"Muso, a research firm that studies piracy, concluded that the high prices of streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are pushing people back towards illegal downloads. Spotify raised its prices by one dollar last year to $10.99 a month, the same price as Apple Music. Instead of coughing up $132 a year, more consumers are using websites that rip audio straight out of YouTube videos, and convert them into downloadable MP3 or .wav files.
Roughly 40% of the music piracy Muso tracked was from these “YouTube-to-MP3” sites. The original YouTube-to-MP3 site died from a record label lawsuit, but other copycats do the same thing. A simple Google search yields dozens of blue links to these sites, and they’re, by far, the largest form of audio piracy on the internet."
The problem isn’t price. People just don’t want to pay for a bad experience. What Apple Music and Spotify have in common is that their software is bloated with useless shit and endlessly annoying user-hostile design. Plus Steve Jobs himself said it back in 2007: “people want to own their music.” Having it, organizing it, curating it is half the fun. Not fun is pressing play one day and finding a big chunk of your carefully constructed playlist is “no longer in your library.” Screw that.
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Look, it’s on it’s last legs, but Bandcamp and Bandcamp Fridays still exist.
Reasonable cost, money goes directly to the artist, and you get high quality FLACs with no DRM to keep permanently.
I pirate a lot, but I also spend a lot of money at Bandcamp trying to get money directly in the hands of the artists I enjoy.
And Bandcamp Friday is today.
For those who are unfamiliar with both Bandcamp and Bandcamp Friday, can you ELI5?
You can buy music without DRM on Bandcamp, and on Bandcamp Friday a larger share goes directly to the creator. It’s a great way to support your favorite artists.
They waive the 20% fee on bandcamp friday, all money goes to the artist.
Don’t use shady sites. Use yt-dlp.
but yt audio quality is terrible.
but yt audio quality is terrible.
So are the bluetooth speakers and ear buds that most people use to listen to music these days.
LDAC codec seems enough for me to tell the difference for music i know in high-rez, and I don’t like it.
I do have good quality android player and wired, but pointless to use with Spotify.So are the bluetooth speakers and ear buds that most people use to listen to music these days.
Heretic! Nothing that my Lord and Savior Apple bestows upon the unwashed is less than divine!
That’s why we gotta give them the chance for good audio!
I have a dream…
fair point.
yt-dlp can use your browser cookies for YT premium and therefore YT music. That’s 256kBit/s AAC, it’s okay.
Most people can’t tell the difference between low bitrate vs high bitrate. Usually just confirmation bias.
Have you truly tested whether you can? I don’t mean playing each side by side and seeing whether you can tell the difference, but actually testing yourself in a way that you don’t know which is being played (like having someone else play it for you).
Maybe you can’t, what headphones/avr setup do you have?
- typed on a vacuum tube keyboard
Then use a Spotify downloader. I had one but forgot the name of it.
It’s very fine unless you decide you just must and have to convert that audio to MP3 (the audio loses quality with every lossy compression), because you are an old boomer and other formats scare you even though almost all modern device can play OPUS or at least M4A or you are one of those people who call themselves “Audiophiles” to feel more special, but wouldn’t recognize a shit if I played OPUS 192kbps on their 2000$ home audio setup instead of the 32 bit uncompressed FLAC that has over 40MB in size each. I have most of my library from YT Music which is ~128kbps OPUS and it has been transparent on all audio devices I have played it till now.
Look, we all have bad days, but there’s no need to be so aggressive to random people online. Everyone’s hearing is different. Some people are more sensitive to certain sounds than others. I tried youtube, spotify and tidal. And youtube is the audio quality I disliked the most. Just for clarification. I’m not a boomer, I’m a millenial, I work in computer science so I enjoy testing new formats. I have tried everything from atrac (sony) to DSD, I don’t have a $2000 home audio setup but I have a couple of decent pairs of cans, with mid-range DAC and amps. And I have tested multiple audio formats at different levels of compression and bitrate to find what I like the most. To me 128kbps feels like listening to the radio over the phone. If that’s enough for you, then great, more power to you. No need to be disrespectful.
