51–60 of 81 posts
Spotify is mostly more of the same to me now. I get stuck in these ruts where I just listen to the same music because the interface makes that most convenient. I’ve been on a good streak lately though with some new artists that make me go “why have I never heard these before”. But on the other hand I’m still mostly stuck in mono-genre land. Also Spotify keeps pushing these “highlights” on me as if I don’t remember wh…
Spotify is mostly more of the same to me now. I get stuck in these ruts where I just listen to the same music because the interface makes that most convenient. I’ve been on a good streak lately though with some new artists that make me go “why have I never heard these before”. But on the other hand I’m still mostly stuck in mono-genre land. Also Spotify keeps pushing these “highlights” on me as if I don’t remember wh…
This is very similar to what the British comedian James Acaster does/did. He buys music off Bandcamp then puts it on his iPod. He documented it all in his second book Perfect Sound Whatever, it helped him get over a breakup and depression around 2016 if I remember right. He jokes in his book that he has an 'iPod guy' who hooks him up with the old iPods. His recommendations here: https://www.jamesacaster.com/my-music/
I had the same issue with Spotify prioritizing playlists over albums. My roommate and I built a Spotify "record player". We printed out album covers and glued them to plywood squares. There is a QR code with the spotify URI on the back. We have a Pi with a camera on the stand. When the album is in the stand we play the album from the beginning, using the Spotify API. If you take the album off the music stops. You can…
Do you have a write up or src hosted anywhere?
Spotify is mostly more of the same to me now. I get stuck in these ruts where I just listen to the same music because the interface makes that most convenient. I’ve been on a good streak lately though with some new artists that make me go “why have I never heard these before”. But on the other hand I’m still mostly stuck in mono-genre land. Also Spotify keeps pushing these “highlights” on me as if I don’t remember wh…
Make sure to check out the Discover Weekly playlist.
Spotify is mostly more of the same to me now. I get stuck in these ruts where I just listen to the same music because the interface makes that most convenient. I’ve been on a good streak lately though with some new artists that make me go “why have I never heard these before”. But on the other hand I’m still mostly stuck in mono-genre land. Also Spotify keeps pushing these “highlights” on me as if I don’t remember wh…
Have you tried using the "Enhance" feature on playlists or playing a radio from a playlist/album/artist/song? Genuinely curious to know your experiences with those as they usually provide me enough variance and new artists recommendations, somewhat based on the general mood the original seed. Sometimes it can pigeonhole me into sameness but then I just feed something else to it and go from there.
Maybe I will try “enhance” more (will save me from manually creating so many playlists; the centerpiece of Spotify which also sucks to manage). Thanks.
I have used iTunes since the very first iPod and still have an iPhone. I customize my own id3 tags and album artwork -- sometimes I find the internet has made their own better perfect album art.
I have over 20,000 songs, mostly from Bandcamp and YouTube these days, but still sometimes ripping CDs here and there. A ton of my music is esoteric stuff I'd never find on Spotify -- some strange soundtrack put together by fan artists of video games, or something like a Japanese noise band.
Audio quality frankly doesn't matter much beyond 128kbps for me, and portability of a format is more important than anything else. I use m4a (AAC) mostly these days, and only a few select albums really deserve the FLAC/ALAC treatment IMO. So I'll store these separately for later... maybe when I retire.
Just to demonstrate how my music is fundamentally incompatible with Spotify, here's some examples, just picking randomly from my library to see if they exist on Spotify:
beatmania IIDX 29 CastHour soundtrack -> Nope
Lost Ark Soundtrack -> Nope
Driven To Madness - Dance with the Dead -> Yes
Blutkind - :wumpscut: -> No, but they have lots of other wumpscut stuff
Creid - Yasunori Mitsuda -> Nope, and this is his best work, RIP Spotify
One Last Kiss - Utada Hikaru -> Yes
follow slowly - Nekomata Master -> Nope
Masada Gestalt - Zen Albatross -> Nope
Yin-Yang - Victor Wooten -> Yes
Zipangu - Wednesday Kanpanera -> Surprisingly, yes
Xenogears: Revival the first and the last - Yasunori Mitsuda -> Nope
Bastion Original Soundtrack - Darren Korb -> Yes
Dark Black Forest - Steve Rhyner -> No
The Skywatcher's Handbook - Skywatchers -> Yes
So anecdotally that's 6/14, or about a 40% rate.
That's actually better than I expected, but still Spotify is something I'd just never, ever use because it's fundamentally incompatible with my ideals behind listening to music and how important it is to me, especially in the long term.
I’ve used streaming services for almost a decade now and nothing has ever come close to Rdio. I use YouTube Music today as its family plan is reasonably priced (although the price is increasing next year) and it includes YouTube Premium…but I have found with it (and every other service I’ve tried) that I have to use other tools for actual music discovery. I tried Spotify for a while but the promotion of Podcasts caus…
Which features made rdio so good?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Make sure to check out the Discover Weekly playlist.
Used to be consistently useful. Now it’s mostly sameness and songs that I’ve heard before.
I don't think I've ever been introduced to artists I wouldn't have listened to otherwise through Spotify. In general I find Spotify's recommendation to be slightly worse than just listening to the radio. I don't have a good alternative at the moment though. A long time ago I built a music recommendation system based on Discogs that made a vector space based on the genres and then found the most similar albums of one…
Is your music recommendation system open source? Would be down to check it out and learn a thing or two from it. On the topic of vector search, I'm fairly certain that Spotify still uses Annoy ( https://github.com/spotify/annoy ). Like Faiss, it's a great library but not quite a database, which would ideally have features like replication ( https://milvus.io/docs/replica.md ), caching, and access control, to name a f…
I was also experimenting with finding a popularity score for songs and artists. The last.fm API worked well for this, but then that was just using an API, so there was a lot of other sources that I was looking into, like using pageviews on the Wikipedia article for an artist.
I've thought about making a new open source version at some point if I get time. I think I've got a decent idea how to make something work quite well now, basically make a vector with the genres/styles, do dimensionality reduction and then store in vector database, so you get like an embedding of the album essentially. A bit like those language models embed words in a vector space, but you don't need a neural network to do it, since that job is done already by humans who have listened to the music and tagged it.