I know of a even more impressive website that will transfer playlists from Spotify (or 20 other platforms, including text files) to 20 other platforms or a text file. I will share the link, but don't hug it to death y'all. :)
I used this. It worked fine. It's a shame it's necessary though... I wish there was some kind of vendor-neutral import/export format rather than requiring a third party to solve the whole matrix of integrations.
The music industry needs to more widely use some kind of equivalent to the ISBN that the book industry uses. A simple "ISMN" list per playlist/library would be all that would be needed to move between services when both apps have the same songs.
One could also imagine a standardized ismn://<number> URL format that could open in your preferred music app, and this could work even without a streaming service if you already own that song in your personal music collection.
But, I've never actually seen it used for recordings; it seems to be focused solely on music notation. So, it would be nice to have some kind of recording-focused identifier for keeping track of specific performances between services.
It's a pity that compression is likely to provide subtly different data under different network conditions. If everything were lossless we could just use hashes as identifiers and proceed without the participation of the apps.
After all, they have no incentive to make this easy for us.
This is actually a beautiful idea. It'd definitely be possible for music purchased through bandcamp since lossless is generally available for most releases. Commenting to bookmark this.
Content addressable doesn't really work here... different apps may have the same recordings encoded in different formats and bitrates, but they are still the same recording. Unless you meant "content addressable" in the sense of a uniquely assigned identifier like I was already talking about, and not a computed identifier from the raw bytes of the file like a hash.
This sounds like an acoustic fingerprint, such as AcoustID[0]. I think AcoustIDs and XSPF[1] would be a good combination for shared playlists. It's a shame that development stopped on the Tomahawk music player[2], it would have been an ideal platform for shared playlists like this.
> I wish there was some kind of vendor-neutral import/export format rather than requiring a third party to solve the whole matrix of integrations.
"vendor-neutral import/export format" sounds like the definition of third party. It's not that there shouldn't be a third party, it's that spotify etc. should adopt it.
Anyone know of a technical solution to retrieve a list of 'titles' for deleted videos from a youtube playlist? Have at least 10x Playlists full of removed/deleted music that has been inappropriately copyright striked, but I can't even reconstitute the playlists as I don't have the Title/Artist for the removed tracks.
I recently made a transition from Spotify to Tidal and found the suggested transfer service to do the job really clumsy. In my case I've transferred favorite artists and the service was just trying to match them by name which failed miserably when there was more than one with the same name - seemingly it picked one randomly. I wonder how this service would do.
I recently made the switch as well and used spotify_to_tidal [1] which is the free and open-source alternative to what Tidal recommends and it worked pretty fine! it couldn't find some specific tracks and I bet it does a somewhat similar name match as the one Tidal recommends, but at least this one doesn't have a limitation by the number of tracks, in case it's useful to someone else.
Use the Spotify artist ID[0] to find the Wikidata entry, and then grab the Tidal artist ID from the Wikidata entry to match the correct artist on Tidal. Even better if you use album IDs. (Brain explodes if you could use a song ID.)
Realistically, Wikidata may not have enough of this data populated, but it is nice to dream. And it seems plausible that MusicBrainz or similar might have enough data.
Great, yet another attempt at solving this with yet another standard that not everyone will use. Why did you pick this attempt instead of something more common like Gracenote?
Gracenote is owned by private equity and has limited availability of data. I prefer to encourage the use of more open data. MusicBrainz or Discogs would have been better choices than Wikidata based on quantity of entries. Though in 5 minutes I have been unable to find if Discogs even has external IDs, and I am not sure of the quantity of Spotify IDs that MusicBrainz has.
Great that you want to use open sources, but now, you've just provided more evidence for my case as you've listed 2 new "sources of truth". Even that fact that there are plural truth sources indicates no one source is truth. Why are they different? Same reasons that have already been discussed
So, we really have not made any forward progress here
If If If. This isn't blind pessimism. This is from someone that has dealt with metadata from studios/labels for just under two decades. IMDB was meant to do this for movies/tv, but yet it's an absolute dumpster fire.
So from an outside perspective, it's fun to dream a little dream, but from a gray beard it's just yet another dream.
It could check the album names on both sides, for example. And in case of uncertainty, it could make a list of dubious matches. Stuff like that, I guess.
The point is that it's all just metadata. There's a saying along the lines of "the filename is a really bad place to store metadata". Whether the title is the same and/or the album name as an additional qualifier, it's all subject to data entry which is prone to mistakes.
To some extent yes, but that data is usually sent from record label with the same values for different streaming services. But anyway, don't tell me that they can't at least figure out that there are more than one artists with the same name...
Record labels are actually quite terrible at providing this. You would assume otherwise because it’s in their best interest. However, I work in the industry and can tell you it’s a ridiculous problem because their is no standard and lots of human effort in cleanup and cleanliness.
You'd think that, but not in my experience. It's not like they are getting ID3 tags populated by Gracenote or some such service. You're also assuming that the streaming platforms do not attempt to manipulate the metadata they received for their own internal policies. See my other comment in a sibling thread for specific examples.
Too much inside baseball experience with the data the studios/labels believe is perfect that when received is far from perfect leaving the individual platforms to deal with it.
You say that as if all metadata is the same. I can tell you it is not. Every company that uses metadata will at some point use a field differently from someone else. "The Album" => "Album, The" type of things. "Album" => "Album (YYYY)" types of things. "Track remix by Artist" => "Track" + "Producer" as different fields.
My impression is that Tidal does a bad job of this in general. I have lots of artists I follow on there who have albums appearing on their page from identically named but different artists.
Don't get me started on that. How can a company which core business is content streaming be that lazy is beyond me. I often feedback them the errors, but even such feedback is difficult.
Well, at least they could make it easy to feedback, like a button on the artist/album page. But it's it really that hard to do it themselves? They are not getting a million albums per day, do they? I'm sure there are ways to improve the process with a little good will.
Having said that I have used https://ko-fi.com/zzzrod to support (if it can be called that) the dev (the link is from app homepage) as per my personal capacity. Because it is such an excellent service and provided for free and also because it isn't behind subscription. So thought I will share that. But of course it is perfectly fine to use it for free as well if one wants to. Cheers.
I didn't even know TuneMyMusic had a premium service, but fwiw, it's free for the first 500 songs. I've only used it a few times and was pretty impressed at how many services it supports.
I love TuneMyMusic, I exported my Spotify when I left, imported everything to Deezer, and now I periodically export everything from Deezer so I can slice and dice it in Excel for various reasons.
That’s the one I used when I moved from Spotify to YouTube music. Luckily my playlists contained less than 500 songs so the whole migration was easy and free.
If this does as you say it does… thank you for posting this. Ive been thinking of trying to get away from spotify but felt trapped at the playlist loss. My kid are now conditioned for instant music that might be the bigger challenge.
I found Soundiiz pretty bad, at least when transferring from Spotify and Apple Music to Youtube Music. It failed to find about a hundred tracks from the library of couple of thousand tracks, and they weren't some niche, rare things, too. I had to manually search for them, using the same titles, and found most of them.
I made a very simple chrome extension that automatically redirects you to your preferred music service when visiting another service. In my case I have it set to YouTube Music, so if I click a Spotify (or other) link in Slack, I'll be redirected to YouTube Music.
I'd love to actually buy music and store it myself, as I've started noticing more and more that some of the songs I have on Spotify have started to disappear, but I find it very difficult to buy modern music anymore. Most gets released as singles, and as far as I know, to only streaming platforms. Is there a way to still buy the same kind of music that is on streaming platforms, and actually get the audio files?
Or going to their live shows if they happen to come to a venue near you.
Or by buying vinyl at a local record store. Sadly, those are dying out, but you can find one or two good ones in any major city.
In electronic, hip-hop, and a lot of music that has a lot of computer-assisted production, a lot of producers will also release sample packs or VST presets that they sell directly on their websites. While often in small amounts, $50 or less, it more often than not goes directly to the artist with very little middlemen involved. While not a huge stream of revenue I'd imagine, it probably does help smaller artists if they can count on an additional couple hundred bucks a month from people that truly appreiciate their craft and I'd bet that if I reached out to artist XYZ whose music is no longer available on major platforms and said "hey i have been to a few of your shows, bought all your sample packs, and I can't find your tracks anymore" the artist, if small enough, would probably oblige and send along a nice little folder of music.
Record stores are thriving pretty much everywhere across the US. The ones that have been closing are the ones that only hold old stock and don't curate their inventories
If you walk into a shop and all you see are old, worn out Barry Manilow and Bob Seger albums at $30+ a pop, the store isn't meant to last. Thankfully, the problem has been solving itself
It's not. Artists will often enough remove old albums so you can no longer play them.
Buy it, download as FLAC, put in your preferred local infrastructure to play. Plex/Plexamp works well, as does local file storage and a good command line music client if you're less GUI-friendly or don't have the resources for running them.
Another source are good ol' CDs. If you know where to look you can get them cheap too. Specialist charity shops that specialise in records and CDs in student or wealthy areas are good, as are second hand stores online.
plex alternative: jellyfin + finamp or fintunes. This is my new setup (alongside bandcamp if I haven't yet imported the bandcamp purchase into my jellyfin library). No cloud shit, no subscriptions, but I still support [most of] my favorite artists. Ones which aren't on bandcamp, well either I still have the CDs kicking around or some mp3s from wherever (yt-dlp + ffmpeg is useful when lazy too)
No, making an album private does not disappear the music from people who have purchased it.
However, Bandcamp does abide by the laws that require them to stop distributing music at the rights holders' request.
No music service, or any service, for that matter, will guarantee access to files without regard to laws. Some will try harder, some have tried harder and been beaten down.
this has happened to me once, appropriately enough with some hauntology tracks. the songs are weirdly enough still available in the ios app to play but not to download via the web. presumably they're still somewhere in bandcamp behind a boolean, but i never got around to downloading them (to be fair, i have them on a _cassette_ that originally included bandcamp codes, so i mean, i really can't complain, i knew what i was getting into)
This happened to me a bunch. I think in one case an artist released an album, but wanted to disallow buying individual tracks so they relisted it after I bought one track.
The most infuriating thing is that bandcamp gaslights you on it. I eventually confirmed that yes, I had bought that song, after tracking down the receipt in my email provider or something (it was hidden from purchase history, bandcamp "I can't find my music" link didn't mention this, etc etc).
This isn't just an issue for playing music though - if you buy a bunch of stuff but don't download it right away you could loose it too. I bought the track I mentioned right after it was released, and the substitution happened within a day or two of that.
Like, I get it, if there was some legal issue (pirated work - and then they should issue refunds). But the fact that bandcamp tries to hide it just means that they know they have no moral grounds here.
> It's not. Artists will often enough remove old albums so you can no longer play them.
That doesn't happen on other platforms?
I had two albums of a band who's front man died and they disbanded. The albums were removed but I still have them in my collection. You cant find it on the site anymore but I can still download and play them.
When I moved country and updated my credit card in Spotify to my card from the new country Spotify also changed my “region”. As a result there are so many songs I have “starred”/“added”/“liked” (whatever fucking language they’re using for it now) are just greyed out and unplayable.
Anyway as for actually getting copies of the music I listen to I think we should just pirate it completely unashamedly.
some time ago when I canceled spotify, they show this special playlist like "we'll miss you" or whatever, and each of the song names, in order, spell out this little goodbye message. Ironically one of the songs in that playlist was greyed out and unplayable. Like, great job reminding me why I'm canceling :)
It's probably not Spotify's fault though, but it's actually on account of being able to finely control legal ownership of licensed songs. This is all insane imo, but legally sound. Welcome to the future.
> I'd love to actually buy music and store it myself...
Qobuz. For a start they only do lossless: no mp3. We're soon a quarter of a century into the 21st: gone are the Napster days of needing to stream mp3s.
Then Qobuz often has albums in higher quality than 44.1 kHz / 16-bit stereo. Not that you'll hear the difference: but artists/sound engineer going to the trouble of offering higher sample rate / bit depth typically do care about producing good sounding music so there's that.
Then Qobuz allows you to do precisely what you want: you can buy individual tracks or full albums to download, no DRM.
I've got both a collection of audio files I ripped myself from my own CDs (which I keep too), in a 100% bitperfect / lossless way (verified with an online DB of people who also ripped their CDs) and a Qobuz subscription.
The one criticism about Qobuz would be that music discovery ain't the best out there: the UI is actually quite bad. But it's good stuff for people who care about quality and who love to own their music.
Most network streaming devices now support Qobuz: for example I've got a fully integrated Yamaha amp that contains a network streamer (Yamaha R-N1000A) and MusicCast (Yamaha's music streaming app, like Sonos I guess but Yamaha) supports Qobuz (and Tidal and Spotify).
You don't just rent temporary access to an online service that may disappear under your feet or remove songs you used to listen to: you can actually buy and own individual tracks.
Check the plans they have: depending on how many songs you buy, one may be better than the other.
IIUC Spotify, under the pressure of both Tidal and Qobuz, announced they'll be moving to lossless streaming. It's 2024. At fucking last.
I've been doing this, and here in Canada https://ca.7digital.com/ is literally the only option I've found that let's you buy normal MP3s, would highly recommend. I've been able to get modern albums without a hitch, but don't know about modern singles. I think in the US Amazon let's you buy MP3s, but not sure there.
For the price of a Spotify subscription, I can usually buy a new album every month! Which is great; and I love slowly growing my album collection.
While it’s more of a treasure hunt, I really enjoy browsing for and buying physical CDs, especially second hand. Albums are often $1, they sound as good as when they were released and they’re easily convertible to any other audio format, including lossless, 16-bit, 44.1khz formats. The only thing better is SACD, but finding that is like a diamond in the rough and ripping it is its own challenge unless you have the right equipment.
People are crazy for vinyl, but CDs are just _so_ convenient.
A few years back, I did an apples-to-oranges test of an album I had on vinyl and CD. The vinyl version probably sounded better (usual BS about warmth and whatnot) but the CD sounded very, very good and it was way closer than I was expecting. It had been ~15 years since I'd listened to a CD on a real stereo and I'd totally forgotten how good they can sound. I'd certainly been swayed by the vinyl enthusiasts in the interim, too.
