

Straight up piracy at this point.
I have vanilla-ass white boy musical tastes, so I’ve had little issue finding what I want on Soulseek.
That said, there is one thing about Soulseek that’s not advertised: there’s a freaking enormous list of “blacklisted” terms that won’t return search results even if the data is there.
Lots of banned artist and album names that will return zero results, unless you do something like search for a song or two that’s on the album you want and finding the data that way.
Might be worth seeing if changing what you’re specifically searching for improves your results, since I was dealing with like 70% completion until someone told me about that ah, feature.
Edit: and you can have my iPod from my cold dead hands.

One thing I ran into, though it was a while ago, was that disk caching being on would trash performance for writes on removable media for me.
The issue ended up being that the kernel would keep flushing the cache to disk, and while it was doing that none of your transfers are happening. So, it’d end up doubling or more the copy time because the write cache wasn’t actually helping removable drives.
It might be worth remounting without any caching, if it’s on, and seeing if that fixes the mess.
But, as I said, this has been a few years, so that may no longer be actively the case.