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I Don't Have Spotify

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Re: I Don't Have Spotify

#351

Post by moffkalast »

I've never taken Spotify or any other music streaming service seriously. They are a joke for the same reason Netflix is, they only play limited licensed content so their selection inevitably drops and drops until everything you search ends with zero results. Obscure indie artists? Forget it.

Add average 4G reliability to that and you have a service that never has what you need, and if they do it never works when you need it (e.g. long car rides in the middle of nowhere). And then they expect you to pay for it or listen to ads too. Nothing beats a good ol' folder of mp3s. And 128GB of the average phone can store many an mp3.

Re: I Don't Have Spotify

#352

Post by loughnane »

rubidium wrote: post #278
joking wrote: post #186

One of the best services I get from my Nas is the ability to save the music there and be able to stream to my phone. I prefer to buy some music and have it there than relying in any subscription service.

Would you share what setup you use or recommend for this, both NAS and software for phone streaming?

Not op but I have a similar setup.

I have an old synology nas thats running Navidrome in a docker container.

On my iPhone I use play:sub and point it to the local ip and port associated Navidrome.

When I’m away I access the network through a WireGuard connection (set up on a protectli router running opnsense). Before I used traefik to expose it to the web.

Takes some setup but once it works it’s great.

Re: I Don't Have Spotify

#353

Post by WorldMaker »

coryd_dev wrote: post #15
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?

Bandcamp, 7Digital and (extremely reluctantly) Amazon. The bigger the label the harder it is to buy music digitally.

As an equally reluctant option one side or the other to Amazon, Apple's "iTunes Store" still exists and is "mostly" DRM free, if you don't mind AAC and friends (MP4 Audio) rather than MP3. It's getting harder and harder to find those Buy buttons, especially if you start from an Apple Music link/the Apple Music app, but it's currently no worse than Amazon as Amazon and Apple seem deep in direct competition on how hard they make it to find Buy buttons.

Re: I Don't Have Spotify

#354

Post by WorldMaker »

legohead wrote: post #340
4ad wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would help if you specified exactly what you didn't like about them. I use Apple Music, I use it because it's lossless and it's integrated in the Apple ecosystem. The UX of the actual Music app is... not great, but tolerable, better than the iTunes before it. I listen to some pretty obscure stuff and I don't think I ever found something missing on it. YMMV.

Well I can tell you as a Spotify user that their random play is horrible. It's not truly random, which is extremely frustrating when you have 1000+ playlist and keep hearing the same 10 songs over and over. Here's an ongoing 150+ page, 4 years old thread about it on their forums: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/All-Platforms-Op...

The silly trick I found is to use Apple's Smart Playlists to help. I've been creating playlists like "Not heard since Jan 1, 2023". Songs drop out after they are played in a shuffle.

Re: I Don't Have Spotify

#356

Post by bariumbitmap »

coder543 wrote: post #339
Muromec wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but the next step is to make identifier somethink like a has so the media can be content addressable. Wait, we can't have that. It's too convenient

Content addressable doesn't really work here... different apps may have the same recordings encoded in different formats and bitrates, but they are still the same recording. Unless you meant "content addressable" in the sense of a uniquely assigned identifier like I was already talking about, and not a computed identifier from the raw bytes of the file like a hash.

This sounds like an acoustic fingerprint, such as AcoustID[0]. I think AcoustIDs and XSPF[1] would be a good combination for shared playlists. It's a shame that development stopped on the Tomahawk music player[2], it would have been an ideal platform for shared playlists like this.

[0] https://musicbrainz.org/doc/AcoustID

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_Shareable_Playlist_Format

[2] https://github.com/tomahawk-player/tomahawk

Re: I Don't Have Spotify

#357

Post by insane_dreamer »

NickC25 wrote: post #287
toastercat wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 smal…

> Or by buying vinyl at a local record store. Sadly, those are dying out,

they were dying out but are now coming back

Re: I Don't Have Spotify

#358

Post by retrodaredevil »

kccqzy wrote: post #286
paxys wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Additionally, there's no way to buy the Dolby Atmos mixes of most albums yet. Spatial sound mixes might actually have a chance at going mainstream, but you'll have to pay for these subscription services to access them.

Re: I Don't Have Spotify

#359

Post by dylan604 »

rvba wrote: post #349
dylan604 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great that you want to use open sources, but now, you've just provided more evidence for my case as you've listed 2 new "sources of truth". Even that fact that there are plural truth sources indicates no one source is truth. Why are they different? Same reasons that have already been discussed So, we really have not made any forward progress here

Reality is that simply very few people use this functionality. If those two open access sources become big enough, it is quite clear that someone will make a project to reconcile the data between them. If any of those projects skyrockets the same way wikipedia skyrocketed, then the topic will be solved.

If If If. This isn't blind pessimism. This is from someone that has dealt with metadata from studios/labels for just under two decades. IMDB was meant to do this for movies/tv, but yet it's an absolute dumpster fire.

So from an outside perspective, it's fun to dream a little dream, but from a gray beard it's just yet another dream.

Re: I Don't Have Spotify

#360

Post by nobody9999 »

seanvelasco wrote: post #272
nobody9999 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>a linux device where only spotify works? Huh? What linux device might only have access to spotify? Pretty much every Linux distribution (with the possible exception of Linux From Scratch[0]) has multiple local apps to play music, both from the command line and via a gui in their standard package repositories. Not to mention dozens of sites (if you can get to spotify you can get to them) that perform the same functio…

apologies, i meant i only have a linux device with only spotify installed, because it's the thing i use. no, i'm not talking about music players, only streaming services. you're completely right other services and software are available on linux. but the point i'm trying to make is, this tool is spotify -> others, but a common use-case is others -> spotify.

>apologies, i meant i only have a linux device with only spotify installed, because it's the thing i use. no, i'm not talking about music players, only streaming services.

>you're completely right other services and software are available on linux. but the point i'm trying to make is, this tool is spotify -> others, but a common use-case is others -> spotify.

No apologies necessary. I misunderstood your point, which is certainly a fair one.

And given your use case, I get your frustration. That said, there are, apparently, a number of Linux apps and plugins for said apps that will allow you to play not only local music, but streams from Spotify as well as from other streaming services.

I get that's not really what interests you, but it is an option if you choose.

I don't use Spotify, so I haven't looked for tools to convert to Spotify links, but I'd expect they're out there, given that the reverse exists.

Edit: Fixed typo.

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