The CD was so clean and clear but not in a robotic way. (I don't think this album had fallen victim to the loudness war either, fwiw.) Whereas the record sounded "warm" but also a little muddy and quiet (not in a good way) in comparison. I know there could be any number of reasons for this but that's also part of the problem. Was my setup dialed in and this is how it was supposed to sound? Or, was the table not flat? Was the needle dirty? Was the tracking force off? Yes, it's fun to tweak these variables but ... it's also fun to just listen to music that sounds excellent with zero effort.
I've started buying CDs again (to my spouse's chagrin) and have no regrets. I do need to start ripping them before discrot comes for them. For anyone in the market, library sales are an excellent option to, essentially, buy CDs by the pound. They also often have rare compilations and anthologies that you won't find in thrift stores.
CDs get a bad rep because people incorrectly assume that all digital music is CD quality. CDs are inherently superior to any lossy codec, especially the ones used by streaming services.
Also discrot is only a problem if you don't keep your CDs in a case, or if the case is made entirely of transparent acrylic and you lost the labels and teh little booklet. They're very reliable when properly protected from scratches and radiation.
Disc rot is not a thing for factory pressed CDs, assuming normal storage. Cheap CDRs from ~2000 or so did have the issue. My CDs from the 80s and CDRs from the 90s are working fine.
I don't use my cds too often anymore, but I've got a pressed 2-disc set of the soundtrack from the song remains the same that's became unplayable because the media developed holes.
These were stored in the case in my home, mostly coastal California, no severe environmental conditions.
Disc rot of pressed CDs seems rare, I don't think I've seen it on other discs, but if it happened to me, it's definitely a thing.
I'm sure defective ones exist. For kicks I just opened my first CD, Bryan Adams' Reckless, bought late '84... it's in perfect condition. Put it on, and it sounds great just like the first time.
disc rot is a thing for every disc that's made with aluminum, which is all but a very few super special ones like mobile fidelity sound lab made with gold. Oxygen permeates through both the polycarbonate base and the clear coat top, maybe quickly, maybe slowly, but always.
Sure, I'll buy that: Aluminum and oxygen are great friends that love eachothers' company, and on a long-enough timeline here in Earth's atmosphere they'll always be reunited.
But how does that timeline compare to that of a human? Or even of the compact disc itself (a bit over 42 years old now)?
I mean: At least anecdotally, I have never discovered rot on any of my CDs that did not also have other contributing condition issues. I haven't even experienced the once-reported issues of air-dried, solvent-based (instead of UV-cured) inks. (And although my sample set is not infinite, it is also not particularly small.)
As a laserdisc collector, I am particularly aware of disc rot and in those it is far more present by now. Practically all discs have some level by now even the good ones, and even if they look clean to the eye. There are people that say the same thing there, that there are good discs that don't have rot and bad ones that do. But that is not true, there are only better and worse examples, faster and slower progress.
cds are both younger and built better, so they will not only last to a later absolute date, they will last longer relative to their manufacturing date, but cds have a few other things that mask rot even when it starts, which is both that they are digital and the player has buffering and interpolation, and also that the data format includes redundant data for error correction. (ld is analog and has neither, later better players do add some digital processing but it can't do the kind of good job with a 6mhz analog fm ntsc video signal that a cd player can with a simple audio bitstream)
A cd with the same rot that is visible on a ld (visible in the output not visible to the eye on the physical disc) will appear to play perfectly even in the cheapest junk player.
So, it will take longer, but I see no reason to treat "longer" as "indefinite".
There is no specific time, but it is inevitable and I don't think it's in the 100's of years but in the 10's of years, and the 10's of years, especially when many are already 30 years old, is not very many more 10's of years left.
And if that turns out to be pessimistic and they last another 50 or more? That's just a bonus. Lucky future rippers who get a chance to rip with even better tech later.
Tangentially I do also assume that some day long before the polycarbonate disintigrates, there will be a practical way to read even fully oxidized discs with a different frequency laser or even a camera or microscope-based head, or even a bulk scanner that just rasterizes the whole surface without even bothering to read the track in a spiral until after the fact purely in software.
As time goes on, tools get both better and more accessible, so in 1995 it would not be possible for a person to make their own laser head, but today it probably is, and in only a few more years will just get easier and easier, and probably at a rate that outruns the rate at which the discs fully degrade.
This should be objectively true, but the limitations on vinyl prevent some of the abuses in the production processes (the loudness wars). Often vinyl is better anyway just because the engineers had to go back to make a good mix (mostly this is mastering not mixing) for vinyl - if the vinyl mix had been put on CD the CD would be objectively better.
Vinyl does theoretically have a better s/n ratio, but you can only see this in perfect setups, including a new needle in your player. Even then after just a handful of plays and vinyl is worn enough to be worse (I've heard of laser based vinyl plays which don't wear the media - I have no idea if they are real or how they compare to CDs, but I need to acknowledge them because they might be different enough to matter)
I don't think the S/N ratio of vinyl approaches that of CDs. If you give vinyl a perfect literally flawless $10 million dollar setup and freshly carve a new disc from a fresh press plate and play it, even though analog has no reasonable bounds on how loud it can get from a physics perspective, there are dozens of things that in reality will get introduce noise into the system that are not present in CD Audio.
It will likely sound at least just as good as a similarly treated CD, but I doubt that it will approach the S/N ratio of a properly mastered CD.
CD has by default a perfect 0 noise floor, whereas vinyl will never have that, and typically has a pretty high noise floor, meaning that even a good vinyl press will never have the same noise floor as the same recording placed on CD.
I said all of that to say, to me vinyl is appreciable for its flaws compared to CD. Vinyl is mastered to a different spec than CDs are (when its done properly), and it can sometimes add to the experience because the mastering and pressing process focuses on different frequencies.
Aside from that, the fact that each time you listen to a vinyl record it changes in subtle ways, bits of dust get moved around, atomic scratches get worn into the surface, meaning that every listen is completely unique, ever so slightly different than any other time that album or any other similar pressing has been played.
That is one of the thoughts I enjoy when listening to vinyl that makes it likeable, a little more special to me when it crosses my mind.
Digital is almost always the same. Analog is always different.
If the store of your choice offers FLAC as an option (and I think they all do), you can simply make your own MP3s from the FLAC files. That's one of the biggest advantages of lossless audio. (The improvement in audio quality is actually pretty minimal, for most people.)
You can also keep the FLAC files to convert them to some future format later, or even do something really wild like burn them to a CD or something.
I did that for a while, but all the tools seem to have been unmaintained for the last decade. The command line ones still work, but the GUIs to make them easy still depend on qt3 or other such obsolete things. (streaming servers like jellyfin do this on the fly easy, but other workflows for offline use don't work anymore even though they are still sometimes useful)
Most people weite scripts with said tools which can keep going for a long time. I have a couple laying in my library directory to add replay gain metadata, convert to aac, and backup.
IIRC those are only 256 kbps. I get that MP3 is a lossy format, but still, they could at the very least offer 320 kbps. I was under the impression Amazon wasn't short on server space.
As an equally reluctant option one side or the other to Amazon, Apple's "iTunes Store" still exists and is "mostly" DRM free, if you don't mind AAC and friends (MP4 Audio) rather than MP3. It's getting harder and harder to find those Buy buttons, especially if you start from an Apple Music link/the Apple Music app, but it's currently no worse than Amazon as Amazon and Apple seem deep in direct competition on how hard they make it to find Buy buttons.
Qobuz removed a range of releases a couple months ago at short notice, including from users' accounts. Hopefully their catalog remains strong as it's about the only online-only store with lossless that has a wide variety of mainstream artists.
I'll also mention: Bleep.com, Boomkat, Ninja Tune (label that directly sells), Junodownload.
Yep, "Pink Martini - A Retrospective" was removed after I bought one song from it, when I click on the track in my library the error toast states "It's impossible to play this track. Thank you for trying another playback format."
But that's the whole point of buying it, mp3 is safely on my SD card, plays just fine
It wasn't explained officially. I assume some distribution arrangement changed but the artists/releases were so varied and from various labels that I can't determine the relationship. I'd bought a handful of releases there and all of them were affected.
I look for music on bandcamp, 7digital, and then amazon music in that order. All offering drm free mp3 and flac files. I don't think there has been something I wanted that I havem't been able to find yet.
The subscription pays tidal, but tidal only pays out based on usage... The artist gets about $0.01 per stream.
The best way to support artists is to purchase albums the week they're released... Sales numbers are a key metric when labels decide touring and investment in the next album... Could mean a better studio or more resources...
If you are committed to the download off of tidal strategy, then please make a playlist of the tracks you download and play it overnight... Otherwise, none of your money supports the artists you listen to.
Tidal has lots of downloader clients you can install due to its often technical but niche user base. May I suggest Tidal-Media-Downloader[0]?
Now if only there was a way to download things from YouTube Music with a Premium subscription. It's practically impossible to search for "YouTube Music download" without falling into the 'youtube-dl YouTube mp3 audio tracks!' SEO hole. Vague naming on Google's part.
You can 100% download higher quality audio tracks from YouTube using yt-dlp. You have to use session cookies from a browser that you've logged into your premium account with to get the higher quality tracks. There are options with yt-dlp to help with this.
This is kind of the confusion I mean. Sometimes YouTube Music has audio tracks that you are seemingly different to the "X Artist - Topic" videos you can find on YouTube proper. I'll have to revisit this again to see if it's all the same now, because the last time I was looking into it a few years ago not everything I had organised in playlists on YTM was available via regular YouTube playlists I could rip with yt-dlp.
I recently learned about buying Mp3s on Amazon. Most CD purchase pages have a "purchase options" and you can do Mp3s. I do that for mainstream things for my kids that aren't on bandcamp (such as music from a kids TV show).
I'm actually working on a IoT device where one of the main goals was selfhosting audio content for my kids. Uses AI for the user interface. Similar to Alexa but battery powered. Still in private beta (orders are closed right now) but here is the link for anyone curious. https://heycurio.com/
Ah. AG Talking Bear meets LLM. I started working on something similar a year back - but tried to keep it restricted to offline which made it more challenging since inference on CPU of raspberry PI limits you to very small models.
Sending voice clips of children to an always listening server is just a bit too dystopian for me.
I like Qobuz too, but have a couple issues with it:
* The prices are a lot higher there than anywhere else
* They don't remember my payment information. I would opt-in to this if it's a legal concern. It's so annoying every single time having to enter it in all over again. I'd do PayPal but they charge a fee these days.
* Their tar'd up download format sucks, and requires me doing a lot of re-naming and re-foldering things to get it to a sane format.
* They started removing some of the things I PAID FOR from my account. Not cool. It's fine if you have to remove it from sale but removing it from my account should not be legal.
* Many popular tracks from otherwise not-so-popular albums are locked so you can't buy just that song, you need to buy the whole album
* If you've bought a few songs from an album, you don't get an appropriate discount if you later decide to buy the whole album - which some digital stores are good about.
Used CDs are dirt cheap. Local thrift stores here tend to price them at $1-$1.50 each. Of course, the dedicated "record" stores tend to be closer to $6-10, but they're more likely to have things other than thousands of country albums.
I have the most luck going to the artist websites or social media. They often have links to different storefronts to buy physical and digital copies. The majority are on Bandcamp, but larger groups also release on Amazon.
Some artists sell them directly either from the site, or at their concerts, the German region I live on still has several stores, and so far I also managed to get several MP3 albuns.
I don't use streaming platforms other than being aware of new musicians in YouTube, which I eventually buy their albums.
I got one that wasn't; the music CD was published by SONY JAPAN. Had to do some shenanigans to play it on a PC drive. Decided it was best to rip it just in case.
As someone approaching 50, the return of Vynil is quite strange feeling.
I now see record stores so full of Vynil that it feels like I timetraveled back to my teenage years when CDs started to being sold, alongside laser discs on a little store corner.
Most gets released as singles, and as far as I know, to only streaming platforms.
Analog hole.
It takes a bit of time, but if you really care about the music, it's worth it.
Note: I suspect that the streaming services watermark the songs. I have some from Apple Music that it refuses to sync over its cloud service. Doesn't bother me, though, because I primarily sync via wire.
Additionally, there's no way to buy the Dolby Atmos mixes of most albums yet. Spatial sound mixes might actually have a chance at going mainstream, but you'll have to pay for these subscription services to access them.
iTunes and Amazon have pretty much every song you'd want to buy.
Nope. Not even remotely. Only if your taste in music is very narrow.
Just this weekend I tried to buy some Christmas songs that were popular and common on the radio in the 80's. I could only find about half of them on Amazon or Apple Music.
Most had some version available, but not the canonical one I grew up with. Some didn't exist at all.
They even think they can exert rights over used album sales. As one example, pretty much all recordings that have rights attributed to an artist named Al Reed, who died in 1990, are blocked for sale on Discogs. Not just his own recordings, pretty much anything he has writing credit for. https://www.discogs.com/artist/623314-Al-Reed
I don't understand why other people are hating on Kanye's music. I understand that he is not a very likeable person, but his music is damn good y'all. Especially the ones you tried :D
I don't think hating or lauding his music is really appropriate in this thread --it's kind of off topic. We can admit it's subjective and tastes will vary.
I don't see the problem here: it looks like it's working extremely well, and in fact doing you a huge favor, if it redirects you from Kanye West to anything else. Why on earth would you want to listen to Kanye West when you can listen to Depeche Mode instead?
They do need to fix the bug with the album art though.
> It would be fantastic to have this as an extension for us, Firefox users. I hope someone makes one someday.
If there's some easy way to figure out where that id parameter in the results page comes from (I assume some simple hash of the link), then you could probably even just make it a bookmarklet.
One of the best services I get from my Nas is the ability to save the music there and be able to stream to my phone. I prefer to buy some music and have it there than relying in any subscription service.
I have an old synology nas thats running Navidrome in a docker container.
On my iPhone I use play:sub and point it to the local ip and port associated Navidrome.
When I’m away I access the network through a WireGuard connection (set up on a protectli router running opnsense). Before I used traefik to expose it to the web.
When I used to maintain a discord music bot, it used to stream from YouTube. For Spotify urls to work though, I had to get YouTube search to work reliably. One trick which I found worked well was including the Spotify URL in the YouTube search along with the song name, artist name, etc. This helped quite a bit with picking out the "official" youtube video, since the official one often includes Spotify links in the video description, which YouTube search also matches against.
This service connects to a few more services, but you can't just paste in an existing URL. https://odesli.co/ it's more link tree type service but since you can search for songs and albums it makes it easy to find things.
