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Backing up Spotify

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Re: Backing up Spotify

#611

Post by grishka »

squigz wrote: post #570
grishka wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? You can still stream any song with a free account. It's just that there will be ads. Additionally, in mobile apps, there will be ridiculous artificial limitations to make sure your experience is as miserable as it could possibly be. My understanding is that the premium requirement is there to avoid having the repo taken down.

My understanding, based on a related comment in this thread, was that premium accounts get higher quality; in that case, I figured any such checks would be server-side. If you were referring to a separate check in the above repo's code, my mistake.

Hm, maybe. I don't remember whether they offer higher quality. If they do, it would make sense to have that check on the server side. It's been a while since I last used Spotify because they deleted my account in 2022 without warning when they left Russia.

But I was referring specifically to all third-party reverse-engineered Spotify players requiring premium accounts to function at all.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#613

Post by writebetterc »

zuspotirko wrote: post #436
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…

> 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. Are you aware Annas Archive already solved the exact same problem with books?

I am not, how did they solve that?

Re: Backing up Spotify

#614

Post by bekindtoartists »

I’m hugely disappointed in Anna’s archive. As much as they believed they were doing this for good, they have now allowed bad faith actors to obtain all music for AI gen. This is just horrific for all artists out there who are fighting against so many issues that impact their creativity and sustainability. Why not just digest the data and not allow the music out there. As usual artists get fucked over.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#616

Post by josteink »

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:…

> What.CD [0] was widely considered to be the music library of Alexandria, unparalleled in both its high quality standard and it's depth.

It was quality in technical quality of the audio in the files, but also in the organization and sourcing of the material, the QA-process of the encoding - down the the specific release the audio-file was from.

There was quantity, sure, but that was secondary to the quality. The quantity was just a side-effect of the place being known for quality, making it an attractive arena to participate in.

And it also had all the "weird"/non-standard things you don't find on mainstream streaming-services precisely because that is what independent curators are good at and often driven by.

This Anna's release... While in itself impressive in many ways does not compare to the things What.CD represented. It's almost the exact opposite:

- focus on most popular content - niche content (even by mainstream Spotify-standards) is not included

- quality is 160kbps ogg files, which is far from lossless, it's not tightly coupled to a release and even as so far the audio-grading goes, there's no transparent QA process for the content, nor is it available in audiophile fidelity.

This is definitely Apples vs Oranges.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#617

Post by bekindtoartists »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #217
lurk2 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Infra isn’t free. There is a certain irony in people providing copyrighted works for free justifying profiting from these copyrights on the basis that providing the works to others isn’t free.

Cost recovery isn’t profit. Copyright is just a shared delusion, like most laws. They’re just bits on a disk we’re told are special for ~100 years (or whatever the copyright lockup length is in your jurisdiction), after which they’re no longer special (having entered the public domain). I think what is more ironic is we somehow were comfortable being collectively conditioned (manufactured consent?) with the idea that…

Are you an artist? Have you ever created a piece of work that has a copyright attached? You might be anti-establishment but ultimately you are anti-creation. Artists are finding it harder and harder to live and create, artists are vital proponents and voices in changing culture - for you to take away their ability to live in a financially viable way says more about you and how you have conflated big business and an artist who is trying to make art and live.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#618

Post by larodi »

mvkel wrote: post #193

This work is so critical. Read an article that was published just 10 years ago, and witness the bit rot as most external links will 404, gone forever. I think it's worth questioning the value of preserving -everything-, but it seems like if we can, we should.

You know, I had the (at time of writing) 600 something comments ran through Opus 4.5 and do a summary of the sentiments. It could't find a single comment that genuinely defends Spotify or expresses sympathy for the company.

HN crowd is, of course, biased in the technocratic sense, but you see - everyone seems to actually rejoice the move.

The closest to remorse is `linhns` and `locusofself` expressing concern about artists getting hurt (not Spotify itself), but locusofself prefaces with "I hate spotify as a company but..."

(disclaimer: this text is NOT LLM generated, I wrote myself a summary of the summary. here's the Claude thread should anyone care https://claude.ai/share/cfc4ca63-2b9e-47ac-a360-202025d1a134)

Re: Backing up Spotify

#619

Post by josteink »

chrneu wrote: post #114
rckclmbr wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t talk about what.cd without talking about its precursor OiNks Pink Palace. Even Trent Reznor was public about what an amazing place it was. Music aside, the community existing just for the shared love of music and not for any other kind of monetary or influencer gain is what set it apart. We just don’t have those kinds of communities for music online anymore

>We just don’t have those kinds of communities for music online anymore They're still kind of around, but yeah, everything is very much on it's way out in the music scene, at least in terms of that late 90s early 00s culture. Or has been until recently. There is a renewed interest in self-hosting and "offline" style music collections. It sucks too. The way folks discover music is important. The convenience of streami…

> It sucks too. The way folks discover music is important. The convenience of streaming has lead to some interesting outcomes.

I think carefully curating music was something we did when music was a scarce commodity. Our collection was limited by how much we could afford to acquire. As such, acquiring the right stuff become a valued skill, not only for DJs, but for music enthusiasts just playing music at home.

Streaming killed all that. For 99.9% of the people out there, streaming has all they need and will ever need, at a fixed cost. It's absolutely abundance.

So the skill of curating music as a human activity went out the window as well, because there's no cost in playing the wrong track and deciding you didn't like it, before moving to the next item in your AI-generated playlist.

Put bluntly: How people discover music isn't important. At least not anymore.

(And I say this as a music enthusiast myself)

Re: Backing up Spotify

#620

Post by RGamma »

troupo wrote: post #606
RGamma wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since relatively recently I'm getting AI music in my automatic radio. They look/sound like soulless facsimiles of the real thing.

It depends on the algorithm which often preferences "similarity" (for whatever definition of similarity is). This year I got into some pretty generic blues/rock when driving and really liked one of the songs in some playlist/radio [1]. Little did I know that the song was AI. So when I started a radio based on that song, the resulting radio was 99% AI though I didn't even realise that until after a second/third listen…

Wow, that channel is misrepresenting its songs as lost records. Pure cancer.
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