I left when I saw how much of our money they gave to Joe Rogan to punch down on trans people. Already paying for YouTube pro for years and finally took advantage of their music app. It’s been great. My car and every Google screen in the house have native support. The only disadvantage is everything from tinder to open source crap I run at home only integrate with Spotify.
What open source stuff? Asking for a friend
Already paying for YouTube pro
lost me in the second half
I just download to actually have the songs. No DRM, No Ads, No song getting removed from streaming service… I have 500+ songs downloaded in opus format and it only takes 2.5Gb with many of them being longer than 5 minutes. I don’t know why people keep using these services while they keep saying they hate it because there are so many ads or why they keep paying for DRM…
Same here, been collecting since the iPod Mini days, 18,000+ songs and 100gb+ of data (almost all mp3 though)
Serve them up with Airsonic and i’ve got my own streaming music service i can use anywhere.
Opus at max bitrate is only like 1/4th the size of FLAC. At that point, why not just store it in 10GB while keeping the full quality?
That definitely makes sense, maybe I should do that… thanks
Where do you download them from?
Soulseek is still a thing.
Tidal, Deezer and Quboz all have ways to download the content. The most stupid one being to record the output of the music player, but there’s tools that automatically get the full metadata too and ensure the audio is cropped to silence.
To do it in an intended way, Bandcamp and other services let you pay once to have access to the source file on your account “forever”.
For Spotify, there is
spotdlwhich downloads the music from YouTube Music, and then embeds the metadata from Spotify.Isn’t YTM like 128-192kbps AAC? I’d rather not even bother ripping that lol
Do you have any recommendations on what would be better to do?
If you must use Spotify, use ZSpotify with DOWNLOAD_REAL_TIME and hope you don’t get banned. Alternatively, use it with a burner account.
I prefer Deezer and pay for Deezer HiFi. Deemix still works to rip FLACs from there.
Thanks, I certainly don’t have to use Spotify.
Musician here…
…I tell people to download both the mp3 and the wavefiles from Bandcamp. Sometimes Soundcloud has a download option (depends on the artist). I still buy CDs where I can.
YouTube Music
Not OP but I use bandcamp so I can pay the artist a decent amount rather than what ever Spotify does. Not sure if the new owner has increased the cut they take though
Spotify Premium in practice has new benefits!
More specifically: Lyrics that they took away from regular users some time ago.
They fucked it up for premium users too, though, since they’ve done that. Half the songs that I knew to have lyrics either no longer have them, or they constantly “fail to load.”
Seriously, damn, that’s feels like such a basic thing
I remember I used to have an add-on (at least I think it was an add-on; didn’t Spotify officially support those at some point?) that synced the lyrics of a song to the timestamp. It used user submissions to figure out the timestamps and edit the lyrics. It was pretty cool.
Smh I want to get off Spotify for tidal but I don’t feel up to teaching my parents how to use a completely different music app
I upgraded to a decent set of headphones with a dedicated DAC, then realised just how terrible Spotify’s sound quality is, even on maximum. I hung on a while for the empty promise of lossless audio then ditched them.
I’m now increasingly glad that I’m giving money to their competitors.
Spotify’s encoding (vorbis 320kbps) should be transparent at the maximum bitrate. However, it’s possible that the files uploaded on there are mastered differently, for average consumer consumption instead of the full dynamics of most source material. I know SoundCloud enforces “loudness” mastering with presets when uploading for example.
The real reason Spotify’s quality is inferior to others is that, if you have the music files, you can apply in-app parametric equalization on every platform and compensate for imperfections of your output device.
My problem was by the time it had been through normalisation for equipment and hearing correction, it sounded very artifacty. Maybe a lack of bits and low sampling rate.
Switched to Tidal when Spotify announced their reduction in artist pay, and I can highly recommend it. The interface is much better, although lacking podcasts (but luckily there are many great FOSS podcasts apps out there).
“lacking podcasts” is a plus for most people, I think. But Tidal’s interface is a bit worse for me in one thing: it lacks the “remote control” Spotify has: controlling playback from any device on any device (e.g. playing on the computer and using the phone as a remote) and also the ability to transfer the playback from one device to another - like pausing it on the computer, picking up the phone, connecting it to car and resuming playback.
I use KDE connect for remote controlling, so I never even noticed. But I can see that being an annoying loss.
what do you mean ‘although’, that’s an added benefit!