I've never taken Spotify or any other music streaming service seriously. They are a joke for the same reason Netflix is, they only play limited licensed content so their selection inevitably drops and drops until everything you search ends with zero results. Obscure indie artists? Forget it.
Add average 4G reliability to that and you have a service that never has what you need, and if they do it never works when you need it (e.g. long car rides in the middle of nowhere). And then they expect you to pay for it or listen to ads too. Nothing beats a good ol' folder of mp3s. And 128GB of the average phone can store many an mp3.
Huh, that looks very interesting. A friend of mine made a streaming service back in the day where you could paste in youtube links, they got downloaded, added to a playlist and then you could listen to that together with friends on multiple computers.
I always wanted to rebuild that and adjust to my needs. Now this convert thing from the OP seems to be an interesting extension to that. Just paste in spotify links, grab the YT one, yt-dlp it and there you go. Ill put this in my favorites, thanks!
Slightly off topic but does any one of the music streaming services actually not suck?
Like I tried a bunch of them but each one made me quit in it's own unique way!
It would help if you specified exactly what you didn't like about them.
I use Apple Music, I use it because it's lossless and it's integrated in the Apple ecosystem. The UX of the actual Music app is... not great, but tolerable, better than the iTunes before it.
I listen to some pretty obscure stuff and I don't think I ever found something missing on it. YMMV.
Well I can tell you as a Spotify user that their random play is horrible. It's not truly random, which is extremely frustrating when you have 1000+ playlist and keep hearing the same 10 songs over and over.
The silly trick I found is to use Apple's Smart Playlists to help. I've been creating playlists like "Not heard since Jan 1, 2023". Songs drop out after they are played in a shuffle.
You're not alone. Streaming services' selling point is access to the catalogue. Everything else about the product tends towards being aggressively mid.
It would be fantastic if this site were a pwa that supported the chrome api [1] that lets you share directly to it on android. I would make a pr but my company owns all my ip and getting an exception takes months :(
It's got to be easiee for a larger company to agree to. What would you be inspired to make that doesn't compete with an existing product if you work at big tech? It feels like they have products in all spaces.
Large companies tend to have very conservative legal departments, and be less supportive of exceptions and more willing to just not hire someone who has requirements outside their perceived norm. The question would be whether the company has ever established an exception path, typically by having a high-level hiring manager insist and running it up the chain.
I had that in my contract when I started in the games industry, it was made very clear to me that if I don't like the terms there are 500 other juniors willing to take my spot. Not excusing it, I'm just saying that sometimes you're not in a position to negotiate this if you really want the job(and I really wanted the job at the time, we can argue whether that was the right thing to do or not but the fact remains).
This is the strategy most of my coworkers take. On principle, I'm just not willing to lie to a project and tell them I have the right to contribute my work under their license.
You're correct, I signed a contract that says they own my free time. I didn't exactly want to, and I firmly believe it's wrong. Nevertheless, it's easy to say I fucked up when you don't know my exact situation. This is my first job and there are a lot of other benefits that made it the best option for me personally, even when there were alternatives that had no such clause.
That's fair, I don't know your situation, and my tone was overboard. I don't mean it as a criticism of your actions as much as a warning for others not to do the same without good reason.
Does that mean if you do something semi-illegal or immoral on your freetime they put their name on it? Start doing work on decrypting media (legal if the content is out of copyright, but good luck finding such a thing), porn (again, legal but many won't like it and you can find weird stuff that is even less liked while still legal), or something else that might technically be legal but they don't want their name associated with.
Finding equivalent content elsewhere is probably not going to happen. The best the service could do is show you Instagram content without requiring an Instagram account.
I started using Tidal earlier this year, simply because they pay artists more (it's still basically a pittance, but it's better.)
If you share a song link using Tidal, it actually shares a landing page where the user can select from Tidal, Spotify, Apple Music, or Amazon Music. It's really great.
I’d believe either, though the latter feels tiny. Pandora is still better than any of the others listed for discovering new music, IMO. Spotify always seems too conservative with its suggestions, making it worse for discovering new music. Subjective, of course.
I don't think it's subjective. Royalties aren't paid equally, and considering Spotify is partly owned by the record labels themselves, it makes sense to steer listeners.
I agree, I feel like Pandora recommendations are far better than Spotify ones, at least for me. Spotify keeps me in my bubble, Pandora is constantly expanding it.
> One of MusicBrainz' aims is to be the universal lingua franca for music by providing a reliable and unambiguous form of music identification; this music identification is performed through the use of MusicBrainz Identifiers (MBIDs).
used it for a project a few years back and it does the job if you listen to music mostly made in the english-speaking world.
the complications with the same song appearing in multiple albums (including compilations) would give weird results sometimes, but it is totally useable if you only care about finding basic information.
Helsing is currently helping Ukraine. It's easy to say "military bad" when you're in the US, but for Daniel Ek it's about self-preservation. As a fellow Scandinavian, I fully support him investing in defense tech.
It has shareholders which benefit from killing people, and who benefit more from war proliferating. How do you think that turns out in the long run? How has it turned out for Ukraine?
War companies sell war, and they sell it to evil people (see Israel's apartheid and genocide in Gaza). The privatization of war is bad for everybody.
I don’t have Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, Deezer, SoundCloud, or Tidal. Would it be too much to ask for a link to be simply converted to the text “Songname by Artist”?
this feels more like an art piece or statement, not an actual tool
what if i have a youtube link and i want to stream on spotify? what if i have an apple music link but want to play it on a linux device where only spotify works?
it's more likely that you discovered a song on youtube and wanted to add it to your spotify playlist, rather than browsing spotify and then deciding to listen on another platform.
someone should make a service like this, but make it universal for all platforms.
however, i found the ability of matching a spotify artist profile to the artist's platform profiles impressive.
Huh? What linux device might only have access to spotify? Pretty much every Linux distribution (with the possible exception of Linux From Scratch[0]) has multiple local apps to play music, both from the command line and via a gui in their standard package repositories.
Not to mention dozens of sites (if you can get to spotify you can get to them) that perform the same function.
apologies, i meant i only have a linux device with only spotify installed, because it's the thing i use. no, i'm not talking about music players, only streaming services.
you're completely right other services and software are available on linux. but the point i'm trying to make is, this tool is spotify -> others, but a common use-case is others -> spotify.
>apologies, i meant i only have a linux device with only spotify installed, because it's the thing i use. no, i'm not talking about music players, only streaming services.
>you're completely right other services and software are available on linux. but the point i'm trying to make is, this tool is spotify -> others, but a common use-case is others -> spotify.
No apologies necessary. I misunderstood your point, which is certainly a fair one.
And given your use case, I get your frustration. That said, there are, apparently, a number of Linux apps and plugins for said apps that will allow you to play not only local music, but streams from Spotify as well as from other streaming services.
I get that's not really what interests you, but it is an option if you choose.
I don't use Spotify, so I haven't looked for tools to convert to Spotify links, but I'd expect they're out there, given that the reverse exists.
This failed completely after trying to search for songs that don't have a unique name. This seemingly just does a basic string search on other streaming platforms. Sad...
For me, it didn't work. The artists and tracks on almost all of the tracks I pasted were incorrect. I suppose it would only be compatible with mainstream music.
Switch out alternative streaming services with torrent links or alternatives ways to listen to the content. And you would actually have something here.
I built a proof of concept for a VC-scale app, and something like this is one of the core features. I applied to YC S24 and didn't get an interview (SUPER understandably). If anyone wants to hear details, shoot me an email (in bio); this project's vaporware until I find the right partner.
The minimum financials for consideration as a gatekeeper for the DMA are 75bn EUR market cap, or 7.5bn EUR turnover (in Europe). In the last week, Shopify's market cap exceeded 75bn EUR for the first time.
Let's go back to the word "algorithm" being used for what it actually means, instead of the opposite—like the way it's used here and in every article about social media written in the last 7 years.
I don't follow. Is he anti music or something? Afaik he's on Apple, Amazon, and Youtube as well. Do you not use anything related to him? I'm honestly curious for some reason.
Some people are intolerant and think that "they allow someone who I disagree with" is grounds to stop doing business with a service. It's a toxic attitude, but sadly common.
This is a bit off-topic, but: am I just dim or could the README be a bit more informative? What it's for, who it's for, etc. (I'll give partial blame to me or github for the About section/link being there... it's offscreen by the start of the README, so I missed it)
(I also... don't use spotify... so had less-than-average context to guess the purpose of this project with.)
Anecdotally speaking, Spotify has become a sort of cultural default for a bunch of people.
If you're in a DM or a group chat, you may not hear "You should listen to X by Y" but rather "Check this out: https://open.spotify.com/blah"
At my current workplace and a previous one, both had Slack channels for sharing music and they were 99% Spotify links.
Partly because of genuine Spotify usage but even not using Spotify at the time, I would find the Spotify equivalent for my own recommendations (to reduce friction for the majority so they'd be more likely to actually listen to the recommendation)
Presumably for those few users not using Spotify, rather than having to find the equivalent song via text search, which may or may not contain a result for Provider Z, this service straight up just converts the Spotify link you've been given into all of the other provider equivalents.
Do the spotify links not just open the song in some kind of web app if you dont have spotify installed?
I always thought giving a straight link to the thing was better for all. If they had Spotify it would open there and without ads if they had the subscription and if they had neither it would still open the web app and let them listen to it with ads and stuff.
That’s absolutely still true. I just disabled Spotify app link handling, and then Spotify opens in Firefox on my phone. And on Desktop it works the same way.
edit: misread parts of grandparent. Yeah, the 30s previews are gone, didn’t even realize anyone used those.
At least for me in the Netherlands, for the past month if I click a link to a specific song, I get redirected to a page to start a radio based on the artist and encouraged to upgrade to Premium.
I've had to get friends to share the titles manually, before I found Odesli to be able to convert them.
Right, but before it just loaded the page of the album/playlist and told you to sign in to your account. It has never allowed you to play songs without a sign in.
Yeah, the generated preview (depending on what application the link is shared in) can play a 30 second sample, but if you want to listen to the whole song you need to have an account, and if you don't have a subscription you'll likely get an ad first.
It's why I often share a youtube link instead, it plays inline a lot of the time and when it plays inline it often doesn't have ads. But that may also be because I have an effective ad blocker (for now).
I’m in a dedicated music discord, about 70% of links are Bandcamp, 20% Spotify, 10% Tidal. BC percentage could be higher, but good enough, most of the time it’s only for those weird bands that don’t sell on BC anyway ;)
That said, I do miss Songwhip. It was a website where you could search for a release, and then generate all links for it, including streaming services and bandcamp.
I miss Songwhip as well. We used to have a bot in our music sharing Discord channel that looks for links to any streaming platform and convert them to Songwhip links via the Songwhip API. The good thing about Tidal is that, like Songwhip, it provides you with a list of links to various streaming platforms when you're not logged in.
Wish it had been open sourced, it worked so well. Or even better, if Bandcamp offered an API, so sites likes SW wouldn’t need to (probably) scrape that information.
> The good thing about Tidal
Can’t confirm, it’s worse than spotify for me, as I get an unclosable modal that asks me to sign up or login.
It was such a beautiful ui and ux , elegant really. It’s a shame yet I wonder how could it have been profitable. There’s really not a whole lot to monetize unless I’m missing something.
Songwhip allowed artists to claim and customize their page for a fee. Back then I looked into why Songwhip closed but couldn't find a definitive answer. I found a Reddit post where the original creator shared their site many years ago, so it looks like Songwhip started as a personal project. When it closed down though that decision was made by Sony. So it seems like the original creator got bought out by Sony and then Sony decided to close the service. Just speculation though.
That's quite the extrapolation from your anecdotal experience. Technically, it would be more accurate to say, "for those few users using Spotify."
What you've noticed is that Spotify has the biggest market share, but that doesn't mean that the number of users not using it are "few". According to https://explodingtopics.com/blog/music-streaming-stats, Spotify has a 30% market share. That implies that up to 70% of streaming music users aren't regular Spotify users.
From what I could tell when choosing AM over Spotify, the latter has a lot of playlists for discovery and I would never use my streaming service for discovery as it encourages the service to promote music it is paid to promote.
Of course AM is annoying too because 3 out of 5 navigation icons along the bottom of the UI are for discovery. But AM has Siri integration, which works some of the time… :-/
Apple Music has been utterly awful on desktop for years, with virtually zero positive progress. I made this angry video [1] 4 years ago, and have tried using Apple Music multiple times since then, and it never failed to disappoint.
Does Apple care though? It seems that Apple's main focus these days is on mobile "lifestyle" devices and services: iPhone, Siri, and Apple Music fits right into that. How many Apple users actually care about listening to AM on their desktop (presumably a Mac)?
Of course, Apple still pushes its overpriced Macs, but the focus there seems to be on developers (for the more expensive stuff--big monitors, workstations, etc.) or people (probably corporate workers, developers, etc.) using MacBooks. In both cases, the focus seems to be on machines used for doing work. I'm just guessing, but I would guess that most MacOS users who want to listen to (Apple) music would do so on their personal device, i.e. their iPhone, rather than their MacOS device which is probably owned and managed by their employer.
You are spot on. Apple does one thing very good: MacOS + Macs. But I don’t like Apple software. Too limited, too crippled, too unpredictable. And they don’t listen to users, you cannot reach out to someone and hope your feedback will change something.
The new "Apple Music (Preview)" app on Windows (exclusively 11 IIRC) absolutely destroys anything they had in the past. And anything they have on macOS right now. It is absolutely stellar, and yet another example of the weird "let's make out apps on opposing systems better than our native ones" trend.
Oh my god you made this video? I have sent it to so many people to explain my feelings for it. Thank you so much for saying what I wanted to but so much better!
You're welcome. I made that channel with the intention of making more videos about other apps and products, but so far could only muster Apple Music :)
I used to use Apple Music but when my Credit Card expired I missed two months payment and Apple happily deleted all of my playlists and library. I don’t think they realise how bad this is, but I will never use it or subscribe ever again.
I had to pause my subscription for a few months for personal reasons and my collection is gone too.
This is crazy.
Not sure how they expect anyone to keep using their service with such attitude.
Perhaps it is a lock-in strategy: don’t leave or you lose months or even years of your music habits.
At the same time, both Spotify and YouTube Music keep all the data to this day.
