Yup, it's becoming a sad state to be able to own things and not be dependent upon the whims of others.
I went from buying all my music (physical and digital copies), and sometimes had to remove DRM from the digital copies, to stopping that and just using Spotify.
I'm slowly planning to stop paying for Spotify, but it would be very expensive to buy all the music I listen to. I think this will lead to at least 2 things (that used to be true, for me). 1) I'll listen to more local/new music that I can buy from BandCamp, etc. and 2) I'll have higher value to the music I do listen to, because I'm not as worried about glutting myself on a million new bands through Spotify. I'm okay with these 2 things.
It still requires a lot of manual work, such as cutting the tracks, and making sure there are no "skips" (which somehow can happen). Skips could theoretically be removed using a consensus algorithm (using multiple recordings).
I just wish someone would develop a fully automated workflow for converting playlists to audio files.
I'm not familiar with the 'parec' command. Are you able to filter out other audio streams (e.g. Slack alerts or accidentally opening a page with an auto-play video)? I was under the impression that one of the big advantages of Pulse Audio was its ability to separate multiple streams.
Interestingly enough, I had similar scripts about 15 years ago pre-Napster. The earliest mp3 sharing sites tended to push full-albums instead of breaking things up by track. I had a lot of fun using some of the earlier mp3 tools to break up and tag tracks. I still have a lot those mp3s on various HDs, and I know it because my splits weren't perfect for certain tracks that don't have 2 second gaps.
In theory PulseAudio should be able to separate the streams, or at least turn off audio for selected applications. However, this was never really a problem anyway because I usually ran the command at night :)
Yes, audio processing in the early days was fun, though it's easier now because of better tools and especially bigger harddrives and faster CPUs :)
I went from buying all my music (physical and digital copies), and sometimes had to remove DRM from the digital copies, to stopping that and just using Spotify.
I'm slowly planning to stop paying for Spotify, but it would be very expensive to buy all the music I listen to. I think this will lead to at least 2 things (that used to be true, for me). 1) I'll listen to more local/new music that I can buy from BandCamp, etc. and 2) I'll have higher value to the music I do listen to, because I'm not as worried about glutting myself on a million new bands through Spotify. I'm okay with these 2 things.