What’s your recommendation for listening to music privately?
My requirements are: open source desktop/web (Linux) and android app. I also want basically every song I would ever want.
I’m willing to pay just not on agregious amount of money.
If you are posting your recommendation please care to include the tradeoffs or any annoyances you got from it.
Thanks all!
I am planning to get a dedicated audio player at some point this year. An modded iPod classic 5th or 6th gen with Rockbox. It’s offline, and you get so much more flexibility once you mod it, you can’t really go wrong. It’s a bit of an upfront cost though but a worthy investment.
The android app I use for music is Musicolet. It’s offline and has a lot of really nice customization options. Also free.
Hugston Media Pro, comes with thousands tv and radio channels worldwide (with bookmarks), updated newsfeed (minute/hour/day), local music player for your downloaded songs/videos. If enough users are interested I can make it opensource :)
Should you open source either way. I’ll check it out sometime
Yeah I have been thinking that, just didnt have much time. Users will decide, if at least 100 users want it they will have it opensource, as .msi or exe and code available to everyone. Until then maybe try Clementine app or Unlinked for android with mod apks. Let me kow if you need updated libs.
- Lidarr + Tubifarry + Slskd: automated downloads and organization
- Explo + listenbrainz: discover weekly replacement
- Navidrome: Subsonic Music Server
- Feishin: Linux Desktop client
- Arpeggi: iOS mobile client (Yes Ik iOS on privacy sub. Can’t afford to switch yet and my family has been using iPhone since I was s a kid)
Listenbrainz requires you to make what you listen to public as it is part of the open source project. If that is something you are worried about I think there are alternatives to explo that use last.fm but that is closed source as far as I know.
As others have said, buy stuff from small bands on band camp or at shows or something and pirate from whoever you see fit.
EDIT: I also should have noted, this is a self hosted setup that requires a server to be online unless you download your tracks to your client device. If you want a single device alternative, I am not personally sure what to recommend.
If yt-dlp/Newpipe still works over a VPN then Spotube with ListenBrainz plugin is an option, but it’s extremely buggy and they’re working on a rewrite afaik. Or use another YT Music client, or download your music and use an offline player. If you have the time and resources to self-host that’s also an option of course.
Download it via torrent, thats your best option. It takes time to build up a sizable catalog but it helps you can download entire acts discographies one fortuitous swoop here and there
Paying is basically antithetical to privacy, I only do it for the essentials or what i cant otherwise obtain freely
Soulseek is my goto
I will usually buy vinyl or cds for artists that I listen to a lot. It has the additional benefit of giving you a hard copy of the data. But yeah, this is unfortunately the way.
Yeah, like support underdogs but be realistic, you cant pay for everything and everyone unless you’re unusally well-resourced so respect your own constraints where they exist.
And thats just music, are you planning on remaining internally consistent and limiting the breadth of access you could otherwise have across all the modalities like TV shows, movies, books, courses, audiobooks, etc??
Your consumption does not hurt them, the stuff you would pay for anyway just do that but i think i can live with myself for downloading Pink Flloyd’s discog or the complete cartoon series from childhood lol
I found a comfortable way to listen to music without torrenting. It relies heavily on a private company though, Bandcamp.
I spend $20 a month in albums and other than that listen to their shows and recommendations. I can’t pay for everything so I set a cap per month. I decided not to be 100% in control of what I listen to by listening to their radio shows (usually featuring an interview with an artist).
I’m slowly growing my private music library. Wish I had a friend or two to help. I’m happy to be supporting artists.
For me its a spectrum, making my own judgment for each piece of media.
Copyright laws in the US have changed a lot over the last century, largely due to regulatory capture. The older versions of copyright law are mostly around 14-28 years after creation and those seem fair to me. So I don’t feel bad about anything >30 years old.
Another factor is the sliding spectrum between art as an altruistic creative experience versus art as a capitalist product created by gigantic corporations. Heavily monetized art tends to be stuff I enjoy less anyways so this kind of filters itself out. Its all formulaic and trend-chasing, largely the made by the same small group of people and rebranded with different faces. If I do ever want big-budget, mainstream content I don’t feel bad about not paying for it.