One might argue that they free plans, so they have to keep it. And I would say “I don’t care”. If I can’t rely on your service to keep a list of songs - I am not using it.
Damn, they could utilize my iCloud account. Or allow me to export a text file with that data, so I could import it back later. But no. No money - you are screwed.
I don't understand why AM doesn't use iCloud to store playlists. You have the storage anyway and a good chunk of people pay for an additional increase too.
You missed two months of payment and you are angry that a company closed the account? Boy do I have to tell you a story about what you can lose by not paying your AWS bill for two months… I am curious how you handle customers that do not pay and continue to not pay instead of just ending their subscription.
AWS has to pay a relatively big money for keeping user data. It is understandable why they would want to delete it.
Playlists are basically zero cost to store. You would spend more $ on delete processing than keeping them around for eternity. So it's just not well thought use-case, implemented without attempt to view the whole picture.
In many places I worked we would keep a user's history on the app for a long while in case they decided to resubscribe. It doesn't cost much to have a 6-12 months leeway before complete deletion.
Erasing a music app data after just a couple of months is idiotic, even more for a company with such deep pockets like Apple.
What do you lose if you don’t pay to AWS for two months?
My account is still there. I can still use it. I am pretty sure it has some historic data there as well. Probably my old lambdas are still laying around.
I've had songs I uploaded later disappear due to their changing agreements with music providers. A google take-out contained the missing files so I was able to recover them, but I'll never again rely on such an integration.
Could it be hidden behind the "Uploads" section? I have a lot of songs that I've uploaded that aren't available on YouTube, but they don't show up unless you go out of your way to find them in their dedicated section.
Not really. Spotify's "add your music" feature has always been an afterthought, it's clunky and inconvenient. It doesn't really store your files in Cloud, like Apple Music does; it just allows you to access local files per device.
>It doesn't really store your files in Cloud, like Apple Music does; it just allows you to access local files per device.
Perhaps things have changed, but 10 or so years ago I "uploaded" my music to Spotify and it didn't actually upload anything, nor did it play my local music.
Rather, spotify used whatever it had in its database with the same name/artist, which wasn't always the same recording or even the same song.
And then there were the ads. No thanks.
I have my own library of more than 22,000 tracks and use Winamp, Jellyfin and VLC to play them wherever I happen to be. No muss, no fuss, and most importantly, no ads.
Spotify doesn't require you to create an account to hear a song from what I recall, so why wouldn't someone send you a link? That's what the web is for.
That said once you have heard it on Spotify, yeah you might want it on your service provider of choice so as to add it to whatever equivalent of playlists there are.
The previous comment was already absurdly america-centric. But with this response, the cake is taken. I have never been sent a spotify link, nor do people really over here, because you need an account.
sorry, it's been so long since I didn't have an account so I went and checked and I guess I was wrong they do require you to create a free account to hear the link you've been sent.
You'd think my comment assuming you didn't need an account was already absurdly wrong but with your response the cake was taken, because I'm not from America either.
The readme also doesn't specify how to set up the development environment. I'd like to make a PR adding support for the two Russian streaming services most people here use, VKontakte and Yandex Music, and the code looks simple enough, but I have no idea how do I actually run it. It probably involves some npm commands?
Looks like a pretty standard npm-based application, so just clone the repo, run `npm install` and then `npm run dev` (see `package.json` scripts section for available commands to use with `npm run`)
Yeah, but as I musician they pay you next to nothing unless you're already on top anyways. I know touring musicians who can comfortably live from their physical record/merch sales who say they can basically ignore their spotify revenue since they earn more with their merch sales on one concert than they earn during a whole year of running on spotify.
So if you care about your musicians consider seeking out other ways to get your records, e.g. bandcamp
> as I musician they pay you next to nothing unless you're already on top anyways
More like "as a musician they pay you literally nothing for a song unless it receives 1000 streams/12 months". This is total bullshit for small musicians.
That's one sentence; it's a good sentence, but it's not a lot. Nothing about running it.
And I already noted (in a very offhand way):
> the About section/link being there... it's offscreen by the start of the README, so I missed it
I think 10 years ago, that sidebar didn't exist on github, so I've got some old skimming habits I could modify... but I think the bar for READMEs should be higher. I was pleasantly surprised to see I wasn't alone in having too little info, though. This project is far far from being an outlier in this regards. 95% of ROS repos (robotics code packages) are worse :)
I know of a even more impressive website that will transfer playlists from Spotify (or 20 other platforms, including text files) to 20 other platforms or a text file. I will share the link, but don't hug it to death y'all. :)
https://app.tunemymusic.com/transfer
I used this. It worked fine. It's a shame it's necessary though... I wish there was some kind of vendor-neutral import/export format rather than requiring a third party to solve the whole matrix of integrations.
The music industry needs to more widely use some kind of equivalent to the ISBN that the book industry uses. A simple "ISMN" list per playlist/library would be all that would be needed to move between services when both apps have the same songs.
One could also imagine a standardized ismn://<number> URL format that could open in your preferred music app, and this could work even without a streaming service if you already own that song in your personal music collection.
ISMN seems to exist: https://www.loc.gov/ismn/about.html
But, I've never actually seen it used for recordings; it seems to be focused solely on music notation. So, it would be nice to have some kind of recording-focused identifier for keeping track of specific performances between services.
This exists and is called ISRC. This metadata is embedded in a subchannel on CD's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Recordi...
Cool, I didn’t know that. I wish it were actually used by the various music apps.
It's a pity that compression is likely to provide subtly different data under different network conditions. If everything were lossless we could just use hashes as identifiers and proceed without the participation of the apps.
After all, they have no incentive to make this easy for us.
This is actually a beautiful idea. It'd definitely be possible for music purchased through bandcamp since lossless is generally available for most releases. Commenting to bookmark this.
MusicBrainz has also been making a list of unique identifiers for music tracks: https://musicbrainz.org/
They’re called magnet links.
Yeah, but the next step is to make identifier somethink like a has so the media can be content addressable.
Wait, we can't have that. It's too convenient
Content addressable doesn't really work here... different apps may have the same recordings encoded in different formats and bitrates, but they are still the same recording. Unless you meant "content addressable" in the sense of a uniquely assigned identifier like I was already talking about, and not a computed identifier from the raw bytes of the file like a hash.
This sounds like an acoustic fingerprint, such as AcoustID[0]. I think AcoustIDs and XSPF[1] would be a good combination for shared playlists. It's a shame that development stopped on the Tomahawk music player[2], it would have been an ideal platform for shared playlists like this.
[0] https://musicbrainz.org/doc/AcoustID
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_Shareable_Playlist_Format
[2] https://github.com/tomahawk-player/tomahawk
Now we just need to associate payment/attribution related metadata with those identifiers
> I wish there was some kind of vendor-neutral import/export format rather than requiring a third party to solve the whole matrix of integrations.
"vendor-neutral import/export format" sounds like the definition of third party. It's not that there shouldn't be a third party, it's that spotify etc. should adopt it.
Anyone know of a technical solution to retrieve a list of 'titles' for deleted videos from a youtube playlist? Have at least 10x Playlists full of removed/deleted music that has been inappropriately copyright striked, but I can't even reconstitute the playlists as I don't have the Title/Artist for the removed tracks.
Paste the URL into savefrom, they have a cache
I manually copy pasted the video urls into services that lookup details and check web archive
I recently made a transition from Spotify to Tidal and found the suggested transfer service to do the job really clumsy. In my case I've transferred favorite artists and the service was just trying to match them by name which failed miserably when there was more than one with the same name - seemingly it picked one randomly. I wonder how this service would do.
I recently made the switch as well and used spotify_to_tidal [1] which is the free and open-source alternative to what Tidal recommends and it worked pretty fine! it couldn't find some specific tracks and I bet it does a somewhat similar name match as the one Tidal recommends, but at least this one doesn't have a limitation by the number of tracks, in case it's useful to someone else.
[1] https://github.com/spotify2tidal/spotify_to_tidal
other than name match, what exactly do you expect them to attempt to do? use a shazam like process to analyze each potential match?
Use the Spotify artist ID[0] to find the Wikidata entry, and then grab the Tidal artist ID from the Wikidata entry to match the correct artist on Tidal. Even better if you use album IDs. (Brain explodes if you could use a song ID.)
Realistically, Wikidata may not have enough of this data populated, but it is nice to dream. And it seems plausible that MusicBrainz or similar might have enough data.
[0] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1902
[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P4576
Edit: P1902 has 57000 uses and P4576 has 7000. So YMMV big time.
Great, yet another attempt at solving this with yet another standard that not everyone will use. Why did you pick this attempt instead of something more common like Gracenote?
Gracenote is owned by private equity and has limited availability of data. I prefer to encourage the use of more open data. MusicBrainz or Discogs would have been better choices than Wikidata based on quantity of entries. Though in 5 minutes I have been unable to find if Discogs even has external IDs, and I am not sure of the quantity of Spotify IDs that MusicBrainz has.
Great that you want to use open sources, but now, you've just provided more evidence for my case as you've listed 2 new "sources of truth". Even that fact that there are plural truth sources indicates no one source is truth. Why are they different? Same reasons that have already been discussed
So, we really have not made any forward progress here
Reality is that simply very few people use this functionality.
If those two open access sources become big enough, it is quite clear that someone will make a project to reconcile the data between them.
If any of those projects skyrockets the same way wikipedia skyrocketed, then the topic will be solved.
If If If. This isn't blind pessimism. This is from someone that has dealt with metadata from studios/labels for just under two decades. IMDB was meant to do this for movies/tv, but yet it's an absolute dumpster fire.
So from an outside perspective, it's fun to dream a little dream, but from a gray beard it's just yet another dream.
It could check the album names on both sides, for example. And in case of uncertainty, it could make a list of dubious matches. Stuff like that, I guess.
The point is that it's all just metadata. There's a saying along the lines of "the filename is a really bad place to store metadata". Whether the title is the same and/or the album name as an additional qualifier, it's all subject to data entry which is prone to mistakes.
To some extent yes, but that data is usually sent from record label with the same values for different streaming services. But anyway, don't tell me that they can't at least figure out that there are more than one artists with the same name...
Record labels are actually quite terrible at providing this. You would assume otherwise because it’s in their best interest. However, I work in the industry and can tell you it’s a ridiculous problem because their is no standard and lots of human effort in cleanup and cleanliness.
You'd think that, but not in my experience. It's not like they are getting ID3 tags populated by Gracenote or some such service. You're also assuming that the streaming platforms do not attempt to manipulate the metadata they received for their own internal policies. See my other comment in a sibling thread for specific examples.
Too much inside baseball experience with the data the studios/labels believe is perfect that when received is far from perfect leaving the individual platforms to deal with it.
Allll the other associated metadata is useful...
You say that as if all metadata is the same. I can tell you it is not. Every company that uses metadata will at some point use a field differently from someone else. "The Album" => "Album, The" type of things. "Album" => "Album (YYYY)" types of things. "Track remix by Artist" => "Track" + "Producer" as different fields.
My impression is that Tidal does a bad job of this in general. I have lots of artists I follow on there who have albums appearing on their page from identically named but different artists.
Don't get me started on that. How can a company which core business is content streaming be that lazy is beyond me. I often feedback them the errors, but even such feedback is difficult.
Sadly it’s an expensive scaling problem. Not trivial to solve at the scale streaming platforms operate at.
Well, at least they could make it easy to feedback, like a button on the artist/album page. But it's it really that hard to do it themselves? They are not getting a million albums per day, do they? I'm sure there are ways to improve the process with a little good will.
Discogs seems to handle it just fine.
Or this https://playlists.cloud/
Thanks for sharing! I didn't want to sign up for a monthly subscription to transfer my music...
Agreed.
Having said that I have used https://ko-fi.com/zzzrod to support (if it can be called that) the dev (the link is from app homepage) as per my personal capacity. Because it is such an excellent service and provided for free and also because it isn't behind subscription. So thought I will share that. But of course it is perfectly fine to use it for free as well if one wants to. Cheers.
I didn't even know TuneMyMusic had a premium service, but fwiw, it's free for the first 500 songs. I've only used it a few times and was pretty impressed at how many services it supports.
I love TuneMyMusic, I exported my Spotify when I left, imported everything to Deezer, and now I periodically export everything from Deezer so I can slice and dice it in Excel for various reasons.
I've used this site before when moving from Spotify to Youtube Music, worked really well and didn't take long to transfer everything over.
That’s the one I used when I moved from Spotify to YouTube music. Luckily my playlists contained less than 500 songs so the whole migration was easy and free.
Playlisty is a great iOS/MacOS app for doing it locally if you're using Apple Music.
https://www.obdura.com/playlisty/
If this does as you say it does… thank you for posting this. Ive been thinking of trying to get away from spotify but felt trapped at the playlist loss. My kid are now conditioned for instant music that might be the bigger challenge.
I used Soundiiz to go from Spotify to YouTube. I paid 5$, but was happy to pay.
Soundiiz does this also. I've been using it for years. Great service
I found Soundiiz pretty bad, at least when transferring from Spotify and Apple Music to Youtube Music. It failed to find about a hundred tracks from the library of couple of thousand tracks, and they weren't some niche, rare things, too. I had to manually search for them, using the same titles, and found most of them.
This is so helpful. This is the one blocking piece preventing my transfer off Spotify.
I made a very simple chrome extension that automatically redirects you to your preferred music service when visiting another service. In my case I have it set to YouTube Music, so if I click a Spotify (or other) link in Slack, I'll be redirected to YouTube Music.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/music-link/gnhphofp...
Do you have a Firefox version of this?
No, sorry. The code should be pretty easy to port, if you want to give it a go.
https://github.com/leddt/music-link
Can I port it to FF?
From the parent comment: yes.
Is this not a perfect use-case for greasemonkey/tampermonkey? Browser independence FTW
Absolutely!
Orion supports FF and Chrome extensions, if you're in the market for a (good) Safari clone.
This type of stuff is what make chrome extension development fun
sounds amazing, how did you map the urls manually?
https://github.com/leddt/music-link/blob/8faa5ceb0caa620499e...
I guess this is a free service? E.g https://api.song.link/v1-alpha.1/links?url=https://open.spot...
Exactly! Their docs are here: https://linktree.notion.site/API-d0ebe08a5e304a55928405eb682...
It has a 10 request per minute rate limit, but no api key needed, so each user runs their own queries.