I am sorry. I went to a little rant, but I meant it rather funny even though I realize it feels aggressive 🤣. I am just enthusiastic about this topic even though I don’t know that much.
is there an android version?
If you use the NewPipe android app to watch youtube, you can download directly from there, as video or audio, in a selection of formats.
Or you could use some app like InnerTune and listen to YouTube Music content without ads.
Or you could install YTDLnis and (optionally) ReVanced, then click the download icon in the video box and you can download it in any other format.
… I didn’t even realize. that’s amazing. thank you!
Seal is a yt-dlp frontend
I wasn’t aware of that. That’s neat. It can be found on F-Droid and Droid-ify.
It’s like a kiss from a rose on the grave.
it’s what I use, works great
hell yes. thank you.
It’s a Python command line program, so yes. I use Termux (a Linux terminal emulator), and I installed
yt-dlpusingpip, a package manager for Python. I also haveffmpegfor command line video editing on my phone.I have it setup such that when I click “Share” on a URL from Firefox or YouTube, and I choose Termux as the receiving app, I am presented with a menu that let’s me choose if I want the video saved to a normal folder or a hidden folder (for reasons), or if I want to download just the audio and save it to an MP3. yt-dlp can download from much more than just YouTube.
The script is just a bash script with a specific name in a specific folder that Termux knows to invoke when sent a URL. You can do anything you want with such a script.
Only get Termux from F-Droid or Droid-ify. Not from the Play Store. The Play Store version is way out of date.
Like the other person said, Newpipe can also download from YouTube. It’s a YouTube front-end that scrapes the public HTML website for YouTube. You can also download that from F-Droid or Droid-ify.
Oh, and another person mentioned Seal, which is a yt-dlp front-end for Android. It’s pretty great! I just installed it. As usual, it’s on F-Droid and Droid-ify.
Pretty sure revanced has a download option too.
You need a third app like newpipe to download. But, it works fine in youtube and youtube music.
I have a slightly different suggestion.
Inflation is crap and the first thing to go are subscriptions that raise their prices when people are already hurting. If you want retention, keep your prices locked when users are having bad times and you’re raking in record profits.
I think curation is great too, but I also think age plays a lot into individual views. A bunch of the younger guys at work were saying how they didn’t want playlists and they didn’t want to listen to an album, they just wanted to hit a button that knew their tastes musically and would give them a mix of familiar likes and new discoveries. The proceeded to describe a radio station to me, sans commercials. They were hot on all the music streaming and though I was crazy for wanting to spend time sorting through music.
Looking at a Spotify by age graph, the boomers dig it (because it’s easy?), Gen-Z and the Younger Millennials dig it, Gen X has less than half the uptake of the other groups.
We were mixing our own tapes in our tweens and teens. We wired ourselves to find music, copy it and play it in the specific order we want.
or at least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
A radio station is a small selection of music curated by an individual and meant for the masses.
Modern music streaming has dynamically curated music from a nearly infinite source, it’s really not the same.
Spotify tried to shove Doja Cat at me the other day. I have never ever EVER listened to anything that would even remotely suggest I would like Doja Cat. It may be infinite but there is still someone behind the scenes pushing particular songs and artists.
If you don’t like the artist, then block them. It’s not that hard. I blocked Travis Scott after he got those people killed at his concert and I haven’t seen a single thing with him since.
On my iPhone it’s 5 taps, which seems excessive but whatever. It’s impossible to do when I’m driving, and also impossible from the Windows app (yes, really, the feature is not available - https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Desktop-Other-quot-Don-t-play-this-artist-quot-on-desktop/idi-p/5027612 )
Gen Xer here…
It didn’t use to be this bad. The FCC (and ftc) dropped the bag (regulatory capture), letting clear channel gobble up stations.
When I was a kid had a couple great local stations back in the day. One was a highschool station that local bands could send in cassette tapes and they would play them on Tuesdays. They had a Mosh Monday curated by local metalhead kids/young adults (there was vocational training at the radio station in evening classes).
Even the commercial channels were better. Not great or anything, but they had a lot more variety.
Sucks to have your radio stations. Mine rotates crap through all the time.
