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I Don't Have Spotify

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Re: I Don't Have Spotify

#281

Post by TacticalCoder »

askonomm wrote: post #8

I'd love to actually buy music and store it myself, as I've started noticing more and more that some of the songs I have on Spotify have started to disappear, but I find it very difficult to buy modern music anymore. Most gets released as singles, and as far as I know, to only streaming platforms. Is there a way to still buy the same kind of music that is on streaming platforms, and actually get the audio files?

> I'd love to actually buy music and store it myself...

Qobuz. For a start they only do lossless: no mp3. We're soon a quarter of a century into the 21st: gone are the Napster days of needing to stream mp3s.

Then Qobuz often has albums in higher quality than 44.1 kHz / 16-bit stereo. Not that you'll hear the difference: but artists/sound engineer going to the trouble of offering higher sample rate / bit depth typically do care about producing good sounding music so there's that.

Then Qobuz allows you to do precisely what you want: you can buy individual tracks or full albums to download, no DRM.

I've got both a collection of audio files I ripped myself from my own CDs (which I keep too), in a 100% bitperfect / lossless way (verified with an online DB of people who also ripped their CDs) and a Qobuz subscription.

The one criticism about Qobuz would be that music discovery ain't the best out there: the UI is actually quite bad. But it's good stuff for people who care about quality and who love to own their music.

Most network streaming devices now support Qobuz: for example I've got a fully integrated Yamaha amp that contains a network streamer (Yamaha R-N1000A) and MusicCast (Yamaha's music streaming app, like Sonos I guess but Yamaha) supports Qobuz (and Tidal and Spotify).

You don't just rent temporary access to an online service that may disappear under your feet or remove songs you used to listen to: you can actually buy and own individual tracks.

Check the plans they have: depending on how many songs you buy, one may be better than the other.

IIUC Spotify, under the pressure of both Tidal and Qobuz, announced they'll be moving to lossless streaming. It's 2024. At fucking last.

Re: I Don't Have Spotify

#282

Post by etra0 »

mihular wrote: post #175
mkhalil wrote: post #103

I know of a even more impressive website that will transfer playlists from Spotify (or 20 other platforms, including text files) to 20 other platforms or a text file. I will share the link, but don't hug it to death y'all. :) https://app.tunemymusic.com/transfer

I recently made a transition from Spotify to Tidal and found the suggested transfer service to do the job really clumsy. In my case I've transferred favorite artists and the service was just trying to match them by name which failed miserably when there was more than one with the same name - seemingly it picked one randomly. I wonder how this service would do.

I recently made the switch as well and used spotify_to_tidal [1] which is the free and open-source alternative to what Tidal recommends and it worked pretty fine! it couldn't find some specific tracks and I bet it does a somewhat similar name match as the one Tidal recommends, but at least this one doesn't have a limitation by the number of tracks, in case it's useful to someone else.

[1] https://github.com/spotify2tidal/spotify_to_tidal

Re: I Don't Have Spotify

#283

Post by aziaziazi »

toastercat wrote: post #79
askonomm wrote: post #8

I'd love to actually buy music and store it myself, as I've started noticing more and more that some of the songs I have on Spotify have started to disappear, but I find it very difficult to buy modern music anymore. Most gets released as singles, and as far as I know, to only streaming platforms. Is there a way to still buy the same kind of music that is on streaming platforms, and actually get the audio files?

The most sustainable way to "buy" music IMO, is to pirate it, and then buy merch from the artist as support. Or just buy off Bandcamp if its an option.

Donating is also an option as soon as you got enough mugs and tshirts. Not mentioning the tot bags.

Re: I Don't Have Spotify

#284

Post by dustincoates »

cwillu wrote: post #237
dustincoates wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As does YouTube Music

I've had songs I uploaded later disappear due to their changing agreements with music providers. A google take-out contained the missing files so I was able to recover them, but I'll never again rely on such an integration.

Could it be hidden behind the "Uploads" section? I have a lot of songs that I've uploaded that aren't available on YouTube, but they don't show up unless you go out of your way to find them in their dedicated section.

Re: I Don't Have Spotify

#285

Post by tempfile »

meeb wrote: post #99
Syonyk wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not. Artists will often enough remove old albums so you can no longer play them. Buy it, download as FLAC, put in your preferred local infrastructure to play. Plex/Plexamp works well, as does local file storage and a good command line music client if you're less GUI-friendly or don't have the resources for running them.

Downloading large collections can be a pain though, one at a time and in zips. I made this to help though https://github.com/meeb/bandcampsync Bandcamp is the only place to sensibly buy music you can own these days which is pretty depressing.

I always wanted this, thank you!

