customisable in terms of what info you're seeing from field columns to UI sections)

is vlsub Bundled with vlc now? It used to be a plugin

this is an incredible resource! Im gonna stop using spotify today i think.
one thing: could someone point me to a good music player for android? I listen to almost all my music on my phone :(

I've used Magnetdl for most torrents (movies, TV shows). Fitgirl repacks for games, and also: Soulseek! Soulseek for music, it's great, free. Direct file sharing.

a few things to add:

virustotal.com is a very useful site that will scan files with 70+ antivirus engines and show you all of the results. nearly anything you give it will already have been scanned by someone so you'll get the existing results instantly.

most major antivirus systems include signatures specifically for flagging keygens that don't actually do anything malicious, so if you get something from a scan where the type of "virus" has "PUA.Keygen" or "Riskware/KeyGen" or "Unwanted-Program" or something like that in the name, you can be fairly sure it's a false positive.

the only time i've ever gotten a notice from my ISP about piracy is when i torrented a textbook. textbook publishers are among the most ruthless IP holders (since their whole business model is exploitative and people frequently try to circumvent them) so if you're getting a textbook from a torrent you might want to be extra careful to use a vpn for that.

Oh my god, soulseek brought me back to the napster glory days. Thank you for this. I've already found tons of stuff that was IMPOSSIBLE to get on torrents, and in a matter of minutes. I'm so goddamn hype to get an mp3 player going and load all this stuff up.

MPC-HC with yt-dlp is currently the best to get around youtube's recent fuckery. It also plays stuff VLC doesn't like.

I have a very silly question that I'm struggling to find. How do I register for a Soulseek account? I get to a login screen in the app, but I can't find a registration page on the website or a way to progress in the app anywhere but login

thanks so much for this great resource! meant to leave this a while ago but qbit has built in search features that let you search a bunch of sites at once! Here's the page with info on how to setup the plugins: https://plugins.qbittorrent.org

I love stealing. 🥰

If you torrent any Star Trek, make sure you have a VPN! Paramount is extremely aggressive, and they closely monitor for piracy of even the very old Star Trek series. But if you have a VPN they can't do anything about it.

Tachiyomi is dead
Use Mihon instead

If you do have the money to buy stuff, vote with your wallet and buy DRM-free (Bandcamp for music, some parts of Vimeo On Demand for movies, GOG for games etc).

I personally love to support artists and creators who make the stuff I enjoy, but I refuse to pay for a product that doesn't respect me and limits how I can use it. If I can buy a file that I can backup and use freely on all of my devices I WILL buy it.

Just to add a note (and someone did leave a comment to this effect), but Tachiyomi isn't getting updates anymore due to a webtoon publisher going after them. Basically immediately, a spiritual successor called Mihon got made, and as someone who used Tachiyomi for multiple years and now uses Mihon, it's an exceptional way to find and read manga (and comics in general!) on your phone, including stuff saved locally. I would highly recommend it, it saved my life when my power was out for 4 days and I needed something to do.

Fun Fact! you can search from sites through QBitTorrent. Go to View > Search engine. (you need python for it to work. but it'll ask you to download it if it does not detect it)
Unofficial (aka the sites dont make it) list of addons for it: https://github.com/qbittorrent/search-plugins/wiki/Unofficial-search-plugins

Does anyone know any good resources for Japanese music/media? There's a collection of old ass anime drama/character song cds I'm always on the hunt for, but the English speaking internet is no help...