Funny story, when I started doing curation, I wanted to get a good list to start from. I looked at the API for Jack FM because I kind of like their mix.
I knew that there was going to be a substantial amount of repetition because you hear the same stuff a lot. Turns out there API doesn’t have any limits on it. If you talk to the iHeartRadio API and ask it for 20,000 of the last played songs it’ll give them to you.
I went back 3 years. Their entire roster was 600 songs. As I started pulling my own curation together from their list I noticed some things were absent. I noticed that some of the things that were on the same album and were arguably better songs weren’t in the curation list. My guess is that whatever catalog they were licensed to pull from they only had a certain number of top hits. A lot of the stuff was the b side of the singles, It was probably a cost savings scenario.
Later on I decided I wanted some other collections to pull from so I started pulling serious XM stations and my local radio stations. Unfortunately for this phase of the date I had to collect for a long period of time so I don’t have years of history. My local radio station had 6,000 unique songs played over the period of 1 and 3/4 years. Which I never would have guessed because again you just hear the same stuff over and over but it’s confirmation bias.
Obviously it’s nothing like the catalog Spotify has where you might hear two new things to every old thing. But there was a fair amount of discovery there. The whole concept of adding pop as it comes in you know.
i love going through my music library at times, it’s a treat. and yeah, gen-x. strange breakdown…
A bunch of the younger guys at work were saying how they didn’t want playlists and they didn’t want to listen to an album, they just wanted to hit a button that knew their tastes musically and would give them a mix of familiar likes and new discoveries.
That’s Pandora… Eventually everything like this gets boring if you are interested in music instead of musak.
I get it though. Some people really aren’t that interested in music and just want some background noise. That’s probably even the majority of people, but I’m not sure it’s entirely an age thing.
This makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the insight!
I’m just here pondering. Might be as wrong as anyone.
Man, your comment reminded me of mp3.com back in the early days of digital music.
It had a lot of up and coming bands on it. And it allowed users the ability to create their own curated ‘radio stations’. You could compile hours of music from those artists and share it with the rest of the user base. And other users could recommend songs for inclusion in your station (which also helped you discover new bands).
I created a station that was getting some decent listening numbers, and I got some good recommendations from listeners (sometimes self-promotion, but that’s okay).
Then one day it was all gone. Probably related to the backlash from the record industry caused by Napster (even though, I think, mp3.com had acquired rights from those artists?). Sad times.
That’s what music streaming fused with social media should be about.
Inflation being a major cause is definitely on my mind, too. For the past decade basically everything has experimented with becoming a subscription service, and if people aren’t doing so hot on their monthly budgets they’re going to start looking for things to cut.
Not fun is pressing play one day and finding a big chunk of your carefully constructed playlist is “no longer in your library.”
this is exceptionally true from my experience with Spotify. I had downloaded a playlist that had a specific song. One day I went to play my locally downloaded playlist only to glance over it and see that the song was unavailable. I had the song downloaded. In my device and it still removed the song. No warnings, no nothing. Ever since, I downloaded everything locally and completely ditched Spotify. Fuck this scummy behaviour
I wish we had Google Play Music again. It really was an excellent app and had flawless suggestions for me I always enjoyed, and truly the most intuitive mixes. Google is evil of course, but honestly one of the best features was the listing of bands playing near you in the upcoming weeks, I went to so many shows because I’d try their music via the GPM suggestions.
I listen to the Henry Rollins show on KCRW to try to get into new music but despite my appreciation of him I find his music tastes repetitive. How many weeks in a row can I listen to the Jesus and Mary Chain?
I don’t listen to nearly as much music these days, YouTube music is so ass, I really miss gpm. YouTube can’t even get notifications right, like I get a notification that a band I like released a new album or something so I tap it… and it just fuckin opens the home page of the app??? EVERY SINGLE TIME. How do you fuck up even the most basic feature of the notifications!!!
The “radio” always brings me back to the same shit that’s playing on the actual radio, regardless of me playing the radio based off of bluegrass or fuckin clown techno idfk it will play imagine dragons and blinding lights shit eventually, guaranteed. The algorithms are actually dumpster fires.