Re: I Don't Have Spotify

#286

Post by kccqzy »

paxys wrote: post #25
askonomm wrote: post #8

I'd love to actually buy music and store it myself, as I've started noticing more and more that some of the songs I have on Spotify have started to disappear, but I find it very difficult to buy modern music anymore. Most gets released as singles, and as far as I know, to only streaming platforms. Is there a way to still buy the same kind of music that is on streaming platforms, and actually get the audio files?

iTunes and Amazon have pretty much every song you'd want to buy.

What's especially annoying is that sometimes there are albums that can be played on Apple Music but they cannot be bought in the iTunes Store.

Re: I Don't Have Spotify

#287

Post by NickC25 »

toastercat wrote: post #79
askonomm wrote: post #8

I'd love to actually buy music and store it myself, as I've started noticing more and more that some of the songs I have on Spotify have started to disappear, but I find it very difficult to buy modern music anymore. Most gets released as singles, and as far as I know, to only streaming platforms. Is there a way to still buy the same kind of music that is on streaming platforms, and actually get the audio files?

The most sustainable way to "buy" music IMO, is to pirate it, and then buy merch from the artist as support. Or just buy off Bandcamp if its an option.

Or going to their live shows if they happen to come to a venue near you.

Or by buying vinyl at a local record store. Sadly, those are dying out, but you can find one or two good ones in any major city.

In electronic, hip-hop, and a lot of music that has a lot of computer-assisted production, a lot of producers will also release sample packs or VST presets that they sell directly on their websites. While often in small amounts, $50 or less, it more often than not goes directly to the artist with very little middlemen involved. While not a huge stream of revenue I'd imagine, it probably does help smaller artists if they can count on an additional couple hundred bucks a month from people that truly appreiciate their craft and I'd bet that if I reached out to artist XYZ whose music is no longer available on major platforms and said "hey i have been to a few of your shows, bought all your sample packs, and I can't find your tracks anymore" the artist, if small enough, would probably oblige and send along a nice little folder of music.

Re: I Don't Have Spotify

#288

Post by ssl-3 »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #109
mixmastamyk wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disc rot is not a thing for factory pressed CDs, assuming normal storage. Cheap CDRs from ~2000 or so did have the issue. My CDs from the 80s and CDRs from the 90s are working fine.

disc rot is a thing for every disc that's made with aluminum, which is all but a very few super special ones like mobile fidelity sound lab made with gold. Oxygen permeates through both the polycarbonate base and the clear coat top, maybe quickly, maybe slowly, but always.

Always? As in... Eventually?

Sure, I'll buy that: Aluminum and oxygen are great friends that love eachothers' company, and on a long-enough timeline here in Earth's atmosphere they'll always be reunited.

But how does that timeline compare to that of a human? Or even of the compact disc itself (a bit over 42 years old now)?

I mean: At least anecdotally, I have never discovered rot on any of my CDs that did not also have other contributing condition issues. I haven't even experienced the once-reported issues of air-dried, solvent-based (instead of UV-cured) inks. (And although my sample set is not infinite, it is also not particularly small.)

Re: I Don't Have Spotify

#289

Post by bluGill »

elevaet wrote: post #181
jonhohle wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it’s more of a treasure hunt, I really enjoy browsing for and buying physical CDs, especially second hand. Albums are often $1, they sound as good as when they were released and they’re easily convertible to any other audio format, including lossless, 16-bit, 44.1khz formats. The only thing better is SACD, but finding that is like a diamond in the rough and ripping it is its own challenge unless you have the ri…

> People are crazy for vinyl, but CDs are just _so_ convenient. I feel like I might be punished for stepping out of line here but CDs sound better than vinyl too.

This should be objectively true, but the limitations on vinyl prevent some of the abuses in the production processes (the loudness wars). Often vinyl is better anyway just because the engineers had to go back to make a good mix (mostly this is mastering not mixing) for vinyl - if the vinyl mix had been put on CD the CD would be objectively better.

Vinyl does theoretically have a better s/n ratio, but you can only see this in perfect setups, including a new needle in your player. Even then after just a handful of plays and vinyl is worn enough to be worse (I've heard of laser based vinyl plays which don't wear the media - I have no idea if they are real or how they compare to CDs, but I need to acknowledge them because they might be different enough to matter)

Re: I Don't Have Spotify

#290

Post by tschumacher »

Semaphor wrote: post #242
tschumacher wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss Songwhip as well. We used to have a bot in our music sharing Discord channel that looks for links to any streaming platform and convert them to Songwhip links via the Songwhip API. The good thing about Tidal is that, like Songwhip, it provides you with a list of links to various streaming platforms when you're not logged in.

Wish it had been open sourced, it worked so well. Or even better, if Bandcamp offered an API, so sites likes SW wouldn’t need to (probably) scrape that information. > The good thing about Tidal Can’t confirm, it’s worse than spotify for me, as I get an unclosable modal that asks me to sign up or login.

> Can’t confirm

Try this link https://tidal.com/browse/track/18835695/u, for me it shows a list of links to other services: https://imgur.com/a/MEsaIZw

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