Sometimes its about convenience. There are a handful of creators still on YouTube that I like, and one of these days I want to get around to setting up yt-dlp and adding their channels to my Jellyfin to get around all the terrible ads of the platform, but I’ll probably buy some merch or throw them some money on Patreon or whatever to try to compensate for it. I also prefer to buy CD’s and merch from bands at their live shows where a higher % of the proceeds goes to the artist.
For sure. Most of my money goes to local artists. If I want to support a music artist, I will usually see them in concert and/or purchase merch. But Ticketmaster is making that difficult these days. I had to have this discussion with my mom regarding amazon kindle.
“AI companies are stealing everything anyway. Get your media while you can, because they don’t want it to exist anymore.”
Server (navidrome) + client (feishin, symphonium) + music (soulseek, bandcamp, ripping your old cds) + remote access (tailscale or something else if you’re savvy).
Absolutely Feishin for Navidrome behind tailscale. Its so good. Slskd for soulseek with Soularr to auto grab music is awesome also.
I have a local music library.
I once uploaded my entire connection of music (ripped from my own CDs or grabbed over the decades) to Google Music, but we know where that went. So I used Amazon Music for a few years, until the service went to shit.
Unwanted tracks in my personal playlists; songs playing out of order; ads despite paying a subscription fee to listen to music I already own.
The frustration with the entire copyright and, “rights holders” scene led me to turn away from buying anything but physical media at local music ships.
I have never used the arr tools, but if I was starting from scratch, I probably would. For now, when I want a few new tracks, I use yt-dlp or fire up jackett and find it.
Eta: frustrations
The real problem is getting the music
Is have a Spotify playlist of some 7000+ songs I want to have but finding each one individually is a nightmare. Are there ways to just put the list into some arr system and have it automatically torrented or pulled from Usenet or something like that?
Lidarr has a Spotify playlist syncing feature built in. You can set it to sync certain playlists and it will automatically add those artists to Lidarr. I think you can also configure it to monitor/download only the albums which the songs in your playlist come from, or download the whole artists discography.
I can’t attest to the quality of Usenet or private trackers for music as I don’t use either (mostly public trackers for movies and tv) but public trackers weren’t the easiest to get all the music I needed. I ended up using Slskd, a frontend for SoulSeek, with the Tubifarry plugin to connect to Lidarr and it is much easier to find releases now.
The next issue I have yet to tackle is porting those playlists to a player for Navidrome. If anyone finds a simple way to do so please let me know!
Lidarr with Soularr for Slskd(Soulseek)
Lidarr
Op answer the following:
How do you usually listen to music? Not “I put on my headphones, fire up Winamp and go” but “I use curated playlists from Spotify” or “i listen to whole albums on youtube”.
What does private mean to you? What do you consider not private?
Although I would appreciate recommendation feed that’s private I know that’s impossible.
I basically download songs anytime I get a recommendation or hear it somewhere. I usually listen for a while or add to a playlist. Very simple use case.
Private means I know and things I choose know what I listen to and others don’t. I would also preferably like ownership of my music. I would consider not private something that uses my data for anything except necessities(no algo no selling)
I know this sounds stupid and pedantic, but what do you mean by ownership?
Where or how do you download?
E: recommendation isn’t off the table, you’ll just have to go about it in an unconventional way.
Ownership as in its a file on my device, no DRM or whatever shit people have on files nowadays.
I download either bandcamp or sometimes from yt music.
Set up whatever arr piracy stack is going now and some kind of overlay network (vpn but not in the vernacular of “anonymizing proxy”) to play your files.
Pick a player that you like and use it.
Use a combination of rss and scripts to get recommendations.
Could you explain a little more on what you mean by rss and scripts to get recommendations. I’ve never really messed with something like that. Any recomemended feeds or sum to look at.
Everything you need already exists, it’s just plumbing.
RSS takes in a website with articles or blog posts or whatever and makes them summarized so you can just look through the titles.
Some kind of script to load some recent plays of yours on YouTube and scrape, compare and output the recommended panel would give you their recs.
There are also very bad no good recommendation engines that don’t work. At least they were bad and didn’t work in the past.
navidrome + dsub2000 for android