Probably around 60% of the roughly 20,000 songs I uploaded (I think that was the limit) didn’t get transferred over and are just gone. Thanks Google.
Also even though the notifications don’t work, it is nice to know when your favorite artists release something new. Gpm was great about this, ytm seems to think I want the hottest vevo shit
Also who the fuck ever thought it was a good idea to use the music video versions for songs instead of the song version, when we’re in the music app, should be fired into the sun. They’re probably the same person that originally synced your video and music “histories,” skewing your YouTube algorithm entirely so your homepage would suggest nothing but music videos
Seriously, what a shitshow of an app, but that’s where most of Google is headed these days
Also who the fuck ever thought it was a good idea to use the music video versions for songs instead of the song version, when we’re in the music app, should be fired into the sun.
Agreed, this is infuriating. I’m in the music app, searching for a piece of music by it’s exact name and artist, and I know that it’s available on YouTube Music.
Here’s a lyric video uploaded to some random asshole’s YouTube channel. Or maybe you want this awful cover version from this other asshole on YouTube. Oh, my mistake, you wanted it as performed by the actual band? That you included in your search? How about this phone camera recording of a live show.
It’s compete garbage. Made even worse when you’re searching by voice command while driving and can’t just quickly correct bad results by looking through the list yourself.
I still use YTM (don’t judge me 😛) and it actually defaults to the audio version instead of the video version. They just give you an option to switch to video if you wanted to.
I still use it because I will not give Spotify money, and Apple Music is SUPER Caucasian and repetitive, I still like YTM the best, but it is way shitty. I hate the video function.
The fun part is, before it was Google play music it was another service by another company that I can’t even remember now. Google bought it, then fiddled with it for a few years before shit canning it.
I miss the original app, it was wonderful for just throwing music on based on your mood.
I think what you’re describing is Songza and it was great as a service. 8Tracks has been pretty decent as well.
I just always figured they canned it once they bought YouTube and started YouTube Music. I never got into Google Play music, but I use YouTube music, and it don’t do everything I am seeing Google play music did.
I remember that app! Can’t think of the name.
I used to use Google Play music back in the day. It was also nice to upload your own music and then be able to stream it anywhere.
Now I use Plex with Plexamp which works almost as well.
Plex is not great for privacy or ownership these days. Jellyfin or Kodi are much better.
Does their music player compare to Plexamp at all?
Best alternative to plexamp I’ve found is Symfonium. It supports plex, jellyfin, subsonic and possibly others.
Oh my god you’ve literally just recommended me a dream app. PlexAmp has so many annoying usability issues and symfonium seems to have solved all of them, I can’t thank you enough.
Just what I’ve been looking for, it supports offline playing!
Thanks!
And to buy music!
But it is a good example of inconvenience. One day they decided well, we’re closing shop. And that made it pretty clear for users that they didn’t own the music.
Google lets you download your music files that you previously uploaded. The method isn’t intuitive but it’s not difficult. I don’t know if the option is still offered but I would guess it is since they still have YouTube Music.
I used to have a big CD collection. Ripped it all off the CDs and uploaded the files to GPM. I was able to download it all.
It is still available. My collection of some 20,000 digital vinyl tracks are streamable for me. Google is evil, but that is nice.
I bought a lot of music through Artist Hub. It kind of was the best of both worlds for me, I’d try an album streaming, love it and buy it.
I never liked suggestions/radios on any streaming platform - GPM, Apple, Deezer, Spotify, they’re all shit.
I use streaming platforms solely for checking out new music that picked my interest on sites like RYM, albumoftheyear, anydecentmusic, Quietus, Picthfork, etc. If I like what I hear, I acquire it either on Bandcamp or on Soulseek and into Plex it goes.
Sad about what happened to Pitchfork.
what happened to pitchfork?
Got sold to GQ and it’s assumed that’ll kill it off.
Ahh got it. I don’t use it as regularly as I did 10-20 years ago but I’d still miss it being around.
Have you used Jamendo radios?
No, I don’t think so. Should I? I have a vague memory about seeing Jamendo in Rhythmbox when it shipped in Ubuntu by default. It was a long time ago, I didn’t even know it was still a thing.