I'd love to actually buy music and store it myself, as I've started noticing more and more that some of the songs I have on Spotify have started to disappear, but I find it very difficult to buy modern music anymore. Most gets released as singles, and as far as I know, to only streaming platforms. Is there a way to still buy the same kind of music that is on streaming platforms, and actually get the audio files?
The most sustainable way to "buy" music IMO, is to pirate it, and then buy merch from the artist as support.
Or just buy off Bandcamp if its an option.
Or going to their live shows if they happen to come to a venue near you.
Or by buying vinyl at a local record store. Sadly, those are dying out, but you can find one or two good ones in any major city.
In electronic, hip-hop, and a lot of music that has a lot of computer-assisted production, a lot of producers will also release sample packs or VST presets that they sell directly on their websites. While often in small amounts, $50 or less, it more often than not goes directly to the artist with very little middlemen involved. While not a huge stream of revenue I'd imagine, it probably does help smaller artists if they can count on an additional couple hundred bucks a month from people that truly appreiciate their craft and I'd bet that if I reached out to artist XYZ whose music is no longer available on major platforms and said "hey i have been to a few of your shows, bought all your sample packs, and I can't find your tracks anymore" the artist, if small enough, would probably oblige and send along a nice little folder of music.
Record stores are thriving pretty much everywhere across the US. The ones that have been closing are the ones that only hold old stock and don't curate their inventories
If you walk into a shop and all you see are old, worn out Barry Manilow and Bob Seger albums at $30+ a pop, the store isn't meant to last. Thankfully, the problem has been solving itself
> Or by buying vinyl at a local record store. Sadly, those are dying out,
they were dying out but are now coming back
I Don't Have Spotify should add Bandcamp support. Bandcamp is great for just playing the music too.
It's not. Artists will often enough remove old albums so you can no longer play them.
Buy it, download as FLAC, put in your preferred local infrastructure to play. Plex/Plexamp works well, as does local file storage and a good command line music client if you're less GUI-friendly or don't have the resources for running them.
Yes, downloading is important as even download sites can redact later - e.g. https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/70250-qobuz-may-be-...
Another source are good ol' CDs. If you know where to look you can get them cheap too. Specialist charity shops that specialise in records and CDs in student or wealthy areas are good, as are second hand stores online.
An alternative to self hosting is to use an online music locker. I wrote up a bunch here: https://www.blisshq.com/music-library-management-blog/2021/0... and (disclaimer) operate one myself: https://asti.ga
Where's the best place to buy CDs online now?
Discogs is pretty great for buying CDs: https://www.discogs.com/
Downloading large collections can be a pain though, one at a time and in zips.
I made this to help though https://github.com/meeb/bandcampsync
Bandcamp is the only place to sensibly buy music you can own these days which is pretty depressing.
what about online music shops like bleep.com and 7digital?
"Fun Fact", 7digital is owned by the same parent company as Bandcamp.
I always wanted this, thank you!
plex alternative: jellyfin + finamp or fintunes. This is my new setup (alongside bandcamp if I haven't yet imported the bandcamp purchase into my jellyfin library). No cloud shit, no subscriptions, but I still support [most of] my favorite artists. Ones which aren't on bandcamp, well either I still have the CDs kicking around or some mp3s from wherever (yt-dlp + ffmpeg is useful when lazy too)
Wait, all the music I bought on bandcamp can disappear if the artist removes it from their public inventory?
No, making an album private does not disappear the music from people who have purchased it.
However, Bandcamp does abide by the laws that require them to stop distributing music at the rights holders' request.
No music service, or any service, for that matter, will guarantee access to files without regard to laws. Some will try harder, some have tried harder and been beaten down.
this has happened to me once, appropriately enough with some hauntology tracks. the songs are weirdly enough still available in the ios app to play but not to download via the web. presumably they're still somewhere in bandcamp behind a boolean, but i never got around to downloading them (to be fair, i have them on a _cassette_ that originally included bandcamp codes, so i mean, i really can't complain, i knew what i was getting into)
This happened to me a bunch. I think in one case an artist released an album, but wanted to disallow buying individual tracks so they relisted it after I bought one track.
The most infuriating thing is that bandcamp gaslights you on it. I eventually confirmed that yes, I had bought that song, after tracking down the receipt in my email provider or something (it was hidden from purchase history, bandcamp "I can't find my music" link didn't mention this, etc etc).
This isn't just an issue for playing music though - if you buy a bunch of stuff but don't download it right away you could loose it too. I bought the track I mentioned right after it was released, and the substitution happened within a day or two of that.
Like, I get it, if there was some legal issue (pirated work - and then they should issue refunds). But the fact that bandcamp tries to hide it just means that they know they have no moral grounds here.
Artists can also remove old albums from Spotify. At least with Bandcamp you can buy the music and download the files - if you want to.
And you can even send a mail to the artist to ask them why they removed old albums and if they can provide you a copy.
Artists can and do remove your access to purchased albums on Bandcamp, see my rant below.
I also buy from Bandcamp.
> It's not. Artists will often enough remove old albums so you can no longer play them.
That doesn't happen on other platforms?
I had two albums of a band who's front man died and they disbanded. The albums were removed but I still have them in my collection. You cant find it on the site anymore but I can still download and play them.
In a way it seems like it's a practical approach to supporting artists directly
Donating is also an option as soon as you got enough mugs and tshirts. Not mentioning the tot bags.
When I moved country and updated my credit card in Spotify to my card from the new country Spotify also changed my “region”. As a result there are so many songs I have “starred”/“added”/“liked” (whatever fucking language they’re using for it now) are just greyed out and unplayable.
Anyway as for actually getting copies of the music I listen to I think we should just pirate it completely unashamedly.
some time ago when I canceled spotify, they show this special playlist like "we'll miss you" or whatever, and each of the song names, in order, spell out this little goodbye message. Ironically one of the songs in that playlist was greyed out and unplayable. Like, great job reminding me why I'm canceling :)
It's probably not Spotify's fault though, but it's actually on account of being able to finely control legal ownership of licensed songs. This is all insane imo, but legally sound. Welcome to the future.
That sounds really frustrating! It’s one of those cases where it feels like the system is actively working against the listener
> I'd love to actually buy music and store it myself...
Qobuz. For a start they only do lossless: no mp3. We're soon a quarter of a century into the 21st: gone are the Napster days of needing to stream mp3s.
Then Qobuz often has albums in higher quality than 44.1 kHz / 16-bit stereo. Not that you'll hear the difference: but artists/sound engineer going to the trouble of offering higher sample rate / bit depth typically do care about producing good sounding music so there's that.
Then Qobuz allows you to do precisely what you want: you can buy individual tracks or full albums to download, no DRM.
I've got both a collection of audio files I ripped myself from my own CDs (which I keep too), in a 100% bitperfect / lossless way (verified with an online DB of people who also ripped their CDs) and a Qobuz subscription.
The one criticism about Qobuz would be that music discovery ain't the best out there: the UI is actually quite bad. But it's good stuff for people who care about quality and who love to own their music.
Most network streaming devices now support Qobuz: for example I've got a fully integrated Yamaha amp that contains a network streamer (Yamaha R-N1000A) and MusicCast (Yamaha's music streaming app, like Sonos I guess but Yamaha) supports Qobuz (and Tidal and Spotify).
You don't just rent temporary access to an online service that may disappear under your feet or remove songs you used to listen to: you can actually buy and own individual tracks.
Check the plans they have: depending on how many songs you buy, one may be better than the other.
IIUC Spotify, under the pressure of both Tidal and Qobuz, announced they'll be moving to lossless streaming. It's 2024. At fucking last.
I've been doing this, and here in Canada https://ca.7digital.com/ is literally the only option I've found that let's you buy normal MP3s, would highly recommend. I've been able to get modern albums without a hitch, but don't know about modern singles. I think in the US Amazon let's you buy MP3s, but not sure there.
For the price of a Spotify subscription, I can usually buy a new album every month! Which is great; and I love slowly growing my album collection.
While it’s more of a treasure hunt, I really enjoy browsing for and buying physical CDs, especially second hand. Albums are often $1, they sound as good as when they were released and they’re easily convertible to any other audio format, including lossless, 16-bit, 44.1khz formats. The only thing better is SACD, but finding that is like a diamond in the rough and ripping it is its own challenge unless you have the right equipment.
People are crazy for vinyl, but CDs are just _so_ convenient.
A few years back, I did an apples-to-oranges test of an album I had on vinyl and CD. The vinyl version probably sounded better (usual BS about warmth and whatnot) but the CD sounded very, very good and it was way closer than I was expecting. It had been ~15 years since I'd listened to a CD on a real stereo and I'd totally forgotten how good they can sound. I'd certainly been swayed by the vinyl enthusiasts in the interim, too.
The CD was so clean and clear but not in a robotic way. (I don't think this album had fallen victim to the loudness war either, fwiw.) Whereas the record sounded "warm" but also a little muddy and quiet (not in a good way) in comparison. I know there could be any number of reasons for this but that's also part of the problem. Was my setup dialed in and this is how it was supposed to sound? Or, was the table not flat? Was the needle dirty? Was the tracking force off? Yes, it's fun to tweak these variables but ... it's also fun to just listen to music that sounds excellent with zero effort.
I've started buying CDs again (to my spouse's chagrin) and have no regrets. I do need to start ripping them before discrot comes for them. For anyone in the market, library sales are an excellent option to, essentially, buy CDs by the pound. They also often have rare compilations and anthologies that you won't find in thrift stores.
CDs get a bad rep because people incorrectly assume that all digital music is CD quality. CDs are inherently superior to any lossy codec, especially the ones used by streaming services.
Also discrot is only a problem if you don't keep your CDs in a case, or if the case is made entirely of transparent acrylic and you lost the labels and teh little booklet. They're very reliable when properly protected from scratches and radiation.
Disc rot is not a thing for factory pressed CDs, assuming normal storage. Cheap CDRs from ~2000 or so did have the issue. My CDs from the 80s and CDRs from the 90s are working fine.
I don't use my cds too often anymore, but I've got a pressed 2-disc set of the soundtrack from the song remains the same that's became unplayable because the media developed holes.
These were stored in the case in my home, mostly coastal California, no severe environmental conditions.
Disc rot of pressed CDs seems rare, I don't think I've seen it on other discs, but if it happened to me, it's definitely a thing.
I'm sure defective ones exist. For kicks I just opened my first CD, Bryan Adams' Reckless, bought late '84... it's in perfect condition. Put it on, and it sounds great just like the first time.
disc rot is a thing for every disc that's made with aluminum, which is all but a very few super special ones like mobile fidelity sound lab made with gold. Oxygen permeates through both the polycarbonate base and the clear coat top, maybe quickly, maybe slowly, but always.
Always? As in... Eventually?
Sure, I'll buy that: Aluminum and oxygen are great friends that love eachothers' company, and on a long-enough timeline here in Earth's atmosphere they'll always be reunited.
But how does that timeline compare to that of a human? Or even of the compact disc itself (a bit over 42 years old now)?
I mean: At least anecdotally, I have never discovered rot on any of my CDs that did not also have other contributing condition issues. I haven't even experienced the once-reported issues of air-dried, solvent-based (instead of UV-cured) inks. (And although my sample set is not infinite, it is also not particularly small.)
As a laserdisc collector, I am particularly aware of disc rot and in those it is far more present by now. Practically all discs have some level by now even the good ones, and even if they look clean to the eye. There are people that say the same thing there, that there are good discs that don't have rot and bad ones that do. But that is not true, there are only better and worse examples, faster and slower progress.
cds are both younger and built better, so they will not only last to a later absolute date, they will last longer relative to their manufacturing date, but cds have a few other things that mask rot even when it starts, which is both that they are digital and the player has buffering and interpolation, and also that the data format includes redundant data for error correction. (ld is analog and has neither, later better players do add some digital processing but it can't do the kind of good job with a 6mhz analog fm ntsc video signal that a cd player can with a simple audio bitstream)
A cd with the same rot that is visible on a ld (visible in the output not visible to the eye on the physical disc) will appear to play perfectly even in the cheapest junk player.
So, it will take longer, but I see no reason to treat "longer" as "indefinite".
There is no specific time, but it is inevitable and I don't think it's in the 100's of years but in the 10's of years, and the 10's of years, especially when many are already 30 years old, is not very many more 10's of years left.
And if that turns out to be pessimistic and they last another 50 or more? That's just a bonus. Lucky future rippers who get a chance to rip with even better tech later.
Tangentially I do also assume that some day long before the polycarbonate disintigrates, there will be a practical way to read even fully oxidized discs with a different frequency laser or even a camera or microscope-based head, or even a bulk scanner that just rasterizes the whole surface without even bothering to read the track in a spiral until after the fact purely in software.
As time goes on, tools get both better and more accessible, so in 1995 it would not be possible for a person to make their own laser head, but today it probably is, and in only a few more years will just get easier and easier, and probably at a rate that outruns the rate at which the discs fully degrade.
> People are crazy for vinyl, but CDs are just _so_ convenient.
I feel like I might be punished for stepping out of line here but CDs sound better than vinyl too.
This should be objectively true, but the limitations on vinyl prevent some of the abuses in the production processes (the loudness wars). Often vinyl is better anyway just because the engineers had to go back to make a good mix (mostly this is mastering not mixing) for vinyl - if the vinyl mix had been put on CD the CD would be objectively better.
Vinyl does theoretically have a better s/n ratio, but you can only see this in perfect setups, including a new needle in your player. Even then after just a handful of plays and vinyl is worn enough to be worse (I've heard of laser based vinyl plays which don't wear the media - I have no idea if they are real or how they compare to CDs, but I need to acknowledge them because they might be different enough to matter)
I don't think the S/N ratio of vinyl approaches that of CDs. If you give vinyl a perfect literally flawless $10 million dollar setup and freshly carve a new disc from a fresh press plate and play it, even though analog has no reasonable bounds on how loud it can get from a physics perspective, there are dozens of things that in reality will get introduce noise into the system that are not present in CD Audio.
It will likely sound at least just as good as a similarly treated CD, but I doubt that it will approach the S/N ratio of a properly mastered CD.
CD has by default a perfect 0 noise floor, whereas vinyl will never have that, and typically has a pretty high noise floor, meaning that even a good vinyl press will never have the same noise floor as the same recording placed on CD.
