The (future) ultimate piracy guide
A piracy guide that is only going to be ultimate when it is no longer under construction
A collection of my favourite tools and sites for obtaining digital wares
Check out the physical media guide for taking care of your collection
All sections are non-torrenting options (i.e. direct downloads (DDL)), except for the Torrenting section itself.
NOTE BEFORE YOU START: I recommend using, at minimum, Firefox browser with Ublock Origin installed before visiting any site offering piracy. For even better privacy from your ISP, I recommend the use of a VPN, either mullvad or ivpn, but it is not necessary when visiting DDL sites. See the torrenting section for specific torrenting advice.
Books
- Libgen - Enter your search query, click on the book title, then click on Libgen & IPFS & Tor under the Mirrors section, then click on GET at the top of the page.
Music
DDL Sites
- Free mp3 download - Does what it says on the tin, as well as also offering the option to download as FLAC. I'm pretty sure it is scraping/streaming from either Deezer or Spotify, and I'm not sure how much longer it can last before it gets taken down, so use it while you can. I wouldn't recommend using it's VPN feature, I have no idea what it does and it doesn't make sense for it to be able to do anything useful for you. If you want to use a VPN, use mullvad or ivpn.
Tools
- Cuetools - Sometimes when downloading lossless audio files, they may be compiled into a single .cue file. I won't pretend to fully understand this, but Cuetools is a program that will help you separate it into separate FLAC (or any format) files.
TV
- get_iplayer - A command line tool for downloading TV from iPlayer. Legally, you should be a resident of the UK and hold a valid TV licence in order to use this program. Practically, as long as you use mullvad vpn on the gb-lon-wg-007 server you're good to go. If you aren't a mullvad user, test each UK server until it works. If you have no luck... you may need to switch to mullvad. Or move to the UK.
Torrenting
Important primer: be sure to pay for a VPN (I recommend Mullvad or ivpn), and make sure it is running before you open your torrent client of choice (I recommend qBittorrent). It's also a good idea to bind your torrent client to the VPN network interface, so that in the event your VPN stops working your activities are not leaked outside of the tunnel.
You can use dnsleaktest by ivpn as a quick way to check whether your VPN is working or not.
Magnet links sometimes automatically open into your torrent client, or you can also copy and paste them.
A final word of caution: be very careful downloading programs you normally have to pay for (or any applications for that matter), and I would personally recommend avoiding The Pirate Bay. Music and videos are far less likely to contain anything malicious, unlike applications, so if you really cannot find your music or video anywhere other than TPB, it's probably fine. If you really need to torrent an application, I recommend doing so within a virtual machine.
Sites
- Knaben - A search engine for torrents. There are a lot, this is just the one I tend to use.