It still works. No famous groups in there but it works.
I wish we had Google Play Music again.
I liked the fact that I could take my Google survey money and buy albums on that service. It’s pretty irksome that they cancelled it.
Loved that part! I bought many records that way. And when we went to YouTube music one of the records I bought disappeared from my uploaded music too.
And when we went to YouTube music one of the records I bought disappeared from my uploaded music too.
Yeah, that’s why I made sure to download every single album I bought. Digital rights are a joke.
I wish we had Google Play Music again.
Not exactly Google Music, but I recently started working on a Funkwhale instance where people can have up to 250GB of space for their personal music collection and where I am planning to have a store front for musicians who’d like to sell/promote their own songs as well. 29€/year if you go to https://communick.com/packages/access. Sounds reasonable?
It does but I can’t seem to get into Funkwhale, I’ve tried a few times!
The app doesn’t allow me to login.
What do you mean? Are you talking about the software in general or that can’t login into my instance specifically?
One of the main reasons I still pay for Spotify is because it is very cheap in my country, specially when splitting a family plan. However I noticed that the user experience has gone downhill over the past years.
I remember when I could seamlessly switch playback devices, from my car to my phone, to my computer and them a Chromecast almost instantaneously. Now I’m lucky if my devices recognise each other even if they are on the same network.
And if you have a poor internet connection, the app is near unusable because it tries yo grab online content first before checking whatever is downloaded. Time and time again I have to put my phone on aeroplane mode just for the main menu to load, it is so frustrating and this didn’t happen some 5-6 years ago
All of those things are 100% legitimate criticisms, I want to add that the UX experience has become more and more horrible. They’ve regressed terribly in most aspects of their apps, wether PC or Mobile. Absolutely unbelievable, this is the thing I see from Google search where marketing takes over from engineering/customer needs/market reality/I don’t know what. Stop shoving shit into the services. You beat piracy for a minute, you can keep that lead, you’re slowly losing it.
Honestly, if this was any other product this would be unacceptable. It’d be like all books went back to only black and white, all movies were only 480p, all music was only mono.
They keep trying to reinvent the library UI, as does Apple. But neither will ever be able to top the way the iOS music app was organized, pre-Apple-music. Every attempt to innovate has been worse
The fact that they changed the default library view from playlists to a random mix of playlist, artists, albums and podcasts without the option to choose just one category is baffling. I’m all for user options, but not by taking user choice away
Like making it impossible to just “play all songs” of a given artist. Seems like it would be simple.
At first I was confused about the books comment, since most books are just black text on white paper, but then I realized you were probably including comic books and manga in that too (and probably textbooks that include a lot of graphics)
And if you have a poor internet connection, the app is near unusable
This is an issue I’ve been noticing across more and more apps and operating systems. It seems like there’s no developers out there even willing to consider how their software operates under non-ideal conditions.
It’s not developers, it’s management. We know how to make it better, but that’s extra complexity. Meaning extra developer time (higher cost and longer turn around) to better support a small fraction of normal use, added on every time that part of the system is changed
It’s more profitable and faster to say “forget those users” now that they’re a smaller and smaller part of the customer base
I’m paying for a family plan, for my family and two friends. The day this plan goes away, or they actively prevent sharing like this, I’m done paying for music. All alternative services are considerably more expensive, and also have a much more limited library. My favorite artists get less than pennies on a dollar from this anyway. No wonder they have to sell 85$ hoodies at concerts
I got caught in a crazy loop of Spotify resetting my password once a week. they offered no help except telling me my 40 char generated password was not secure enough. so I cancelled and deleted the account. the seas are a much more friendly place.
Never left, baby! Although ripping from YouTube should be a last resort. And even then, use a proper tool like Yt-dlp.
It’s taken longer than I expected, but more and more people are realising streaming services as a model are not good, by any measure.
They cost more in the long run, you are made powerless as a consumer (perpetually increasing costs and removing your favourite content), and you can’t even get ‘everything at the convenience of your fingertips’ cause the market is fragmented and they remove things periodically. You own nothing and pay more. Absolutely stupid model that deserves to die.