I said all of that to say, to me vinyl is appreciable for its flaws compared to CD. Vinyl is mastered to a different spec than CDs are (when its done properly), and it can sometimes add to the experience because the mastering and pressing process focuses on different frequencies.
Aside from that, the fact that each time you listen to a vinyl record it changes in subtle ways, bits of dust get moved around, atomic scratches get worn into the surface, meaning that every listen is completely unique, ever so slightly different than any other time that album or any other similar pressing has been played.
That is one of the thoughts I enjoy when listening to vinyl that makes it likeable, a little more special to me when it crosses my mind.
Digital is almost always the same. Analog is always different.
CDs are smaller, cheaper, sound great, and have longer playtime. I think they're the superior medium. I get people prefer the sound of vinyl, though.
If the store of your choice offers FLAC as an option (and I think they all do), you can simply make your own MP3s from the FLAC files. That's one of the biggest advantages of lossless audio. (The improvement in audio quality is actually pretty minimal, for most people.)
You can also keep the FLAC files to convert them to some future format later, or even do something really wild like burn them to a CD or something.
I did that for a while, but all the tools seem to have been unmaintained for the last decade. The command line ones still work, but the GUIs to make them easy still depend on qt3 or other such obsolete things. (streaming servers like jellyfin do this on the fly easy, but other workflows for offline use don't work anymore even though they are still sometimes useful)
Mac users can use XLD: https://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html
Free, still maintained, and supports every format around.
Most people weite scripts with said tools which can keep going for a long time. I have a couple laying in my library directory to add replay gain metadata, convert to aac, and backup.
> ...is literally the only option I've found that let's you buy normal MP3s
I just went to Amazon and found what's advertised as "mp3" for a recent Taylor Swift album.
That's not an option here in Canada, alas!
IIRC those are only 256 kbps. I get that MP3 is a lossy format, but still, they could at the very least offer 320 kbps. I was under the impression Amazon wasn't short on server space.
Can you hear the difference? Even with mp3, it gets hard at high bitrates.
Bandcamp, 7Digital and (extremely reluctantly) Amazon. The bigger the label the harder it is to buy music digitally.
As an equally reluctant option one side or the other to Amazon, Apple's "iTunes Store" still exists and is "mostly" DRM free, if you don't mind AAC and friends (MP4 Audio) rather than MP3. It's getting harder and harder to find those Buy buttons, especially if you start from an Apple Music link/the Apple Music app, but it's currently no worse than Amazon as Amazon and Apple seem deep in direct competition on how hard they make it to find Buy buttons.
Amazon hates Canada (no Amazon music store, no Household plan) so here the tool of last resort is iTunes Music Store (it still exists, apparently).
Heh, I commented this exact list in order before reading your comment :D
also Bleep
I use a mix of Qobuz and Bandcamp and have been happy with them.
https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/shop
https://bandcamp.com/
Qobuz removed a range of releases a couple months ago at short notice, including from users' accounts. Hopefully their catalog remains strong as it's about the only online-only store with lossless that has a wide variety of mainstream artists.
I'll also mention: Bleep.com, Boomkat, Ninja Tune (label that directly sells), Junodownload.
Yep, "Pink Martini - A Retrospective" was removed after I bought one song from it, when I click on the track in my library the error toast states "It's impossible to play this track. Thank you for trying another playback format."
But that's the whole point of buying it, mp3 is safely on my SD card, plays just fine
> Qobuz removed a range of releases a couple months ago at short notice, including from users' accounts.
What was the deal with this?
It wasn't explained officially. I assume some distribution arrangement changed but the artists/releases were so varied and from various labels that I can't determine the relationship. I'd bought a handful of releases there and all of them were affected.
I look for music on bandcamp, 7digital, and then amazon music in that order. All offering drm free mp3 and flac files. I don't think there has been something I wanted that I havem't been able to find yet.
Bandcamp is the way to go. Artists get paid and I get to keep my data.
Personally, I have a TIDAL subscription, download everything I like from there, and then store everything on a Plex server.
While not legal, having the subscription fix any moral problems I’d have with the idea.
The subscription pays tidal, but tidal only pays out based on usage... The artist gets about $0.01 per stream.
The best way to support artists is to purchase albums the week they're released... Sales numbers are a key metric when labels decide touring and investment in the next album... Could mean a better studio or more resources...
If you are committed to the download off of tidal strategy, then please make a playlist of the tracks you download and play it overnight... Otherwise, none of your money supports the artists you listen to.
I'm the same, but with Deezer, the Deemix downloader and Plexamp.
How are you downloading from Tidal?
Tidal has lots of downloader clients you can install due to its often technical but niche user base. May I suggest Tidal-Media-Downloader[0]?
Now if only there was a way to download things from YouTube Music with a Premium subscription. It's practically impossible to search for "YouTube Music download" without falling into the 'youtube-dl YouTube mp3 audio tracks!' SEO hole. Vague naming on Google's part.
[0]: https://github.com/yaronzz/Tidal-Media-Downloader
You can 100% download higher quality audio tracks from YouTube using yt-dlp. You have to use session cookies from a browser that you've logged into your premium account with to get the higher quality tracks. There are options with yt-dlp to help with this.
This is kind of the confusion I mean. Sometimes YouTube Music has audio tracks that you are seemingly different to the "X Artist - Topic" videos you can find on YouTube proper. I'll have to revisit this again to see if it's all the same now, because the last time I was looking into it a few years ago not everything I had organised in playlists on YTM was available via regular YouTube playlists I could rip with yt-dlp.
Amazon music still sells the mp3 downloads, though they definitely nudge you away from them as much as they can.
This is a great way to use those digital rewards Amazon gives if you delay/combine shipping if you haven't dropped Amazon yet.
I recently learned about buying Mp3s on Amazon. Most CD purchase pages have a "purchase options" and you can do Mp3s. I do that for mainstream things for my kids that aren't on bandcamp (such as music from a kids TV show).
I'm actually working on a IoT device where one of the main goals was selfhosting audio content for my kids. Uses AI for the user interface. Similar to Alexa but battery powered. Still in private beta (orders are closed right now) but here is the link for anyone curious. https://heycurio.com/
Ah. AG Talking Bear meets LLM. I started working on something similar a year back - but tried to keep it restricted to offline which made it more challenging since inference on CPU of raspberry PI limits you to very small models.
Sending voice clips of children to an always listening server is just a bit too dystopian for me.
What a beautiful website! Absolute joy to explore it.
It exploded. I get only server errors now.
What do i even pay Vercel for?! gah
Seems like a smart setup
I've enjoyed the selection on Qobuz, which is all DRM-free and allows mp3 or lossless flac formats.
I like Qobuz too, but have a couple issues with it:
* The prices are a lot higher there than anywhere else
* They don't remember my payment information. I would opt-in to this if it's a legal concern. It's so annoying every single time having to enter it in all over again. I'd do PayPal but they charge a fee these days.
* Their tar'd up download format sucks, and requires me doing a lot of re-naming and re-foldering things to get it to a sane format.
* They started removing some of the things I PAID FOR from my account. Not cool. It's fine if you have to remove it from sale but removing it from my account should not be legal.
* Many popular tracks from otherwise not-so-popular albums are locked so you can't buy just that song, you need to buy the whole album
* If you've bought a few songs from an album, you don't get an appropriate discount if you later decide to buy the whole album - which some digital stores are good about.
I never trust online platforms to keep my library. I download stuff and back it up.
Used CDs are dirt cheap. Local thrift stores here tend to price them at $1-$1.50 each. Of course, the dedicated "record" stores tend to be closer to $6-10, but they're more likely to have things other than thousands of country albums.
I have the most luck going to the artist websites or social media. They often have links to different storefronts to buy physical and digital copies. The majority are on Bandcamp, but larger groups also release on Amazon.
Some artists sell them directly either from the site, or at their concerts, the German region I live on still has several stores, and so far I also managed to get several MP3 albuns.
I don't use streaming platforms other than being aware of new musicians in YouTube, which I eventually buy their albums.
I still buy CDs. It's true a number of modern artists do not release on physical media, although vinyl is making a comeback.
Same. Especially for backfilling your collection, used CDs are incredibly cost effective and DRM free.
Try BookOff, yard or estate sales, or "friends of the library" events. You will burn some time searching, but the hunt can be fun on its own.
>CDs are incredibly cost effective and DRM free
I got one that wasn't; the music CD was published by SONY JAPAN. Had to do some shenanigans to play it on a PC drive. Decided it was best to rip it just in case.
As someone approaching 50, the return of Vynil is quite strange feeling.
I now see record stores so full of Vynil that it feels like I timetraveled back to my teenage years when CDs started to being sold, alongside laser discs on a little store corner.
Most gets released as singles, and as far as I know, to only streaming platforms.
Analog hole.
It takes a bit of time, but if you really care about the music, it's worth it.
Note: I suspect that the streaming services watermark the songs. I have some from Apple Music that it refuses to sync over its cloud service. Doesn't bother me, though, because I primarily sync via wire.
They don’t have to watermark them to do that. They can just do the regular content ID thing YouTube does.
But it works fine for songs ripped from vinyl. It's only things from streaming that gum up the works.
Bandcamp and Qobuz have been my only options for anything in lossless quality. Everything else is shitty compressed MP3s.
>Everything else is shitty compressed MP3s.
Check your supposed lossless files in Fakin The Funk or manually in Spek and become horrified at how many of them are complete garbage.
Beatport generally has more mainstream stuff and offers it in WAV and AIFF.
Not FLAC? I mean I guess I can run them through something to convert them, but I'm surprised.
It’s because up until very recently, PioneerDJ gear only supports MP3, WAV, and AIFF.
What is PioneerDJ?
I know that some artists sell their music directly from their own websites. I prefer to buy CD versions actually...
I can never justify it to myself if the shipping cost is more than 25% of the product price.
iTunes and Amazon have pretty much every song you'd want to buy.
What's especially annoying is that sometimes there are albums that can be played on Apple Music but they cannot be bought in the iTunes Store.
Additionally, there's no way to buy the Dolby Atmos mixes of most albums yet. Spatial sound mixes might actually have a chance at going mainstream, but you'll have to pay for these subscription services to access them.
iTunes and Amazon have pretty much every song you'd want to buy.
Nope. Not even remotely. Only if your taste in music is very narrow.
Just this weekend I tried to buy some Christmas songs that were popular and common on the radio in the 80's. I could only find about half of them on Amazon or Apple Music.
Most had some version available, but not the canonical one I grew up with. Some didn't exist at all.
Record company pulled he albums or they are stuck in rights limbo. EBay and record shops are your best bets for these tracks
They even think they can exert rights over used album sales. As one example, pretty much all recordings that have rights attributed to an artist named Al Reed, who died in 1990, are blocked for sale on Discogs. Not just his own recordings, pretty much anything he has writing credit for. https://www.discogs.com/artist/623314-Al-Reed
Found this out when I was adding Johnny Winter / Guitar Slinger to the collection and noticed it was blocked for sale. https://www.discogs.com/release/3318469-Johnny-Winter-Guitar...
iTunes and record stores still exist!
Bandcamp and Soulseek.
iTunes?
The youtube music matching didn't work for the first two songs I tried:
Two Words by Kanye West: https://open.spotify.com/track/62wtttQzoIA9HnNmGVd9Yq?si=b1b...
Went to Two Words by Milabel Ranque: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=Y64cFG9dfYo
Never Let Me Down by Kanye West: https://open.spotify.com/track/34j4OxJxKznBs88cjSL2j9?si=7ec...
Went to Never Let me Down by Depeche Mode: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=snILjFUkk_A
Even though the correct album art appeared on the site.
Actually none of the songs I put it are working. Is this what it's supposed to do? Find songs with similar titles?
Same. I just searched through my texts to find the last song a friend sent me:
https://open.spotify.com/track/5qFL2uwfnGU8FccwLMgPNQ?si=b-a...
https://idonthavespotify.donado.co/?id=b3Blbi5zcG90aWZ5LmNvb...
is missing the link to YouTube Music:
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=0IHBCxs7QPE&si=QYvCtGCjKav...
I would get lots of use out of this if it was reliable though! Very useful tiny tool idea.
Tried a random track I happened to be listening to.
https://idonthavespotify.donado.co/?id=b3Blbi5zcG90aWZ5LmNvb...
The deezer link was correct, tidal didn't work, others were incorrect.
Still a great idea, I thought about implementing something like this years ago.
When sharing music with a mixed group that I know some don't have spotify, I tend to just fall back to the common denominator of youtube links.
I don't understand why other people are hating on Kanye's music. I understand that he is not a very likeable person, but his music is damn good y'all. Especially the ones you tried :D
I don't think hating or lauding his music is really appropriate in this thread --it's kind of off topic. We can admit it's subjective and tastes will vary.
Kanye West?
Maybe the misdirection is a feature, not a bug.
i miss the old kanye
I don't see the problem here: it looks like it's working extremely well, and in fact doing you a huge favor, if it redirects you from Kanye West to anything else. Why on earth would you want to listen to Kanye West when you can listen to Depeche Mode instead?
They do need to fix the bug with the album art though.
I have to deal with spotify links sent to me often and this is great. The better link would be to the actual service page, not github repo:
https://idonthavespotify.donado.co/
It would be fantastic to have this as an extension for us, Firefox users. I hope someone makes one someday.
> It would be fantastic to have this as an extension for us, Firefox users. I hope someone makes one someday.
If there's some easy way to figure out where that id parameter in the results page comes from (I assume some simple hash of the link), then you could probably even just make it a bookmarklet.
Why do you get Spotify links sent to you often?
Probably because his friends use it.
I know what services my friends use and make sure to send them the appropriate link whenever I suggest music
I do, too, but not everyone does that, and many people, say, on Discord, just link to Spotify.
I use this page to create a page with links to all kinds of music providers: https://odesli.co
Works per artist, album, or song.
Create a login to customise URLs.
I'm just a user; I don't have a dog in this race.
Yes, I also really like Songlink/Odesli! Their search also works faster than Spotify’s or Apple Music’s search.
I made a Discord bot which used songlinks API 5 years ago! Unfortunately not used much and not maintained anymore.
They also have Slack integration (/songlink {url})
One of the best services I get from my Nas is the ability to save the music there and be able to stream to my phone. I prefer to buy some music and have it there than relying in any subscription service.
Would you share what setup you use or recommend for this, both NAS and software for phone streaming?
