Skip to content

FAQ

How can I obtain a deleted track from SoundCloud?

Unless someone else has downloaded the track you are looking for before it was deleted, which is unlikely and should not be relied upon, it is not possible to obtain deleted tracks from SoundCloud.

People will sometimes share their downloaded tracks on Soulseek, VK and the Internet Archive.

Is there a SoundCloud archive?

A comprehensive public SoundCloud audio archive does not exist.

There are comprehensive SoundCloud metadata dumps that do not include audio for 2017-07, 2019-09 and 2023-03. These were made by scraping the SoundCloud API and contain only metadata such as track names, descriptions, genres, durations, dates, usernames, etc.

How to automatically tag a large amount of music?

There is no reliable way to automatically fetch and apply metadata to large music collections. Most existing solutions (such as Lidarr and Beets) will either fail to identify releases, misidentify releases or be missing essential data unless the collection consists of the most mainstream releases.

Some reasons why this is the case:

  • Different releases can contain overlapping content making it difficult to identify a release from a track without manual intervention.
  • Artists can use unconventional release editions and credits, difficult to consistently and accurately map into existing databases.
  • Sources focus on a subset of music based on target audience or community taste.
  • Sources do not provide detailed data as there is no financial or personal motivation.
  • Sources do not allow searching by universal identifiers such as barcode and ISRC.
  • Sources do not provide data in a format suitable for efficient processing by a machine.
  • Sources do not use consistent artist names and release titles.
  • Sources do not provide public access to their data.

Closest one can get is semi-automatic tagging with MusicBrainz Picard, Mp3tag, kid3 or a custom script using mutagen. Semi-automatic tagging involves automatically fetching metadata from multiple main sources where the releases were manually identified, then enhancing the data manually from secondary sources.

What is Master Quality Authenticated (MQA)?

Master Quality Authenticated (MQA) is a dying, proprietary and lossy audio codec.1 2 3 4 5 6 MQA-coded audio can be found in any PCM audio container (including WAV, FLAC, ALAC), including on CDs i.e. MQA CDs.

How can I identify MQA?

Programmatic detection of MQA is possible but not always reliable.3 Another way to identify MQA is to simply know where the audio was sourced from.

Tools that search for the MQA syncword in the decoded audio stream: MQA Identifier, mqaid. Based on the same principle some music players (including Roon) and DACs also display whether the currently playing audio is MQA-coded or not.

Audio ripped from TIDAL before 2024-07-24 in any quality from any release labeled as "master" will always be MQA.3 If the audio was ripped in any non-"master" quality it will also be undetectable as the syncword will not be present.3 Even though TIDAL has removed MQA from most of their catalog by now, there is still a chance of getting MQA.4

Is Album Art Exchange (AAE/AAX) down?

Many countries and VPNs are banned from accessing the site due to arbitrary reasons made up by staff. Damning staff-community interactions can also be found on Reddit. There exist more open and reliable artwork sources. See Finding Artwork


Created 2022-10-25 • Updated 2024-12-13

  1. I Published Music on TIDAL to Test MQA — https://youtube.com/watch?v=pRjsu9-Vznc ↩

  2. MQA Deep Dive Part 2 — https://youtube.com/watch?v=NHkqWZ9jzA0 ↩

  3. TIDAL "HiFi" Is NOT Lossless — https://goldensound.audio/2021/11/29/tidal-hifi-is-not-lossless ↩↩↩↩

  4. Audio Format Updates — https://support.tidal.com/hc/en-us/articles/25876825185425-Audio-Format-Updates ↩↩

  5. MQA Is Going Into Administration — https://whathifi.com/news/mqa-is-going-into-administration ↩

  6. Appointment of Administrators for MQA LIMITED — https://thegazette.co.uk/notice/4324214 ↩