Yeah, that is true for video steaming, but not music. Spotify has almost every song on the planet, and with a family account it’s very cheap. Unless you only listen to a very small music library it’s vastly cheaper than buying all the music
Spotify has almost every song on the planet
Until a contract negotiation with UMG goes south and they lose half the catalog overnight. See what’s happening on tiktok right now for a good example of this.
I understand the convenience draw, but I’m not a fan of continually paying for content that can disappear at any moment.
Well if that happens, then there’s always piracy. But until then. I’ll use my family account. Because I don’t have the resources to download all the songs that my other 4 family member likes.
Or, since I cannot download each and every song they like, I’ll turn to another form of piracy. Revanced yt music.
I do use streaming (although for free) to find new tracks. But I cannot imagine having my PRIMARY collection there, mostly because it’s so locked-down. You can’t use it on a dumb MP3 player, you can’t use a player application of your choice, etc.
Their android app is total garbage and frustrates me to no end. I’m seriously considering just going back to pirating my music just because I hate spotifys music app…
I’m surprised everyone didn’t realize it right from the beginning before things got to this point. Better late then never, I - suppose.
My theory is that it’s just the fact that there is always a new generation of people around the corner who haven’t learned the lesson of how capitalists work. Therefore, there is always a market vulnerable to being swindled. They can keep using the same tactics, there’s always a delay in people figuring out the grift, then by the time they do there’s a new group of suckers ready to fall for it.
It never left. My MP3 collection is getting kinda disgusting at this point. I really should delete a bunch of it, but you never know when I’m going to want to listen to that album I downloaded 15 years ago and haven’t gotten into yet!
Every few years I just create a new folder of the artists that I actively listen to and keep the older stuff out of my library but still in storage.
Sounds better than my method of having the first ten-fifteen years of collecting arranged neatly by artist names in folders labeled alphabetically followed by a few different folders labeled by the year I downloaded (not the year of release), a few genre folders, and a a few, uhh, folders sorted by how I acquired the music torrented or through Soulseekqt. Yeah, mine is a complete mess. Pulsar player for Android makes it incredibly easy to sort through stuff anyway. I did conveniently fail to put a lot of the stuff I rarely listen to on my current phone anyway. I’m not too egregiously awful. I do at least listen to everything I download at least once or twice. I had a friend in the 00s who just downloaded everything whether he listened or not. Yeah, I’ll keep comparing myself to his 20+ year old standard of digital hording.
I lost mine several times - I didn’t always use to have backups. Two were on MP3 players that stopped working. One was on an old smartphone, which worked but which I just didn’t bother copying most of the data from. Once I just wiped it accidentally. In hindsight - I don’t mind, that would’ve got cleaned up anyway.
I kinda wish I’d lost mine once or twice.
Piracy creates an endless loop of artists taking advances and eventually losing royalties. That’s just what I’ve seen growing up in the music /film/ TV industry and briefly working in both. Screw labels and Spotify but go support artists and actually buy stuff.
Screw labels and Spotify but go support artists and actually buy stuff.
This is the way.
Seems like advances exited long before piracy was a significant thing. Though I’m sure piracy does contribute to the imbalance like you describe.
I don’t mind paying artists for work that I like. Hell, I’ve bought much of my collection 3 times now: LP, cassette, CD. I never bought MP3s - just ripped them myself. All my CDs are in storage, which is dark, cool, and dry.
I’m pretty sure the distributors kept most of that money.
And that’s where the bulk of the problem lies: the power brokers that have always tried to control production and distribution.
And that goes back a long way. I know I’m being repetitive, but Payola has been around a long time, and rather indicative of the state of media production. It’s not like these ideas left just because someone got busted… They just learned new ways to accomplish the same goals of controlling the media marketplace without getting caught.
The problem isn’t price. People just don’t want to pay for a bad experience.
It’s all about the price for me cause I live in a 3rd world country. Even if their service improves, I will not hesitate for a second to pirate stuff. I’ll just use the money i save to pay the internet bill instead of availing a monthly sub
I was going to say that this is where I disagreed with the OP. It is 100% about price and has absolutely nothing to do with bloat or hostile design. As I wouldn’t consider Spotify’s design or Apple Music’s design choice bad. If anything they are popular because of their design choice.
