On one hand, that’s great news for uploaders!
On the other hand - oof! ISPs are bastards! You definitely deserve a bill credit! I was limited to about 100 Mbit when I moved in to my new apartment - turned out the fiber jack was bad. Have you been able to get a tech to check it out? Definitely a pain to get one out to check the physical line sometimes.
What’s your upload bandwidth? Just asking because it is kinda relevant to the topic at hand.
You cleared the whole continent! I’m in awe!
Core network tech for a largely US-based but still global fiber backbone provider.
I have a streaming subscription on qobuz, and use qobuz-dl to download anything that’s available to stream on qobuz. I tried using soulseek for a bit but it was sometimes a bit hit-or-miss with my searches, so the qobuz stream-rip option seemed like the best compromise. I’ve still got soulseek running, though, so whatever I get from qobuz is made available to the community.
I use Lidarr to manage my library. If you don’t mind running the plugins branch, there’s a qobuz-dl plugin that will let you utilize this method to download albums directly through Lidarr. Qobuz often has multiple versions of an album that can be hard to differentiate in the lidarr UI, so I often just end up downloading the specific version I want and then importing it into lidarr.
We all just lost The Game.
Ah, yeah, I can see where that would be an issue. I don’t use a VPN for Soulseek since it’s not really needed, but I seem to recall reading that it can be configured to work behind a VPN. However, the VPN provider must have port forwarding. And the configuration process may understandably be more effort than you’d want to put into downloading ebooks.
If these are e-books you’re looking for, you may want to try soulseek. It’s promoted a lot on here for music downloads, but I’ve gotten almost all my e-books from there, too.
As far as why the downloads are failing - does the site/mirrors your downloading from have subscriptions for higher speed downloads? My bet would be that if you’re downloading without a subscription then your traffic is getting deprioritized server-side. Kind of a shitty way for them to operate, if so, but nothing you can really do about it. Most sites I’ve downloaded from like that just make you watch an ad or force you to wait some amount of seconds before the download starts.
Just my hypothesis, though. Can’t know for sure if that’s happening without knowing what site it is.
I know Usenet is still alive and well for video, at least. Check out soulseek for music downloads if you want to try avoiding a subscription.
A factor that comes to mind as someone who also runs a Plex server with friends is the importance of hard-linking vs copying files. I may be projecting my own experience from when I first started sailing the seas, but you can save a lot of storage space once you learn you can have a torrent folder AND an organized TV/movie folder(s) without doubling your media collection size!