Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Backing up Spotify

annas-archive.li

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 732 posts

Re: Backing up Spotify

#101

Post by some-guy »

leetbulb wrote: post #82
VanTheBrand wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True but What.cd had a tremendous amount of notable music not available on Spotify though because it was also sourced from cds, bootlegs, vinyl, tape etc whereas Spotify only includes music explicitly licensed for streaming.

Yes. RIP a ton of very rare material. What.cd has a special place in my heart.

Redacted.sh is a worthy successor, but the average person just doesn’t care about “which release is best” anymore. I use YT Music as a backup but Redacted is my main source of music these days.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#102

Post by cm2012 »

rightbyte wrote: post #64
827a wrote: post #63

Holy crap. This is going to trigger a five-alarm fire at Spotify Engineering. This has got to be among the largest proprietary datasets ever unintentionally publicized by a company.

Wasn't all data available to users though?

Yes but very hard to scrape in bulk from user accounts

Re: Backing up Spotify

#103

Post by charcircuit »

Nextgrid wrote: post #80
montag wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand how the parent comment is downvoted yet this is not. “Stealing is ok because stealing is already a thing”… come on, now

Because it's not stealing . Stealing is a problem because it deprives the original owner of the item - whether the thief subsequently uses the item or not doesn't change that. This doesn't apply to dematerialized content: the original copy still exists. The only negative impact occurs if someone decides to actually use the pirated copy in place of buying a licensed one. The mere existence of this new pirate copy bein…

Okay, call it copyright infringement then if you want to be a stickler on definitions. It's still wrong and existing instances of it doesn't make it justifiable to do.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#104

Post by some-guy »

flxy wrote: post #75
Etheryte wrote: post #28

To put this into perspective, What.CD [0] was widely considered to be the music library of Alexandria, unparalleled in both its high quality standard and it's depth. What had in the ballpark of a few million torrents when it got raided and shut down. Anna's rip of Spotify includes roughly 186 million unique records. Granted, the tail end is a mixed bag of bot music and whatnot, but the scale is staggering. [0] https:…

I think what earned what.cd that title wasn't necessarily just the amount but the quality, as you mentioned, as well as the obscurity of a lot of the offered material. I remember finding an early EP of an unknown local band on there, and I live in the middle of nowhere in Europe. There were also quite a few really old and niche records on there which possibly couldn't be put on streaming services due to the ownership…

I’m still using the “successor” to what.cd and I usually discover artists through random lists, “related artists”, among other things on the platform.

One interesting way of discovering artists is finding an artist that I already like on a compilation CD, and then seeing what else is on the CD.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#105

Post by ruuda »

kzrdude wrote: post #35
ipsum2 wrote: post #31

Can someone explain why C#/Db (major/minor) is the third most popular key? Very unexpected for me, since its relatively more difficult to play.

Electronic dance music is the biggest genre in the data. So then easy to play shouldn't matter. It's still an interesting question. I think playing Db is pretty nice on the piano even if it's not the easiest.

There is a sweet spot for the bass. Lower is better for deep bass, but too low and it stops being a recognizable note, and consumer speakers can't reproduce it. This effect exists though I'm not sure if it is the cause of the pattern here.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#106

Post by stefan_ »

crazygringo wrote: post #11

This is insane. I definitely was not aware Spotify DRM had been cracked to enable downloading at scale like this. The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners, since Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000's of tracks each sounds horrible. But this does seem like it will be a godsend for researche…

DRM aside, Spotify clearly should have logic that throttles your account based on requests (only so many minutes in a day..), making it entirely impractical to download the entirety of it unless you have millions of accounts.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#107

Post by cm2012 »

basisword wrote: post #6

[flagged]

Ageee with you, this release is obviously a scummy thing to do.

Same as if someone released every book on Kindle for free. There are rules. Project Gutenberg is great. They don't just steal every book they can.

Not to mention the organization is openly trying to profit from this data by selling it to big tech orgs for AI training! None of the artists consented to that, I am sure, to say nothing if Spotify's interests.

On top of that they beg for donations.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#109

Post by cm2012 »

Nextgrid wrote: post #17
basisword wrote: post #6

[flagged]

Music piracy is already a thing, not to mention you don't even need to torrent nowadays when music is available for free on YouTube. Those who don't want to pay already don't pay so nothing changes there. The value of Spotify is the convenience, and this collection does not change that in any way. Your argument would apply if someone were to make a Spotify clone with the same UX using this data.

At least pirates provide some value from curation usually. In this case the leak is just all of Spotify. It makes it really easy for a competitor to just duplicate the Spotify service without paying licensing fees. Tbd what happens.
Post reply on HN