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Backing up Spotify

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Re: Backing up Spotify

#621

Post by R68B24 »

rendaw wrote: post #326

Looking at the analysis, I'm totally surprised opera and psytrance are so prolific. Psy-trance... I thought it was the same as any other electronic genres, but do people get high and just start shoveling psy-trance tracks out or something? Opera I thought was a very strict discipline, needing rigorous somewhat esoteric training in order to produce the right sounds. How could there be so many opera artists? I mean, I'…

I was suspicious of this too. I don't think "genres" table is correct.

On Spotify, Blue Öyster Cult are listed as: ['album rock', 'classic rock', 'glam metal', 'hard rock', 'progressive rock', 'rock'] In the archive, they are just coming up as ['classic rock', 'hard rock']

Grimes: ['art pop', 'canadian electropop', 'grave wave', 'indietronica', 'metropopolis', 'neo-synthpop'] In the archive: ['art pop']

Taylor Swift: ['pop'] In the archive... nothing.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#622

Post by cess11 »

dehrmann wrote: post #603
cess11 wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's what they ran on when the general public could join on a referral basis. They called that "beta". The technology was already proven, i.e. The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks had already been a success for years. What Spotify likely aimed to show was that they could grow very fast and that their growth was too good to just shut down, like the entertainment industry tried to do with TPB. After they too…

> The technology was already proven, i.e. The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks had already been a success for years. Spotify showed that you could have a local-like experience with something backed by the cloud. BitTorrent had never really done that. The client wasn't that good, and you couldn't double click and hear a song in two seconds. The way you said that made me think you might be remembering when it was…

If you don't remember, why speculate?

Ek had been the CEO of µTorrent and they hired a person who had done research on Torrent technology at KTH RIT to help with the implementation. It was a proven technology that required relatively small adaptations.

They moved away from this architecture after the entertainment industry got involved. Sure, it was a cost issue until this point, but it also turned into a telemetry issue afterwards.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#623

Post by lurk2 »

0x3f wrote: post #580
lurk2 wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days. The majority of people on earth cannot afford more than two or three of these subscriptions. > But then who would be making the knock-offs and what would be motivating them? Ten years ago there was a popular blog that got posted on /r/anarcho_capitalism with some frequency. IP was a contentious topic among the then-technologically l…

> The majority of people on earth cannot afford more than two or three of these subscriptions. I would guess the majority of people on earth don't even have good enough internet to pirate HD video, nor the technical skills to do it, so we're not really talking about global averages here. > Without any* copyright law, any content that is generated effectively gets arbitraged out to the most efficient hosts and promote…

> I would guess the majority of people on earth don't even have good enough internet to pirate HD video

Why is that the qualification you’re using? There are plenty of people in the developing world who have benefitted from access to e.g. LibGen who would never be able to afford to legally access the materials hosted there.

My point is that under the abolitionist model there is no financial incentive to create anything because the profits get arbitraged away by the most efficient copy services. This wouldn’t be relevant for saturated mediums like music or literature, but it does create a free rider problem in scenarios where the intellectual property has a high cost of production and not many people qualified to produce it (e.g. technical manuals, pharmaceutical research, well-produced films, etc.)

Pirates effectively have their usage subsidized by those who actually pay for the content. A huge amount of human potential is unlocked when works are freely available through legitimate platforms; neither of us are disputing this. The reason I can’t get on board with copyright abolitionism over copyright term reduction is because I don’t see how certain works will be produced at all under an abolitionist model that can only sustain itself via voluntary donations.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#624

Post by whstl »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #546
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A way to strip the DRM was built into the iTunes app - burn the song to a CD and rip it.

Is burning to a CD and ripping it lossless?

If the source and target are both lossless, then yes. ALAC was available in iTunes since 2004 AFAIK.

