You mean there’s more of me out there?!
✅ No buffering, music starts instantly
✅ No connection issues
✅ No monthly money drain
✅ No arbitrary access or availability revocation
❌ No immediate access to any song I want to hear, but
✅ I’m patient
I need to get a NAS and a sailing hat
No algorithmic suggestions and therefore, no curated daily taste playlists, no sorting your library by genre (at least not as granular and specific as Spotify unless you put in as much work as they do at tagging your music), finding new music manually takes at least 10x more effort and you’re limited to the taste you already know you have. If you switch phones you’re SOL unless you want to deal with the insanely slow transfer speeds of androids MTP or whatever apples slow ass transfer protocol is. Not to mention your library is limited by how much space you have. My 10,000+ song playlists on Spotify aren’t gonna easily fit on anyone’s device, and definitely not at the highest quality that Spotify can stream at. Your only hope of getting even a comparable experience is to be tech savvy and patient enough to set up a home streaming server, manually tag all your music, and find an audio app with an interface/features that you like that also supports streaming. Oh and then your home computer needs to be on all the time, and your Internet has to be great, and you must not care about your energy bill that much, and … I’m just gonna stop. Locally stored music is just not anywhere near as good. It’s lame and tedious and nearly pointless. At most, I’d say keep a couple albums you like with high quality FLACs but that’s it. You’re waisting your time not getting Spotify premium or Apple Plus or whatever the heck
Oh and this is coming from 20+ years of pirating media. Limewire used to be the best, but now it’s firmly Spotify etc.
No algorithmic suggestions and therefore, no curated daily taste playlists, no sorting your library by genre (at least not as granular and specific as Spotify unless you put in as much work as they do at tagging your music), finding new music manually takes at least 10x more effort and you’re limited to the taste you already know you have
I haven’t used Spotify much, but I found Google Music and Pandora to be very shallow with regards to discovery. There’s not really much to them other than “people who liked X tend to like Y” or “here’s something that sounds similar to an artist you like”. It’s discovery sure, but it’s discovery on autopilot. It’ll keep you treading water in the same shallow area of the ocean forever unless you make a concerted effort outside of its algorithms to listen to something new.
I usually don’t want something “similar to…X” when finding new music. I usually want things that are completely different. I subscribed to Google Music for around a year and found maybe two new artists I liked to listen to. I switched back to a manual discovery process around five years ago and this year alone I’ve found probably a dozen.
All valid points, and I’m glad Spotify works for you. For me though, the tedium isn’t nearly as bad as it seems to be for you. I’m fine with my methods since they’ve never truly failed me Even with my relatively disorganized collection, I can find what I’m looking for pretty quickly even without metadata (Lots of my oldest stuff is also from Limewire, and even Kazaa. Let’s just not mention the bitrate of some of it lol).
I’m fine with gradually expanding my tastes too, so I don’t need Spotify for finding new things. To be fair though, I have found some truly great stuff through the site that I feel I would have never heard, so it’s not without its merits. Though if you’re ever bored and you want to do some manual discovery, Every Noise at Once is a bizarrely cool place and might lead to some interesting finds. But YMMV. And if I don’t feel like picking anything I’ll just throw on whatever internet radio station suits my fancy.
I get you on the storage space as well. Luckily for me, a lot of what I listen to (don’t make fun please) is chiptunes, and I found a kickass app for my phone that reads the same files that the real consoles read so I can enjoy them in truly perfect quality, plus I have actual weeks of music in this format for less than 300 megs.
I admit my tastes are highly eclectic - to say the least - but I’m perfectly content with that. It’s great that you, along with the majority of other people, have an option that best suits your needs. May we both be able to access our music solutions as long as possible.
Go FLAC or go home.
FLAC is a meme for 90% of use cases out there. The difference in sound quality between a .flac and 320 .mp3 is imperceptible to the majority of people and needs thousands of dollars of listening equipment to become apparent. The file size is drastically different, though. Not to mention the fact that almost all music is recorded in .wav files nowadays, and the “lossless” versions are usually just synthetically upscaled for the audiophile crowd.
Not to say that I don’t prefer to download FLAC when possible, but I also don’t avoid non-lossless albums either.
FLAC Not to mention the fact that almost all music is recorded in .wav files nowadays, and the “lossless” versions are usually just synthetically upscaled for the audiophile crowd.
Yeah, this isn’t how that works.
“Lossless” refers to a mathematical property of the type of compression. If the data can be decompressed to exactly the same bits that went into the compressor then it’s lossless.
You can’t “synthetically upscale” to lossless. You can make a fake lossless file (lossy data converted into a lossless file format) but that serves zero purpose and is more of an issue with shady pirate uploaders.
Lossless means it sounds exactly like the CD copy, should it exist. That’s really all. And you want lossless for any situation where you’ll be converting again before playback. Like, for example, Bluetooth transmission.
