Needles & Grooves

some of my mp3s are corrupted from a hard drive transfer to a new computer a few years ago and "legacy acts" full album downloads like The Beach Boys, Talking Heads, Bruce Springsteen are impossible to find without using torrents which I would rather avoid

Is the issue that you don’t want to buy FLAC? Plenty of places to buy FLAC or high res of those legacy acts. Or just borrow CDs from your library and rip them?

I've never dabbled in FLAC. Mp3s for the most part have been fine for listening on the go. I have Spotify but I really don't like listening to it when the quality can vary away from wifi. I have massive mp3 collection I've been maintaining over the years but it's nearly impossible to find free links anymore. I'd love to not have to buy them but I think for some I may need to go that route.

Ah gotcha…wanna download without paying but not use torrents. Been a minute since I’ve done that. Between the copyright takedowns and torrents being a more effective way to share files, not shocked that MP3 links aren’t easily found.

Yeah! I haven't paid for a VPN in a few years because I wasn't using it often enough. Maybe I'll go that route but I don't know if I want to bother with the effort and I want to play nice since I just started using a new ISP. It's very scarce out there for download links. There's a handful of sites that usually have new releases, but even then if you don't grab it within a week the links get taken down quickly.

+1 for using your library and ripping them yourself if you can.