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Leaving Spotify for freer pastures

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Re: Leaving Spotify for freer pastures

#71

Post by sabellito »

hxugufjfjf wrote: post #27
sabellito wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you find horrible about it? I'm genuinely curious as, apart from the lack of tab navigation, the UX suits my use cases pretty well.

Pretty much everything about the UX on all platforms I use it on, the constant breaking changes to the UX, which just keeps getting worse. How its still completely geared around lists and recommendations, while 90% of how I listen to music is album or discograpgy based. How its piss poor (I believe that's the technical term) at actually recommending me music I like or could like, or in any way challenging my tastes.…

I have the opposite experience both with the interface and the recommendations. I look forward to my Discovery Weekly and often use the "Daily Mix" and "Radio from this track" features.

I usually pick off the songs I like from these recommendation-based features and then I go to listen to at least their album, while adding tracks to mood/subgenre-based playlists for other activities. I dedicate time out of most of my days to just listen to music while walking.

I don't remember ever seeing a bug on the android app. Which's a bit odd now that I think of it.

Really polar opposite experiences from both of us. It seems that they're catering to people with my usage patterns, however it may be that they differ from yours.

Re: Leaving Spotify for freer pastures

#72

Post by disposition2 »

s3000 wrote: post #58
disposition2 wrote: post #43

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…

What's your opinion of https://digs.fm ? It's built by a HN user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862 Which features made rdio so good?

I’m basing this off of 7+ year old memories so please excuse errors / misinformation…

- It had label support. For example, if you wanted to find all releases by Deutsche Grammophon, you could

- It’s handling of classical music seemed much better than anything I can recall using

- It’s recommendations seemed to be better…like they went above and beyond basic genre recommendations

- For ‘radio stations’ you could dislike a song or artist and it only affected that station. So if you love Bowie but don’t want him on your funk station, you could dislike the artist but still have all the Bowie you wanted on other stations…same for songs

- The social aspect seemed to bade recommendations on people who had similar taste as you…kind of like Dig that would mention but it was built in to the service

Again, this is all based off of memory but I’m confident I discovered more artists and music on that single service vs the plethora of varied services I use today.

As to Dig, I have tried it but it’s such a manual thing I haven’t kept up. I tend to listen to local jazz / classical radio nowadays for the majority of my time and periodically use various services for discovery. I’ll have to give it another go.

Side note, similar to OP, I have found BandCamp (specifically their weekly show) to be also good for discovery.

Re: Leaving Spotify for freer pastures

#73

Post by jskulski »

thepuppet33r wrote: post #68
disposition2 wrote: post #43

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…

You're the only other person I've met online who knows of RDIO. I was an early adopter and I loved that service like it was my own child. I was HEARTBROKEN when it was shuttered.

Team Rdio right here. A truly great app for music lovers that arrived when the age of apps felt like a bright utopia ahead of us. I truly miss it.

Re: Leaving Spotify for freer pastures

#74

Post by patchorang »

arran-nz wrote: post #54
patchorang wrote: post #50

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…

This is really inventive, great execution. Do you have a write up or src hosted anywhere?

https://github.com/rttomlinson/spotify-record-player

Re: Leaving Spotify for freer pastures

#75

Post by treebeard901 »

sph wrote: post #34
pelorat wrote: post #30

> I think a lot of people would probably look at my distaste of Spotify and recommend another, more suitable, streaming platform like Apple music or Pandora Just go to YTM? I stopped using Spotify when their client became slow and bloated. Then I went to GPM which was easy (didn't care for my library much). Then onto YTM (which in the beginning sucked), but is now close to parity with GPM. Took them a while but they…

Eh, I just left Youtube Music considering to go back to Spotify. Youtube Music has a terrible UI, lacks features, and feels like an afterthought to entice people to get Youtube Premium. Honestly, if you're paying for Youtube Premium, you might as well use YT Music, but it's all around worse than Spotify. I'm currently giving Deezer a try.

I've been trying Deezer for a week or so. Other than an app crash once, it has been a good experience so far. It's just a simple music streaming app with a good collection of music. Not tied to a Big Tech company and actually based in France.

Re: Leaving Spotify for freer pastures

#76

Post by andre-z »

fzliu wrote: post #24
macrolime wrote: post #16

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…

Yes, there are more suitable solutions than faiss or annoay. For example https://github.com/qdrant/qdrant

Re: Leaving Spotify for freer pastures

#77

Post by Markoff »

I'm positively surprised this is actually not another Why I'm leaving twitter virtue signalling post, since I can imagine people doing same with Spotify over some content they don't like, nice to see for change someone leaving some platform for actual rational reasons.

Re: Leaving Spotify for freer pastures

#78

Post by rcarmo »

xenospn wrote: post #70
rcarmo wrote: post #65

I’ve never felt much of an allure for music streaming services. They’re great for skimming, but pretty useless for anything non-mainstream, so I’ve been slowly amassing a ripped CD library for decades, and use Plex (and the pretty amazing PlexAmp) to get at it. My only gripe with Plex is that the only voice assistant that interacts with it is Alexa, and it requires me to have my Plex server shared over the Internet.…

I’ve been using Apple Music for my very niche taste (scandinsvian black metal) and it works great.

I tried it for a while but other than Siri integration I got nothing much out of it…

Re: Leaving Spotify for freer pastures

#79

Post by kcartlidge »

echohack5 wrote: post #57

I'm definitely the odd one out here. I hate any streaming service because the value of my music is being able to listen to that music whenever I want...including 20 years from now. 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 Bandca…

Ditto. If my income drops or streamers shut down I'll still have my music. Owning nothing can be liberating, but not if you're replacing it with decades of renting instead.

Plus I've also got loads of stuff that isn't on Spotify, Apple, and the rest.

And as for discovery, the free Spotify still gives me some of that (I also like a bit of Smooth Chill or similar running in the background on ye olde voice assistant speaker).

Re: Leaving Spotify for freer pastures

#80

Post by MattDemers »

thepuppet33r wrote: post #68
disposition2 wrote: post #43

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…

You're the only other person I've met online who knows of RDIO. I was an early adopter and I loved that service like it was my own child. I was HEARTBROKEN when it was shuttered.

Canadians loved Rdio, trust me.
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