Caveat: CDs were 44.1/16 so if the original files had more bit depth, they would require downsampling. Technically lossy, but not "compression" per se. But AFAIK, iTunes was also 44.1/16.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#625

Post by troupo »

RGamma wrote: post #620
troupo wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup.

There's also obvious care and human creation there as well.

They have several "artists". Bertha Mae Lightning gets the better lyrics and artangements. Virgil Dillard gets simpler tunes and the occasional weird grammar/lyrics. And so on.

I even saved that radio as a playlist to show people: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/072Wp3cFsziKBQlnglF5XM?si=... It has both obvious AI ("artist" by the name of promptgenix) and not-so-obvious (Enlly Blue, Dumpster Grooves).

The weird/sad/funny/ironic part? Many of those songs are still better than whatever Taylor Swift and a lot of other artists produce.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#626

Post by mycall »

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.

Are those 404 links available on web.archive.org?

Re: Backing up Spotify

#627

Post by oarfish »

NoahZuniga wrote: post #458
oarfish wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is actually quite nefarious, as it is a private organization that decides what sites get blocked, with no legal oversight. - https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearingstelle_Urheberrecht_im... - https://netzpolitik.org/2024/cuii-liste-diese-websites-sperr... Its a DNS based block, so overriding your default DNS server is enough to circumvent it. I think Dns over Https also works.

Pretty sure this was a thing in the past, but that currently it has to be a court order.

The wikipedia article seems to concur with you, although this seems to be a voluntary policy by CUII, the members could still decide to not wait for any court orders and block whatever they want.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#628

Post by oarfish »

KomoD wrote: post #353
derkades wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not hard. But please don't misuse it and ruin the fun for everyone. It is nice to be able to use the music relatively easily for hobby projects. My music server has functionality to play tracks from Spotify this way: https://codeberg.org/raphson/music-server/src/branch/main/sp...

Where the magic actually happens: https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot

Seems like librespot is not directly suppporting the fetching of audio to files, and intentionally so, in order to not get targeted by Spotify. Obviously you can dump the audio to file as it "plays", but that would be be very slow.

So I suppose if one wanted to use librespot for archiving, one would have to modify it to support this use case.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#629

Post by R68B24 »

R68B24 wrote: post #621
rendaw wrote: post #326

Looking at the analysis, I'm totally surprised opera and psytrance are so prolific. Psy-trance... I thought it was the same as any other electronic genres, but do people get high and just start shoveling psy-trance tracks out or something? Opera I thought was a very strict discipline, needing rigorous somewhat esoteric training in order to produce the right sounds. How could there be so many opera artists? I mean, I'…

I was suspicious of this too. I don't think "genres" table is correct. On Spotify, Blue Öyster Cult are listed as: ['album rock', 'classic rock', 'glam metal', 'hard rock', 'progressive rock', 'rock'] In the archive, they are just coming up as ['classic rock', 'hard rock'] Grimes: ['art pop', 'canadian electropop', 'grave wave', 'indietronica', 'metropopolis', 'neo-synthpop'] In the archive: ['art pop'] Taylor Swift:…

Seems Spotify have been removing genre info. Lots of "big" pop stars are no longer listed under pop.

Re: Backing up Spotify

#630

Post by xandrius »

squigz wrote: post #571
xandrius wrote: post #496

Truly amazing work. I couldn't help but being sad of the less popular songs not being currently stored, as those are definitely the ones more in risk of being lost forever. If you like the goal and you have even a few 100gb available on your server, consider "donating" some of that space to seeding the data (music or books). It's absolutely how we can fight the system, even if just a tiny bit. https://annas-archive.o…

Going off the blog post, archiving the rest of Spotify (which only represents 0.4% of total listens) would bring the total size up to something like 1PB, and would likely include a huge amount of AI generated stuff, which I don't think is worth it. I'd rather see them focus resources on archiving other stuff.

Sure but "the other stuff" is Lady Gaga and Bunny, which we won't have issue finding a copy of.

Sure, there is AI stuff but also not.

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