Not op but I have a similar setup.
I have an old synology nas thats running Navidrome in a docker container.
On my iPhone I use play:sub and point it to the local ip and port associated Navidrome.
When I’m away I access the network through a WireGuard connection (set up on a protectli router running opnsense). Before I used traefik to expose it to the web.
Takes some setup but once it works it’s great.
When I used to maintain a discord music bot, it used to stream from YouTube. For Spotify urls to work though, I had to get YouTube search to work reliably. One trick which I found worked well was including the Spotify URL in the YouTube search along with the song name, artist name, etc. This helped quite a bit with picking out the "official" youtube video, since the official one often includes Spotify links in the video description, which YouTube search also matches against.
This service connects to a few more services, but you can't just paste in an existing URL. https://odesli.co/ it's more link tree type service but since you can search for songs and albums it makes it easy to find things.
Example https://song.link/i/1051394215
You can paste in an existing url: https://odesli.co/https://open.spotify.com/track/1Yk0cQdMLx5...
The placeholder in their search field even says "Search or paste URL"
I built something very similar the last time I got laid off and needed something to do https://github.com/kudos/combine.fm
The first song I tried mapped incorrectly. Even though there was a green verified checkmark!
> https://open.spotify.com/track/1Pfc1Qpj0s9vQumI0JvpBp
mapped to
> https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=ogoeWS6CDbI
but it should have mapped to
> https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=dfgKYWrRfoc
I've never taken Spotify or any other music streaming service seriously. They are a joke for the same reason Netflix is, they only play limited licensed content so their selection inevitably drops and drops until everything you search ends with zero results. Obscure indie artists? Forget it.
Add average 4G reliability to that and you have a service that never has what you need, and if they do it never works when you need it (e.g. long car rides in the middle of nowhere). And then they expect you to pay for it or listen to ads too. Nothing beats a good ol' folder of mp3s. And 128GB of the average phone can store many an mp3.
Thank you for the submission! Should this be a Show HN? https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
Huh, that looks very interesting. A friend of mine made a streaming service back in the day where you could paste in youtube links, they got downloaded, added to a playlist and then you could listen to that together with friends on multiple computers.
I always wanted to rebuild that and adjust to my needs. Now this convert thing from the OP seems to be an interesting extension to that. Just paste in spotify links, grab the YT one, yt-dlp it and there you go. Ill put this in my favorites, thanks!
The hoops to go through to have a ”legal” napster.
Also not sure yt-dlp is any more legal than just downloading mp3s.
Obviously it's all just a dream in a fantasy world. And even in that fantasy world it would be for friends only, not anything commercial.
Edit: also we don't use mp3, we use free (tm) opus! (as in just yt-dlp -x )
Slightly off topic but does any one of the music streaming services actually not suck? Like I tried a bunch of them but each one made me quit in it's own unique way!
Am I alone on this?
It would help if you specified exactly what you didn't like about them.
I use Apple Music, I use it because it's lossless and it's integrated in the Apple ecosystem. The UX of the actual Music app is... not great, but tolerable, better than the iTunes before it.
I listen to some pretty obscure stuff and I don't think I ever found something missing on it. YMMV.
Well I can tell you as a Spotify user that their random play is horrible. It's not truly random, which is extremely frustrating when you have 1000+ playlist and keep hearing the same 10 songs over and over.
Here's an ongoing 150+ page, 4 years old thread about it on their forums: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/All-Platforms-Op...
The silly trick I found is to use Apple's Smart Playlists to help. I've been creating playlists like "Not heard since Jan 1, 2023". Songs drop out after they are played in a shuffle.
You're not alone. Streaming services' selling point is access to the catalogue. Everything else about the product tends towards being aggressively mid.
You are not alone
It has a Raycast extension too https://www.raycast.com/sjdonado/idonthavespotify
A similar service that I use frequently to generate song.link URLs for sharing: https://odesli.co/
Thanks for this, I used an automated script to create a post with links on my gh . This looks great, ty
It would be fantastic if this site were a pwa that supported the chrome api [1] that lets you share directly to it on android. I would make a pr but my company owns all my ip and getting an exception takes months :(
1: https://chodounsky.com/2019/03/24/progressive-web-applicatio...
They probably don't, especially if you're in California. Employers love to intimidate with unenforceable terms in contracts.
In CA, the contracts often say something obnoxious to the effect of “we own all your IP except for the IP that the law says we don’t own.”
Unfortunately I live in Texas.
Maybe your wife can make the pull request?
Or your dog
I know it's a tough job market, but that's unacceptable! They won't change, but you shouldn't put up with that.
I'm not done trying to convince them. They're small enough that I think I have a legitimate chance.
Won't help you now OP, but I've always negotiated an IP carve-out for any product(s) that I develop that:
A. Are developed with my own hardware
B. Are developed outside of hours of employment
C. Are not designed to compete with existing company products
Every place I've worked with was amenable to these terms, but I always make sure to get it IN WRITING.
> Every place I've worked with was amenable to these terms
What is the largest company you've successfully gotten to agree to these terms?
It's got to be easiee for a larger company to agree to. What would you be inspired to make that doesn't compete with an existing product if you work at big tech? It feels like they have products in all spaces.
Large companies tend to have very conservative legal departments, and be less supportive of exceptions and more willing to just not hire someone who has requirements outside their perceived norm. The question would be whether the company has ever established an exception path, typically by having a high-level hiring manager insist and running it up the chain.
I knew about this ahead of time. I was kinda going through it mentally at the time and I didn't have the energy to negotiate.
I had that in my contract when I started in the games industry, it was made very clear to me that if I don't like the terms there are 500 other juniors willing to take my spot. Not excusing it, I'm just saying that sometimes you're not in a position to negotiate this if you really want the job(and I really wanted the job at the time, we can argue whether that was the right thing to do or not but the fact remains).
Your cat wrote this pull request? It must be a genius cat!
This is the strategy most of my coworkers take. On principle, I'm just not willing to lie to a project and tell them I have the right to contribute my work under their license.
Just create an anonymous new GitHub user, it's like jaywalking. They'll never know.
... don't do it at work?
If your company owns your free time as well, you've fucked up and should talk to HR.
You're correct, I signed a contract that says they own my free time. I didn't exactly want to, and I firmly believe it's wrong. Nevertheless, it's easy to say I fucked up when you don't know my exact situation. This is my first job and there are a lot of other benefits that made it the best option for me personally, even when there were alternatives that had no such clause.
That's fair, I don't know your situation, and my tone was overboard. I don't mean it as a criticism of your actions as much as a warning for others not to do the same without good reason.
Does that mean if you do something semi-illegal or immoral on your freetime they put their name on it? Start doing work on decrypting media (legal if the content is out of copyright, but good luck finding such a thing), porn (again, legal but many won't like it and you can find weird stuff that is even less liked while still legal), or something else that might technically be legal but they don't want their name associated with.
WTF I've never heard of this. I hope you're getting compensated well.
Unfortunately it's not uncommon here.
Nice work!
It got me thinking how useful something like an "I don't have instagram" app would be. Unfortunately I suspect it would be impossible to implement.
Finding equivalent content elsewhere is probably not going to happen. The best the service could do is show you Instagram content without requiring an Instagram account.
I don't have Spotify, I have Navidrome. Self-hosted on a cheap old mini PC.
I started using Tidal earlier this year, simply because they pay artists more (it's still basically a pittance, but it's better.)
If you share a song link using Tidal, it actually shares a landing page where the user can select from Tidal, Spotify, Apple Music, or Amazon Music. It's really great.
Not seeing Pandora, apparently 46 million people still use that as of 2023
Highly recommend Hermes with a free Pandora account (Mac desktop app, no ads), if you just want to set a station and listen for hours.
https://github.com/HermesApp/Hermes
Thanks for the Hermes.app recommendation...
Even as a paying Pandora member I plan to use this (over their website).
46 million active users or 46 million accounts created?
I’d believe either, though the latter feels tiny. Pandora is still better than any of the others listed for discovering new music, IMO. Spotify always seems too conservative with its suggestions, making it worse for discovering new music. Subjective, of course.
I don't think it's subjective. Royalties aren't paid equally, and considering Spotify is partly owned by the record labels themselves, it makes sense to steer listeners.
I agree, I feel like Pandora recommendations are far better than Spotify ones, at least for me. Spotify keeps me in my bubble, Pandora is constantly expanding it.
It is tiny - It's US only.
Pandora is also way more trainable. You can train that recommender with your thumbs up/down, and it's been like that for 15 years.
I haven't tried Pandora lately but Spotify is horrible for suggestions. My goto remains BBC 6 Radio Music.
Me neither, still buying CDs and MP3, making my own playlists, with music that will outlast me.
I'm still mad that they killed Rdio because Spotify was "free". Will never use it.
Is there a DOI equivalent for identifying music tracks?
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Identifier
> One of MusicBrainz' aims is to be the universal lingua franca for music by providing a reliable and unambiguous form of music identification; this music identification is performed through the use of MusicBrainz Identifiers (MBIDs).
used it for a project a few years back and it does the job if you listen to music mostly made in the english-speaking world.
the complications with the same song appearing in multiple albums (including compilations) would give weird results sometimes, but it is totally useable if you only care about finding basic information.
A damn shame they want $5k for mbid.org
Could you tell me who? I love MBID but didnt read about that. Thanks in advance
Whomever has listed it at GoDaddy when you land on the domain in a browser.
https://www.godaddy.com/forsale/mbid.org
Yes, the International Standard Recording Code (ISRC): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Recordi...
I don't know how to look up music with a known ISRC, though.
The DOI equivalent for audio and video is also DOI. Good luck getting the industry to use them.
Could that be restated as "Spotify doesn't have me"?
Spotify literally plays the same songs over and over...and creates features no one wants
Love it! Even since Spotify CEO Daniel Ek's investment company invested $100m into weapons tech, we've been looking at how to move off his platform.
https://inthesetimes.com/article/spotify-military-industrial...
Helsing is currently helping Ukraine. It's easy to say "military bad" when you're in the US, but for Daniel Ek it's about self-preservation. As a fellow Scandinavian, I fully support him investing in defense tech.
It has shareholders which benefit from killing people, and who benefit more from war proliferating. How do you think that turns out in the long run? How has it turned out for Ukraine?
War companies sell war, and they sell it to evil people (see Israel's apartheid and genocide in Gaza). The privatization of war is bad for everybody.
This is great. I don't have spotify but everyone i know has spotify.
I wish I could just share the spotify link to a WPA app using the Web Share API and have it share back the url for my preffered music streaming app.
I guess I can ask claude to do it for me and use the code here for the UI, but I can't find the license file
Bring back echo nest's Rosetta stone.
https://musicmachinery.com/2010/02/10/introducing-project-ro...
I run an ios shortcut to do the conversion when a friend messages a spotify link:
https://x.com/justinprojects/status/1708184379326144925?s=46
I don’t have Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, Deezer, SoundCloud, or Tidal. Would it be too much to ask for a link to be simply converted to the text “Songname by Artist”?
this feels more like an art piece or statement, not an actual tool
what if i have a youtube link and i want to stream on spotify? what if i have an apple music link but want to play it on a linux device where only spotify works?
it's more likely that you discovered a song on youtube and wanted to add it to your spotify playlist, rather than browsing spotify and then deciding to listen on another platform.
someone should make a service like this, but make it universal for all platforms.
however, i found the ability of matching a spotify artist profile to the artist's platform profiles impressive.
>a linux device where only spotify works?
Huh? What linux device might only have access to spotify? Pretty much every Linux distribution (with the possible exception of Linux From Scratch[0]) has multiple local apps to play music, both from the command line and via a gui in their standard package repositories.
Not to mention dozens of sites (if you can get to spotify you can get to them) that perform the same function.
Please do explain, as I'm pretty confused.
[0] https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
apologies, i meant i only have a linux device with only spotify installed, because it's the thing i use. no, i'm not talking about music players, only streaming services.
you're completely right other services and software are available on linux. but the point i'm trying to make is, this tool is spotify -> others, but a common use-case is others -> spotify.
>apologies, i meant i only have a linux device with only spotify installed, because it's the thing i use. no, i'm not talking about music players, only streaming services.
>you're completely right other services and software are available on linux. but the point i'm trying to make is, this tool is spotify -> others, but a common use-case is others -> spotify.
No apologies necessary. I misunderstood your point, which is certainly a fair one.
And given your use case, I get your frustration. That said, there are, apparently, a number of Linux apps and plugins for said apps that will allow you to play not only local music, but streams from Spotify as well as from other streaming services.
I get that's not really what interests you, but it is an option if you choose.
I don't use Spotify, so I haven't looked for tools to convert to Spotify links, but I'd expect they're out there, given that the reverse exists.
Edit: Fixed typo.
This failed completely after trying to search for songs that don't have a unique name. This seemingly just does a basic string search on other streaming platforms. Sad...
For me, it didn't work. The artists and tracks on almost all of the tracks I pasted were incorrect. I suppose it would only be compatible with mainstream music.
Switch out alternative streaming services with torrent links or alternatives ways to listen to the content. And you would actually have something here.
You can create an iOS shortcut to convert Spotify to Apple Music as well. This is how my gf and I share (she has apple music and I have spotify)
I built a proof of concept for a VC-scale app, and something like this is one of the core features. I applied to YC S24 and didn't get an interview (SUPER understandably). If anyone wants to hear details, shoot me an email (in bio); this project's vaporware until I find the right partner.
Omg I was planning to build this for ages! That's very good.
Doesn't appear to work for Youtube Music links...
"Something went wrong, please try again later"
Bandcamp + iTunes Match is the sauce for folks in the Apple ecosystem.
Hear, hear! To more inclusive projects like this one.
No support for Amazon Music is a bummer.
I should create something simlar for Apple Music links
I like this idea
This works with Apple Music links too. From the site: "Paste a link from Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, Deezer or SoundCloud to start."
The EU should mandate that this gatekeeper (Spotify) make their links interoperable with other music streaming services.
https://dtinit.org/blog/2024/08/27/DTI-members-new-music-too...
Apple, Google and Meta are Data Transfer Initiative members. I hope Spotify joins soon.
The minimum financials for consideration as a gatekeeper for the DMA are 75bn EUR market cap, or 7.5bn EUR turnover (in Europe). In the last week, Shopify's market cap exceeded 75bn EUR for the first time.
