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.
YouTube premium has the benefit of removing YouTube ads in addition to access to the music.
I wont pay youtube-thanks though!
You have the same feature with just Newpipe. And the pro is: You dont give oligarchs money for making a service less miserable.
Probably but my family finds YouTube easy to use on Roku and their phone. Not sure if newpipe works as well for that.
What is youtube doing to combat ai music?
I’m not sure but I don’t encounter it.
So far, nothing at all. The slop has completely overtaken my “recommended” feeds and autoplay with no way to filter it out. I really want to support an alternate like Deezer/Tidal/etc but unfortunately have not yet found a viable replacement for my use case. A large portion of what I listen to is not formally released by labels/distribution, rare live performances, etc that only seem to be on YouTube.
Did the same move recently and am currently using qobuz. Higher price aside, it’s great and I think worth it.
My one caveat is that the android app has something seriously wrong with it where one of my two phones battery drain like crazy, and a search indicates this seems to have been a recurring issue for years…
My only issue is Chromecast bugs out occasionally. I got one of the few missing obscure albums added to the catalogue just by messaging the record company!
Discover page is the tits, so many good new albums i would’ve missed.
Radio Garden or other Internet radios are an option too
I discovered I actually prefer Internet radios entirely to song dna streaming type stuff
I can only think of 3 services:
Youtube,Bandcamp,Soundcloud
Or even rarely:
Physicaly/Retail copy of the Music.deleted by creator
Are Tidal and Quobuz really the only choice?
From what I heard from them, those two are a good alternative to Spotify and also have better audio quality if you’re a audiophile and it matters to you. If I recall, other music streaming platform don’t have the best discovery feature ever and also depending on which music genre you like, they may not have as many the music you would listen.
That being said, I suggest giving either one of them a try.
I have tidal now for over 2 years and I am very satisfied with it. Catalogue is all I want and need, quality is amazing and the suggestion feature works very well for me. Discovered quite a lot of new music and old stuff I already forgot about. So I can recommend tidal.
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 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.
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.
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
Symfonium can work from a google drive and you can spin up a new account and just throw 15gb in for free.
Otherwise I would just go with the YouTube route. Export the playlist and load it onto YouTube. Then pick a Ytdlp frontend and download it
SoundCloud supports importing playlists. I feel it has a lot of popular music nowadays, but I mostly listen to stuff some guy made on their laptop, so I’m not the best person to ask.
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.
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 need to be so for real right now. Nothing beats Spotify in terms of speed, catalogue, and features. But every other service blows them out of the water because Spotify is just that bad with AI and artist abuse. I still use Spotify for searching for songs because its search is still bar none so far, but I don’t listen to tracks or have premium anymore
The closest alternative is Tidal, it’s fast and has third party integration that leaves much to be desired but it’s there. Still janky but closest you can get to Spotify or Apple Music and it’s a good service on its own.
If you like music discovery and good taste and hate AI, Qobuz is pretty great. But it’s not a replacement, Qobuz is new, slow, and lacks features. I can’t block artists in Qobuz so I don’t do a lot of listening there. If that feature is in and they make it faster I’d use it full time
Yes, Qobuz definitely needs an artist blocking feature. It’s been putting Taylor Swift in my daily playlists ever since I listened to a Feist album and I am actually pretty fucking offended by that, to be honest.
I mostly like Qobuz, though. It’s been a solid Spotify replacer outside of a few issues.
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
