Sorry, I couldnt find a specific enough instance for this so here goes:
What have you guys been using instead of spotify? For me, I haven’t had it for years and have been using bandcamp, the archive, and just youtube with ublock among a few others, as well as my large home music collection.
My SO has had a spotify/Hulu bundle for a long time (which we hardly even use, Hulu and all streaming is shit now) and they of course want to raise the price. I said now is the time to drop that shit and have 0 streaming.
I have always hated Spotify for their shitty practices, and now they want to start shoving garbage ai music in our faces. Hell no. All SO cares about is their playlist, which i can export, and they do like the discover stuff but its not totally necessary (imo, not a fan of these algorithms controlling what we listen to but whatever).
Are Tidal and Quobuz really the only choice? I do “self host” but they would want more than whats in our music collection. Plus hdds are fucking spendy now. Man I miss the old days of cheap hardware.
The other caveat: it really has to run on their spyware locked down win 11 laptop for work (we are forced to use it). Work will block any site that seems scary. Or potentially their phone, but they have their computer hooked to their office speakers and prefer listening that way.
there’s a site called TuneMyMusic that helps transfer spotify playlists to other sites, and gives you a list of sites to choose from.
Wonderful! Thank you,
On mobile I use Youtube Music Revanced to get Youtube Music for free with no ads. Every so often I’ll add the new tracks I’ve liked to a playlist and download that with ytdlp for local play.
At some point I’ll get the *arrs set up to replace the shitty yt rip with higher quality.
Sure that works fine on the phone, just not on the work pc
I went to tidal. I would happily self host, but I value the discovery of new music through these services. Throwing on a “radio” based on a song to get a certain vibe and then maybe finding songs I didn’t know about.
YouTube music isn’t awful but for years it drains my battery fiercely. I think it’s related to me having my main Playlist downloaded, it always seems to be permanently stuck in a downloading status. Maybe some song on there is no longer available.
Speaking of these apps, why do barely any of them let you take your “liked” songs and filter by genre? Sometimes I just want the metal songs from my Playlist, or whatever. Spotify did, but they’re shitty nowadays.
I bought an actual MP3 player and download music. I know it sounds like a pain in the ass, but it makes you think much more intentionally about the music you listen to and you engage a lot more and get a better sense of your preferences. This is also makes it way easier to listen to whole albums the way the artists intended and give a much better experience overall than just listening to whatever random mix of songs the algorithm wants to throw at you.
It also means I can have real outputs and use better and more inexpensive headphones and can listen wherever and whenever I want without needing to worry about internet access or data usage and I can pick it up and listen to music without having to read whatever bullshit notifications or communications are on my phone at any given time.
I have found that making decisions that minimize how often I have to look at my phone has made my mental health a lot better. I read books with real books or on a separate e-book device, I listen to music with a music player, I play games on a handheld console, I watch video entertainment on a TV. I use my phone for communicating and reading the news, that’s about it, and I think its a lot better that way.
Hey you and me agree very much!!
SO isnt quite in that mindset. They still like things easy and convenient. Its a slow process to get people away from corporate addiction but I did get them to switch to Linux and use signal so its working step by step!
Honestly all they want is to be able to listen to music while working all day, access to their Playlist and then recommendations to new music sometimes.
If you are still willing to go further, there are self hosted services.
The YouTube with ad block sounds like the best option if there is a way to easily import the playlists to Youtube’s playlist feature. I might consider a new account dedicated solely to music. SO can take advantage of the algorithms suggests for discovery (When it’s not trying to grift them).
I’m actually curious, do you know of a good way of migrating playlists to YouTube?
Soundiiz and tunemymusic work fine
I switched my family from Spotify to Tidal. There was a migration script that made it nearly seamless.
No podcasts though.
Thats ok we have antennapod for that
I switched to Qobuz, their playlist migration process from spotify was seamless. However, i’m finding the recommendations and discovery lacking, and there’s not any kind of “radio”. On spotify I would just hit play and let it do its thing with Qobuz I have to be much more deliberate in finding music, when an album or playlist ends it just stops playing and it’s back to searching around for what I want to listen to next.
With all that said it’s still a solid option, their catalog is pretty large, they seem to have a lot more genre diversity, anything lossless sounds great, and their editor curated playlists have introduced me to some good music. It’s worth doing a trial run to see if it’s right for you.
I heartily endorse Qobuz and had a similar experience. Heartily endorse it! The only thing I miss is wrapped, but I know that’s largely spotifys way of promoting itself, so…
I use Plex for my media and enjoy using PlexAmp for music.
