Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client • Hacker News Board

Re: Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client

#151

Post by pxoe » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 1:07 PM UTC

dotancohen wrote: post #58

pxoe wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

signing up for a free service (or even just using it without an account with youtube music), and playing music for free, is the easiest way to support a creator, at no cost to you. the bar is so low - support creators with ad money for free, and some people still can't clear it, or refuse to clear it. the complaining is not fair, it's annoying. if you can't pay, or wouldn't pay otherwise, and still opposed to things…

I feel that your comment is poorly articulated and ignores the primary reasons that many people use adblockers (malware protection). However, your point is very valid and I 100% agree. Compensate with your time or compensate with your money. I personally still have a large collection of compact discs. The sound quality difference is amazing, though people listening to music produced in the last decade might be less a…

in context of music/video streaming (maybe even youtube and spotify specifically), if there's no malware in video and audio itself of ads that would be getting blocked, that isn't really "blocking malware". juuust a little disingenuous there.

even with ads blocked "for malware protection", malware could end up being promoted within content, or just encountered somewhere, and there's more actual malware protection (some is built in to OS). so...it's not about "blocking malware" with blocking ads altogether, is it. especially when a bunch of ads are non-interactive and not even about software but stuff like food and other things. it's more about not seeing ads at all.

and sometimes, ad blocking just isn't an "anti-malware" solution in itself. like, if you wouldn't be able to navigate app catalogues and kinda sus out what could be malware or just steer away from untrustworthy apps altogether, ad block isn't gonna help you much there. "native" ads (promotional content) throw an even bigger wrench into that.

Re: Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client

#152

Post by denysvitali » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 1:11 PM UTC

nunez wrote: post #113

bayindirh wrote: post #2

Nifty. Please be aware that this is not a "spotify client" per se. It gets the data from Spotify, and plays the audio from YouTube. It's an interesting invention, and worthy of the first page, if you ask me.

Okay, THAT is Hacker News worthy.

To be fair it would be more HN worthy if they managed to reverse engineer the DRM of Spotify to create a custom client without the Spotify library (which only works for Premium users)

Re: Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client

#153

Post by elashri » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 1:15 PM UTC

extheat wrote: post #123

__warlord__ wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the "hacker" part of "hacker news" doesn't mean much anymore.

The Hacker in hacker news was never meant to imply black hat/malicious types of hacking. There’s quite a difference between say, tearing something apart, reverse engineering it, breaking into something that _you_ own, versus trying to tear into something you don’t own without a really good reason. At the end of the day it’s about judgement and taste, there isn’t so much a hardline but there is a line on what we consi…

What in this project is about piracy? It does not give you free access you cannot have without it.

Re: Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client

#154

Post by carlosjobim » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 1:15 PM UTC

Congratulations! This is the best performing client I've ever used on MacOS, and with a decent GUI as well. YouTube Music is so slow and laggy as to be unusable on my powerful computer, the official Spotify client is just on the limit of being unusable because of extreme sluggishness.

If users could log in with their YouTube account as well, then us folks that pay for Premium could also support the artists we listen to, win-win.

Playlist management could be improved. It took me a while to figure out that you have to hold on a song to select it. It would be more reasonable to select a track and delete it with the delete key or from a right-click menu. Right now the "Remove from playlist" option does not work.

Re: Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client

#155

Post by denysvitali » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 1:18 PM UTC

monsieurbanana wrote: post #4

For something that puts "not using electron" so prominently I didn't expect it using flutter. I admit I don't really have much experience with it, I thought it was like react-native (but better?), still far from truly native apps. Im here to being told I'm wrong. I would love to, specially since we can transpile clojure to dart

Flutter, from experience, works really well on Android. Unfortunately the same cannot be said about the web (see for example [1]).

I think that if these performance issues were to be solved, Flutter would see a bigger adoption. In any case IMHO Flutter >>>>> Electron

[1]: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/56257

Re: Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client

#156

Post by gnramires » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 1:19 PM UTC

drewdevault wrote: post #51

pinkgolem wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Even if you only listen to one artist, 8 hours per day, 365 days a year, they will earn a whopping... 100 bucks from Spotify. i mean, that sounds fair?