If people cared about bloat they wouldn’t be on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. The rest of the consuming world lives in a pretty concerning place financially. Anyone who thinks it has to do with the design of the apps is either missing the point and not looking at the rest of the shit going on in the world or blatantly wants to believe Apple bad and FOSS good and I have found that to be a part of what I call the Lemmy mentality.
Paying for spotify, was google music before. Current “experience” is bad, I hate pop-ups to try to upsell me something I don’t want or features I don’t care. It happens too much and I’m considering switching to self host.
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Never a bad time to plug ListenBrainz. ListenBrainz logs what you listen so you can keep track of what you hear and it helps you get recommendations and insights into your listening habits. It’s not specifically for music pirates but it is compatible with music piracy. You can submit listens from all kinds of sources, youtube, spotify, but also local files (pirated or not). ListenBrainz is FOSS and publishes all their data on a open license, for the benefit of everyone.
Do you know if there is anything that locks up to this that will automatically download the music they recommend?
It would be cool to have an app where if you like the track, you give it a thumbs up, but if you don’t you give it a thumbs down and the track is deleted automatically
Not that I’m aware of but I never looked into this.
Pandora?
Sheesh, kids have it so easy now… Back in my day, we had to set sail along the Atlantic trade routes looking for ships full of the latest wax cylinders out of Europe and Asia. Didn’t have anything to play them on but at least we owned our collections.
I used to do lots of piracy back in the days. I am so glad those days are behind me and have not been big on the scene. What would be some sites to avoid to not fall in the trap of being a criminal. I love giving companies all of my money and do not ever want to go back to my old ways. Please help me with a nice list of things to avoid.
Please for the love of god avoid buying a real mp3 player with a metal shell, become a linux nerd, install yt-dlp, and run this command in the terminal
yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 -o "%(playlist_index)02d - %(title)s.%(ext)s" MUSIC-PLAYLIST-URL-LINKIt also totally doesn’t work on other music websites like bandcamp.Screw MP3, Opus is better.
I personally carefully avoid ed2k, gnutella and soulseek, just like in the olden days. But you may also want to avoid YouTube with youtube-dl or YT search in QMPlay2.
Avoid Spotify dl. Easily installed and after insted from the command line by typing spotdl
Thankfully, my ISP informs me if someone on my network shares movies on Bittorent without a VPN. Do ISPs typically do the same for music on the ed2k and gnutella networks?
I don’t know whether they detect it (technically no problem), but these are not widely used anymore. In USA maybe, but I live in Russia.
Thesome of the old music sites are still there. But I would avoid torrentgalaxy.to it has curated weekly albums of top playlists from Spotify, tiktok, etc that have all the new stuff updated every week, for your local playback displeasure. Only uncool people play locally stored music, all the cool kids stream. Do not go there.youtube-dl -F url
That will list formats; get one of the audio only formats
youtube-dl -f 140 url
Bonus is that the script works for lots of sites. It can get movies from tubitv for example
-f 140is AAC, please don’t do that.-f 251is better since it’s Opus, the best versatile lossy codec so far.I’ll try that out. Thanks for the heads up.
If I download music, I have access to a larger music library, the ability to change the pitch, speed, and equalizer of the music, and the freedom to choose the player that I want. Can’t do that with a streaming service.
I try to support artists if I can still download the music in a DRM-free file. Just this week I made a purchase, and late last year I bought an album and a midi file to support two artists.
And this is for personal listening. I make sure to follow royalty laws and attribute the artist when the music ends up in something I publish to the Internet.
For anyone who’s a music enthusiast, having the files makes more sense. Poweramp is a way better experience than Spotify or YT Music. I loved being able to set the EQ on an album or song basis.
That said, YT Music comes with YT premium, and I’m lazy, so I do that for now. I also haven’t got much of a commute right now, so I don’t listen to music near as much.
PowerAmp is the only thing I found that could replace Google Music in my heart!