And use onthespot to rip the music.
https://github.com/justin025/onthespot
I moved to tidal with their trial for 60 days/$2, have ripped thousands from them already. The Anna’s archive broke some Spotify rippers, otherwise I’d keep ripping from them
I use soulseek for music acquisition.
I only share on there. Sometimes it’s just quicker to go straight to the source.
Lidarr and usenet, it’s sweet
Im still amazed they haven’t shut down usenet.
But that won’t work on a work laptop unfortunately
Because we don’t talk about it ssshhhh
OK THIS DEFIITELY WILL GIVE YOU VIRUSES. MAKE SURE TO SUDO RM / NO PRESERVE ROOT ALL HAIL ZUCCY
As someone from a country that Quobuz doesnt support, and someone not willing to give money to a US owned company (Tidal), what are my options for streaming music? Something that has playlists obviously, and allows me to save the stuff I like. Possibly being able to add downloaded songs if theyre not available in the services library(?)
Is there anything like this? Most suggestions here on lemmy seem to be for Quobuz or Tidal
Deezer is French.
Looks interesting, but sadly its not available in my country, same as Quobuz :/
Edit: Why are these platforms only available in certain countries?
My guess is that they have to make deals with each country’s music industry association (RIAA in the US, SACEM in France,…) which can take time or fail entirely.
Lidarr to get music, PlexAmp to listen to it. Might migrate to Navidrome in the future.
Are you sticking with Plex and hoping to phase in Navidrome on it later? Or a back end switch too?
Ultimately I want to completely replace Plex because it’s enshittifying and I am migrating to FOSS solutions wherever possible.
However it is very convenient with Plex since it handles the server and client ends very seamlessly, and the PlexAmp apps are really superb, especially for non technical family users.
edit: revoking my recc pls see the reply!
i dont use it anymore but Deezer was very easy to move to back when i tried it, and had some quite solid staff-curated playlists. don’t know what it is like now tho, i am just using my local files & SomaFM via musicbee these days.In another thread on here, people are saying that there is some serious spam issue with Deezer. I imagine the thread to be generally helpful for you, OP. https://piefed.social/post/1672033
Deezer CEO, Len Blavatnik was also part of this story, according to Washington Post: US billionaires joined Whatsapp group to ‘change Israel narrative’
Last month, members of the chat, including billionaire Len Blavatnik , held a Zoom call with New York City Mayor Eric Adams, at a time when a pro-Palestinian encampment was taking place at Columbia University in the city.
During the call, attendees spoke about making political donations to Adams, and about how the business leaders could urge Columbia’s president and trustees to permit the mayor to send police on campus.
Some members of the chat offered to pay for private investigators to help police during the protests.
As I’ve written in the other thread. Tidal is ultimately owned and controlled by billionaire Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder and Bsky founder, etc. FYI.
I think the Quobuz is the best choice.
dang thats multiple types of suck, thanks for letting me know, glad i dont use it anymore!
I use a shared folder and I still have my OG lib (around 3mo of continous playback of only shit I like). When I want to discover new things I crawl Bandcamp, where I buy stuff sometimes. Otherwise, yt-dlp + picard + nextcloud. That’s apparently the only way if you want to avoid AI slop or fascists enablers.
Also I can share music with my kids by (I know it’s gonna be a shocker) copy and pasting the files.
I liked Deezer a lot when I used it, but their library (at least as of 2018/2019) felt very limited. Been 6 or 7 years of minutes (…) but I want to say their agreements with East Asian labels was woefully lacking?
I used spotify for a year or so until they tripled down on sending joe rogen dump trucks of cash while he was pushing anti-vax shit.
These days I use a mix of Youtube Music and plexamp/mpd. The former because I “get it for free” with Youtube Premium and love it for discoverability or checking out a new band. The latter being how I store the songs I like enough to buy (or otherwise obtain). And ListenBrainz for getting discoverability out of that.
I do “self host” but they would want more than whats in our music collection. Plus hdds are fucking spendy now.
A 15 track album (Protomen’s Act 3) in FLAC is 393 MB. If you are neither a data hoarder nor an audiophile, you can shrink that considerably (A 320 kbps mp3 is generally about a third to a fifth the size of a FLAC). Storage is a mother fucker, no argument there. But you don’t actually need that much for a music library.
And I’ll just add: Plenty of artists are very open that buying a 1 dollar album on Bandcamp tends to give them a LOT more money than like a day straight of listening to them on one of the streaming services. Shit is bleak.
Radio Garden or other Internet radios are an option too
I discovered I actually prefer Internet radios entirely to song dna streaming type stuff