So, y'know, might be coming.
no tidal support yet but looks very useful for one off uses
Me neither, never used Spotify. I do use Apple Music, YouTube and SoundCloud though.
Now that the app algorithms are horrible can we all go back to something like last.fm so I can discover new music?
Let's go back to the word "algorithm" being used for what it actually means, instead of the opposite—like the way it's used here and in every article about social media written in the last 7 years.
The real reason why last.fm lost to Spotify: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR8az1UMOiQ
You need to use webradios, there's lot of them.
But you can't skip to the next tune so you need to skip to the next webradio instead ;)
last.fm is still there and you can still use it to discover new music!
AI
This is great, thanks!
I left Spotify when they signed Rogan.
I don't follow. Is he anti music or something? Afaik he's on Apple, Amazon, and Youtube as well. Do you not use anything related to him? I'm honestly curious for some reason.
His podcast was exclusively on Spotify for a while, for a measurable amount of money (the article is from February when that portion of the deal ended): https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/joe-rogan-renews-spoti...
Some people are intolerant and think that "they allow someone who I disagree with" is grounds to stop doing business with a service. It's a toxic attitude, but sadly common.
Spotify was paying someone who disseminated anti-vaccine misinformation. I consider that dangerous and will not support it with my money.
Being principled is not toxic.
Personally, I don't like the idea of my money supporting people who oppose vaccination, among other things.
Exactly
> Tidal No No No
Well I guess I'll just go fuck myself, then.
the tidal API was not publicly available last year. I tried it today and it seems it is no longer in beta, will get this adapter done soon!
This is a bit off-topic, but: am I just dim or could the README be a bit more informative? What it's for, who it's for, etc. (I'll give partial blame to me or github for the About section/link being there... it's offscreen by the start of the README, so I missed it)
(I also... don't use spotify... so had less-than-average context to guess the purpose of this project with.)
Anecdotally speaking, Spotify has become a sort of cultural default for a bunch of people.
If you're in a DM or a group chat, you may not hear "You should listen to X by Y" but rather "Check this out: https://open.spotify.com/blah"
At my current workplace and a previous one, both had Slack channels for sharing music and they were 99% Spotify links.
Partly because of genuine Spotify usage but even not using Spotify at the time, I would find the Spotify equivalent for my own recommendations (to reduce friction for the majority so they'd be more likely to actually listen to the recommendation)
Presumably for those few users not using Spotify, rather than having to find the equivalent song via text search, which may or may not contain a result for Provider Z, this service straight up just converts the Spotify link you've been given into all of the other provider equivalents.
Do the spotify links not just open the song in some kind of web app if you dont have spotify installed?
I always thought giving a straight link to the thing was better for all. If they had Spotify it would open there and without ads if they had the subscription and if they had neither it would still open the web app and let them listen to it with ads and stuff.
> Do the spotify links not just open the song in some kind of web app if you dont have spotify installed?
The page won't even load if you don't have the DRM plug-in installed.
I don't think you can _listen_ to the song without an account anyway.
That was true in the past but it's no longer true. I don't know when it changed.
That’s absolutely still true. I just disabled Spotify app link handling, and then Spotify opens in Firefox on my phone. And on Desktop it works the same way.
edit: misread parts of grandparent. Yeah, the 30s previews are gone, didn’t even realize anyone used those.
When I open a Spotify link as a webpage, I can't play that song unless I have an account. At some point in the past you didn't have to.
You always had to, in the past it gave a 30s preview. It still does that in Discord.
At least for me in the Netherlands, for the past month if I click a link to a specific song, I get redirected to a page to start a radio based on the artist and encouraged to upgrade to Premium.
I've had to get friends to share the titles manually, before I found Odesli to be able to convert them.
Right, but before it just loaded the page of the album/playlist and told you to sign in to your account. It has never allowed you to play songs without a sign in.
Yeah, the generated preview (depending on what application the link is shared in) can play a 30 second sample, but if you want to listen to the whole song you need to have an account, and if you don't have a subscription you'll likely get an ad first.
It's why I often share a youtube link instead, it plays inline a lot of the time and when it plays inline it often doesn't have ads. But that may also be because I have an effective ad blocker (for now).
I’m in a dedicated music discord, about 70% of links are Bandcamp, 20% Spotify, 10% Tidal. BC percentage could be higher, but good enough, most of the time it’s only for those weird bands that don’t sell on BC anyway ;)
That said, I do miss Songwhip. It was a website where you could search for a release, and then generate all links for it, including streaming services and bandcamp.
I miss Songwhip as well. We used to have a bot in our music sharing Discord channel that looks for links to any streaming platform and convert them to Songwhip links via the Songwhip API. The good thing about Tidal is that, like Songwhip, it provides you with a list of links to various streaming platforms when you're not logged in.
Wish it had been open sourced, it worked so well. Or even better, if Bandcamp offered an API, so sites likes SW wouldn’t need to (probably) scrape that information.
> The good thing about Tidal
Can’t confirm, it’s worse than spotify for me, as I get an unclosable modal that asks me to sign up or login.
> Can’t confirm
Try this link https://tidal.com/browse/track/18835695/u, for me it shows a list of links to other services: https://imgur.com/a/MEsaIZw
Yeah, this one does, I guess you have to create a special link? Or is it only for tracks?
It was such a beautiful ui and ux , elegant really. It’s a shame yet I wonder how could it have been profitable. There’s really not a whole lot to monetize unless I’m missing something.
Songwhip allowed artists to claim and customize their page for a fee. Back then I looked into why Songwhip closed but couldn't find a definitive answer. I found a Reddit post where the original creator shared their site many years ago, so it looks like Songwhip started as a personal project. When it closed down though that decision was made by Sony. So it seems like the original creator got bought out by Sony and then Sony decided to close the service. Just speculation though.
> for those few users not using Spotify
That's quite the extrapolation from your anecdotal experience. Technically, it would be more accurate to say, "for those few users using Spotify."
What you've noticed is that Spotify has the biggest market share, but that doesn't mean that the number of users not using it are "few". According to https://explodingtopics.com/blog/music-streaming-stats, Spotify has a 30% market share. That implies that up to 70% of streaming music users aren't regular Spotify users.
Apple Music = few users??
From what I could tell when choosing AM over Spotify, the latter has a lot of playlists for discovery and I would never use my streaming service for discovery as it encourages the service to promote music it is paid to promote.
Of course AM is annoying too because 3 out of 5 navigation icons along the bottom of the UI are for discovery. But AM has Siri integration, which works some of the time… :-/
Apple Music has been utterly awful on desktop for years, with virtually zero positive progress. I made this angry video [1] 4 years ago, and have tried using Apple Music multiple times since then, and it never failed to disappoint.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE8ZikfrpFU
Does Apple care though? It seems that Apple's main focus these days is on mobile "lifestyle" devices and services: iPhone, Siri, and Apple Music fits right into that. How many Apple users actually care about listening to AM on their desktop (presumably a Mac)?
Of course, Apple still pushes its overpriced Macs, but the focus there seems to be on developers (for the more expensive stuff--big monitors, workstations, etc.) or people (probably corporate workers, developers, etc.) using MacBooks. In both cases, the focus seems to be on machines used for doing work. I'm just guessing, but I would guess that most MacOS users who want to listen to (Apple) music would do so on their personal device, i.e. their iPhone, rather than their MacOS device which is probably owned and managed by their employer.
You are spot on. Apple does one thing very good: MacOS + Macs. But I don’t like Apple software. Too limited, too crippled, too unpredictable. And they don’t listen to users, you cannot reach out to someone and hope your feedback will change something.
The new "Apple Music (Preview)" app on Windows (exclusively 11 IIRC) absolutely destroys anything they had in the past. And anything they have on macOS right now. It is absolutely stellar, and yet another example of the weird "let's make out apps on opposing systems better than our native ones" trend.
Oh my god you made this video? I have sent it to so many people to explain my feelings for it. Thank you so much for saying what I wanted to but so much better!
You're welcome. I made that channel with the intention of making more videos about other apps and products, but so far could only muster Apple Music :)
This is great.
I used to use Apple Music but when my Credit Card expired I missed two months payment and Apple happily deleted all of my playlists and library. I don’t think they realise how bad this is, but I will never use it or subscribe ever again.
I had to pause my subscription for a few months for personal reasons and my collection is gone too.
This is crazy. Not sure how they expect anyone to keep using their service with such attitude.
Perhaps it is a lock-in strategy: don’t leave or you lose months or even years of your music habits.
At the same time, both Spotify and YouTube Music keep all the data to this day.
One might argue that they free plans, so they have to keep it. And I would say “I don’t care”. If I can’t rely on your service to keep a list of songs - I am not using it.
Damn, they could utilize my iCloud account. Or allow me to export a text file with that data, so I could import it back later. But no. No money - you are screwed.
I don't understand why AM doesn't use iCloud to store playlists. You have the storage anyway and a good chunk of people pay for an additional increase too.
You missed two months of payment and you are angry that a company closed the account? Boy do I have to tell you a story about what you can lose by not paying your AWS bill for two months… I am curious how you handle customers that do not pay and continue to not pay instead of just ending their subscription.
I stopped paying for Spotify for 3 years, didn’t login for 2 of those years, came back and my playlists were all still there.
My annual Apple Music subscription lapsed for one day, and my entire library was gone the next day when I resubscribed for another year.
Apple are allowed to make whatever customer hostile choices they want. As a former Apple Music customer, I’m not making that mistake again.
AWS has to pay a relatively big money for keeping user data. It is understandable why they would want to delete it.
Playlists are basically zero cost to store. You would spend more $ on delete processing than keeping them around for eternity. So it's just not well thought use-case, implemented without attempt to view the whole picture.
In many places I worked we would keep a user's history on the app for a long while in case they decided to resubscribe. It doesn't cost much to have a 6-12 months leeway before complete deletion.
Erasing a music app data after just a couple of months is idiotic, even more for a company with such deep pockets like Apple.
What do you lose if you don’t pay to AWS for two months?
My account is still there. I can still use it. I am pretty sure it has some historic data there as well. Probably my old lambdas are still laying around.
Apple Music also integrates with your own music library, which is the killer feature for me.
Beware of the full integration though. It deleted the files I had from my CDs and replaced it with the Apple Music version.
Some items now stay greyed out because they don’t have a license. And some versions got replaced (eg, to the remastered ones).
As does YouTube Music
I've had songs I uploaded later disappear due to their changing agreements with music providers. A google take-out contained the missing files so I was able to recover them, but I'll never again rely on such an integration.
Could it be hidden behind the "Uploads" section? I have a lot of songs that I've uploaded that aren't available on YouTube, but they don't show up unless you go out of your way to find them in their dedicated section.
Doesn't Spotify as well?
It used to, but then they removed it. They might have re-added it since though.
Not really. Spotify's "add your music" feature has always been an afterthought, it's clunky and inconvenient. It doesn't really store your files in Cloud, like Apple Music does; it just allows you to access local files per device.
>It doesn't really store your files in Cloud, like Apple Music does; it just allows you to access local files per device.
Perhaps things have changed, but 10 or so years ago I "uploaded" my music to Spotify and it didn't actually upload anything, nor did it play my local music.
Rather, spotify used whatever it had in its database with the same name/artist, which wasn't always the same recording or even the same song.
And then there were the ads. No thanks.
I have my own library of more than 22,000 tracks and use Winamp, Jellyfin and VLC to play them wherever I happen to be. No muss, no fuss, and most importantly, no ads.
I find the user experience of Apple Music to be subpar, and keeps pushing young genres in which I have zero interest.
I use Cider on my desktop but mobile is still a challenge.
On the other hand Spotify has literal porn on it along with Joe Rogan.
Then it's easy to see why Spotify is so popular in America these days...
Huh, ok. Thanks for explaining.
I just don’t listen to music, full stop. Never used Spotify in my life, or any other streaming music service. Was really confused about all of this.
Spotify doesn't require you to create an account to hear a song from what I recall, so why wouldn't someone send you a link? That's what the web is for.
That said once you have heard it on Spotify, yeah you might want it on your service provider of choice so as to add it to whatever equivalent of playlists there are.
The previous comment was already absurdly america-centric. But with this response, the cake is taken. I have never been sent a spotify link, nor do people really over here, because you need an account.
Isn't your comment also America centric? Spotify is huge in more countries than the US.
sorry, it's been so long since I didn't have an account so I went and checked and I guess I was wrong they do require you to create a free account to hear the link you've been sent.
You'd think my comment assuming you didn't need an account was already absurdly wrong but with your response the cake was taken, because I'm not from America either.
If you meant me, I live in New Zealand funnily enough.
You can just try any link in incognito mode to find out that is not true. Spotify is a walled garden
the repository description sums it up already: Effortlessly convert Spotify links to your preferred streaming service
Honestly doesn't sum it up very well, given that it doesn't even mention that it's an extension.
The readme also doesn't specify how to set up the development environment. I'd like to make a PR adding support for the two Russian streaming services most people here use, VKontakte and Yandex Music, and the code looks simple enough, but I have no idea how do I actually run it. It probably involves some npm commands?
Looks like a pretty standard npm-based application, so just clone the repo, run `npm install` and then `npm run dev` (see `package.json` scripts section for available commands to use with `npm run`)
Yeah, but as I musician they pay you next to nothing unless you're already on top anyways. I know touring musicians who can comfortably live from their physical record/merch sales who say they can basically ignore their spotify revenue since they earn more with their merch sales on one concert than they earn during a whole year of running on spotify.
So if you care about your musicians consider seeking out other ways to get your records, e.g. bandcamp
> as I musician they pay you next to nothing unless you're already on top anyways
More like "as a musician they pay you literally nothing for a song unless it receives 1000 streams/12 months". This is total bullshit for small musicians.
The project description on the right hand sidebar says a lot more:
> Effortlessly convert Spotify links to your preferred streaming service
That's one sentence; it's a good sentence, but it's not a lot. Nothing about running it.
And I already noted (in a very offhand way):
> the About section/link being there... it's offscreen by the start of the README, so I missed it
I think 10 years ago, that sidebar didn't exist on github, so I've got some old skimming habits I could modify... but I think the bar for READMEs should be higher. I was pleasantly surprised to see I wasn't alone in having too little info, though. This project is far far from being an outlier in this regards. 95% of ROS repos (robotics code packages) are worse :)