Lidarr has a Spotify playlist syncing feature built in. You can set it to sync certain playlists and it will automatically add those artists to Lidarr. I think you can also configure it to monitor/download only the albums which the songs in your playlist come from, or download the whole artists discography.

I can’t attest to the quality of Usenet or private trackers for music as I don’t use either (mostly public trackers for movies and tv) but public trackers weren’t the easiest to get all the music I needed. I ended up using Slskd, a frontend for SoulSeek, with the Tubifarry plugin to connect to Lidarr and it is much easier to find releases now.

The next issue I have yet to tackle is porting those playlists to a player for Navidrome. If anyone finds a simple way to do so please let me know!

• Lidarr + Tubifarry + Slskd: automated downloads and organization
• Explo + listenbrainz: discover weekly replacement
• Navidrome: Subsonic Music Server
• Feishin: Linux Desktop client
• Arpeggi: iOS mobile client (Yes Ik iOS on privacy sub. Can’t afford to switch yet and my family has been using iPhone since I was s a kid)

Listenbrainz requires you to make what you listen to public as it is part of the open source project. If that is something you are worried about I think there are alternatives to explo that use last.fm but that is closed source as far as I know.

As others have said, buy stuff from small bands on band camp or at shows or something and pirate from whoever you see fit.

EDIT: I also should have noted, this is a self hosted setup that requires a server to be online unless you download your tracks to your client device. If you want a single device alternative, I am not personally sure what to recommend.

I graduated last year and it was a rough search. I think I submitted over 300 applications across LinkedIn, my schools Handshake account, Dice, Welcome to the Jungle, and a few other sites.

I’d honestly recommend just putting a good resume together and going for the spray and pray option with applications. It didn’t seem like anything I did really worked. Career fairs never actually led anywhere for me and I even saw a stack of resumes in the trash one time which was really discouraging.

Eventually I got a call while I was on vacation from a recruiting agency saying they had some opportunities. They said I had applied but I still have no recollection of visiting their website tbh. I landed a job in software support through them with my current company which is buying me out of the contract this coming month after being there for a little under a year.

I was skeptical at first going into software support since I really wanted to do some coding myself but it has so far worked in my favor. I have had the opportunity to do some coding with some of our engineers and my regular job duties also require code analysis so it is a lot more hands on with code than I first expected. There is also a clear path to becoming a software engineer with my current role so I will be pursuing that.

Overall, if you are comfortable doing something other than software engineering as your main role, I would look for similar roles like devops, db management, or anything that might involve some scripting programming as a smaller responsibility. Then you can try to work your way into software engineering from there. Definitely continue to apply to software engineering positions as your man focus though.