Maybe, maybe not. If an artist makes up 1% of your listening, that goes down to a dollar, and if you factor in more realistic listening habits that goes down further. Consider that this is paid to the rights holder, not the artist, as well -- the artist usually gets even less. Buy one album on Bandcamp for $10 and the rights holder gets $8.50 (on Bandcamp this is usually the artist directly). Fact of the matter is th…

People are saying about 70% of Spotify revenue goes to rights holders, whereas you're saying about 85% of Bandcamp's revenue goes to rights holders. It really doesn't seem like that much of a difference?

Maybe what you're saying is, you end up spending much more buying merchandise and labuns directly than you would spend on Spotify. (I'm not sure this would be true for everyone though)

Maybe then the solution could be to have a way to just pay more to Spotify (conditional on keeping the revenue split intact).

Something I don't like about Spotify though, is that I don't get to have any kind of say on how the revenue is split. I'd personally prefer if there was an egalitarian bias in payment, and the artists with less revenue would get a greater share of my subscription. But there's no way I can control that, that's the most frustrating to me personally, and I'd gladly switch to a system that pays more (since I currently have the means to).

In fact, I've proposed FunkWhale, the federated (libre-)music streaming platform, should get a subscription service like that, and that I should have some control over the revenue distribution (maybe there would be a minimum revenue split, and the rest I can 'choose my own algorithm', for example one that heavily favors less popular musicians). I agree that meanwhile the best I can do to support them would be paying them directly, and I've found a few have Liberapay (or Patreon) accounts as well.

Re: Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client

#157

Post by DotaFan » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 1:19 PM UTC

App is very buggy on windows.

Re: Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client

#158

Post by apwell23 » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 1:37 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #146

drewdevault wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Direct your passion for getting musicians paid to Spotify and the distribution system, not to this. If everyone who uses this software were to use Spotify direct, ads and all, in the long run it would make pennies for the artists at best. You're better off listening to music however you please and buying albums on Bandcamp to support the artists; a lifetime of spotify listening will make less money for an artist you…

>You're better off listening to music however you please and buying albums on Bandcamp to support the artists; Often, the "listening to music however you please" will contradict "buying albums on Bandcamp to support the artists" ... because the particular artists the listener wants to listen to are on a big label and thus, their albums are not on Bandcamp . The "buy on Bandcamp" advice only works if one likes to list…

it also sidesteps the whole discovery issue. I would love to know how that person is discovering music that they buy on bandcamp.

Re: Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client

#159

Post by rglullis » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 1:41 PM UTC

blowski wrote: post #129

drewdevault wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't actually make that argument, though. I said that a user who circumvents ads on Spotify and buys albums from Bandcamp is more profitable for the artist than someone who just listens to Spotify ads, and I believe that this is factually true. A quick review of Google will turn up endless testimonies from artists who make more money from Bandcamp, usually by an order of magnitude or more. Spotify may be better t…

1. If you _really_ like an album, buy it on Bandcamp, because it gives more money to the artist. 2. If you just listen to the occasional song, listen to them on Spotify. Artist gets _some_ money, but nowhere near as much as #1. 3. If you don't care about the artist getting anything at all, then use workarounds like this tool, or download on torrents. Most people used to do #3, and are now doing #2. #1 is just not goi…

0. If you really want to support an artist, just ask what is the best way to just send them some hard cash every month? Patreon, ko-fi... even straight wire transfer (isn't FedNow already working?).

Why do we keep insisting on having middlemen?

Re: Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client

#160

Post by plagiarist » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 1:41 PM UTC

Reubend wrote: post #3

While it's nice to have an open source client, please think twice about bypassing the premium subscription/ads to listen for free. Musician deserve to be paid for their work, and it's not fair to them to bypass all of the mechanisms to do that. Spotify doesn't pay musicians well, but there are still indie artists making a living from it nonetheless. I hear a lot of people these days complaining about ads, and that's…

Paying Spotify does not pay musicians. It pays Taylor Swift and Joe Rogan. The musicians I am listening to are receiving fractions of a penny per song.