I liked having both in the same app until I discovered AntennaPod, which is far superior to Spotify’s podcast manager.
I was mostly joking but I’m just so over podcasts. Even when people who I like and follow on YouTube talk about their podcasts my eyes glaze over.
I have so little time and patience for low effort hours long drivel that i find what I’m doing now more worthwhile than listening to a podcast. Not saying all podcasts are like this obviously but that’s my default assumption.
Multitask. Listen to a podcast AND do what you are doing now. Can’t be many people that sit down, focus and say “I’ll now listen to a podcast and do nothing else”.
that’s only more proof that it’s worthless.
I cancelled spotify a few months ago, when getting some free Apple music with my Airpods. Not the best, but still happy that I don’t have to use Spotify anymore, will probably shop around after my free period with Apple is done
I was satisfied with Apple Music myself (until I no longer had need for it), but I keep hearing that Tidal is one of the better services if Apple doesn’t quite cut it for you. Supposedly they have a reasonably fair cut for the artists compared to Spotify, and also good audio quality (to be fair, Apple has high quality available too, if you enabled it in the settings)
Just for funzies, my Spotify family plan in Canada is $17.84 CAD, which works out to $13.05 USD at current exchange rate.
Usually Canadians are screwed harder on, well pretty much everything, so I’m surprised that Americans are paying more for this. Guess it’s “what the market will bear” or similar nonsense. Please discuss.
Just FYI, Napster’s family plan is only $14.99 CAD
PSA:
Innertune
Vi Music
Spotiflier
ViMusic has not been updated in quite some time. RiMusic is actively being developed.
Thanks!
The average person: Spotify sucks and is making me hate them even more
Shareholders seeing layoffs followed by AI replacements for those workers and then repeated price hikes: 🤑
The myth of capitalism is that it improves things for the consumer. It’s very obvious that it only improves, at best, the next quarter’s returns for the investor. Once that husk of a company stops “line going up,” the money goes elsewhere and we repeat.
If the line can’t go up through creation it’ll go up through destruction.
The myth of capitalism is that it improves things for the consumer
So you don’t think your life is better than someone from the 16th century?
I’m so tired of this nonsense argument, is capitalism your God to which you give credit for every human accomplishment? How did capitalism help to raise the Russian serfs to the status of a world superpower? It didn’t… How did capitalism help Russia get to space before the United States? How did capitalism help human life improve before the 16th century?
I wonder what you even think capitalism is. I wonder if you comprehend that technological advancement, markets, money, and trade aren’t synonymous with it.
You love democracy but when it comes to matters of economic decisions you are bootlicking the petite dictators that control every aspect of your economic life. You are employed by people whose means of acquiring wealth is to skim off the top of what you’re producing and steal it from you but you are too busy making eye contact while you suck them off that you don’t see their hand in your pocket.
The world is burning and there’s plastic in your balls because of capitalism, you are such a good submissive little peasant.
It worked differently before speech was considered money. Or I like to tell myself that.
It worked differently before because the information network was orders of magnitude slower and data was expensive as Pope shit.
Nowadays, the information is almost instant and everything is interconnected and data storage is cheap so we got big data with people paid solely to boil that down to algorithms that squeeze money as much as possible from customers.
Just look at all the streaming services that makes you pay more if you don’t want ads and they resell your data. Triple dipping baby
This is for sure a big part of it also. Greed greed and greed being the main draw lol
Everyone that works for a company is poorer, every company is scraping by and making cuts, but executives are making more and more money
I’m so grateful, I have thousands of songs and just hit shuffle and made my own playlists. I always thought internet radio was overpriced 😅
Glad I moved away from Spotify to Apple Music years ago (for different reasons tho)
The only reason I keep Spotify anymore is that I’ve got a family plan with something like six accounts. I gave those to random acquaintances back in the Facebook days - people who are really into music.
If I cancel Spotify, there are five people out there who are suddenly and without warning going to find themselves without music.
I really don’t even remember who they are, but I feel like continuing the subscription is my community service
Pretty sure you can see their email address. This should give you the opportunity to message them stating you’ll be canceling the subscription. They’ll still be able to subscribe on their own.
I never did get a music subscription of any kind. Guess I am glad about that now. I just host my own server. Spotify never had a quarter of what I want to listen to anyways so I guess there is that.
Listening to Legion of Mary 12-10-1974 right now.
After watching how similar business practices torched Twitter, I think this dude is underestimating the general public’s commitment to just sail the high seas.