Lossless means it sounds exactly like the CD copy, should it exist
You’re bang on with everything but this, if you’re getting FLACs from the source, you may be getting higher quality than CD which is 16-bit 44.1khz. I’ve got many 24-bit 96khz FLACs in my collection
Your last point about Bluetooth is such a great one though. Recompression of already compressed audio is a much worse end result than compressing uncompressed audio one time (and before anyone says it, basically no one is listening to lossless Bluetooth audio)
Fair point with the higher bit depths and sampling rates, I just figured there was no point in overcomplicating it when it seemed there was already some form of misunderstanding.
In my case I use FLAC because when Plex transcodes, FLAC > Opus sounds better than MP3 > Opus. Almost all my media was ripped by me direct from CD, with some coming from Bandcamp.
See the problem there is that Plex is transcoding instead of just supporting popular audio formats directly.
I fucking love my 100gb flac collection
Do you know a reliable tracker? I have lidarr set up to find lossless versions, but it’s pretty terrible at it.
Orpheus for torrents, Usenet gets like 90% of the stuff out there though. And don’t forget to sort your favorites bands but buying their albums when they provide them as FLAC.
Nah, I won’t pay for music, unless it’s a signed record, because the bands get pretty much no money from the sale, so it’s more of a fuck you to the labels. But I will travel to go to concerts and buy merch to support them.
I guess I should get around to figuring out how to use usenet, though.
It’s all about the 64kbps .wma’s. I could fit so many songs on my 128mb mp3 player back in the day
I use FLAC for albums I love and mp3s for everything else (including copies of the flacs in mp3). It’s a nice balance.
Fucking love my collection of music. I use Spotify as well, but nothing can compete with literally owning a music collection of my own I can listen to without the Internet
This is the way. Also, FLAC for high bit rate audiophile vinyl rips.
Gotta use that lossless format so you can pick up all the sound artefacts caused by an imperfect physical format.
Despite vinyl’s technical inferiority, it was those same limitations that meant vinyl actually sounded better than CD throughout a specific period. Vinyl cannot be too loud or the needle will jump off the track, making the vinyl unplayable. This prevented vinyl from dealing with the loudness wars, and brick wall dynamic range compression. So especially for the early 2000s, the masters used for the vinyl mix were often significantly better.
And, a clean record played on clean and properly set up equipment can sound really pristine, especially if copied to a digital format early in its life. You wouldn’t even be able to tell it’s vinyl.
+1 to all you said. I collect vinyl for a number of reasons and none of them are because it is technically superior (it isn’t) however, many (most?) people have never heard just how good vinyl can actually sound when it’s in good condition and played on a good setup. I personally cannot tell the difference between even a 33 and CD, let alone a 45, and I have a decently high end setup.
My ears like to trick me and tell me I can hear a difference between a 33 and 45 but I’m pretty sure this is a lie.
Not to mention, psychoacoustics don’t really give a damn about fidelity, so if your goal is “I want it to sound good to me” moreso than “I want it to reproduce sounds accurately” then there’s arguments for vinyl, tube amplifiers, vintage speakers, etc.
Hell I have a friend who specifically uses one of the earliest CD players because it had a 14 bit DAC and no oversampling vs 16 bit DAC, and for those few albums he really likes the digital distortion that comes with it because that’s how he first heard it.
The Enshittification has forced us to revisit the old way
If I really like something, I get my own copy. Because I don’t like corporations deciding what I’m allowed to enjoy.
It’s been more than 25 years of accumulating mp3, editing and cleaning my libraries, upgrading to flac, etc. Now going strong at around 600gb of music.
I recently started ripping all my Spotify playlists using spotdl to put them on my Plex. Spotdl doesn’t actually download from Spotify but uses it as a source for the metadata to tag the files but it gets the audio by matching to YouTube music and downloading from there. From there I import to lidarr for renaming / organization.
What features have been removed from Spotify?
Nothing if you’re a premium user. Being able to pick songs on Free I think.
Plenty of things have been removed from Spotify or just bastardized over the years.
The app is so much less useful overall, so many controls are just gone. It’s exhibit A for the dumbing down of modern apps. It went from being mature software designed to give users tools to control their experiences to a ranch designed solely to corral users into singular usage patterns.
I believe they’ve just placed a bunch of stuff behind their premium subscription, like shuffle/repeat, lyrics, etc.
Interesting. Not a Spotify user, but that’s pretty gross. Looks like the way things are going and I’m becoming more okay with that. There are more and more commodities I’m becoming more and more comfortable not paying for.
I’m surprised more folks on here don’t like FLAC… it fits better 😉
You cant stream it on data connection without obliterating your data cap and battery.
You cant simply load FLACs onto your phone it kills the free storage in the blink of an eye. Try loading 1000 FLACs vs MP3s.
And moreover, there is a debatable gain or quality when you are on mobile with mobile gears/earphones.
MP3s fit in the middle of all restrictions.
I like FLACs, of course, but I can see why people just prefer MP3s
I just don’t hear any difference between ~200kbps VBR mp3 and flac. If you manage a large library, 10x smaller matters a lot, it’s faster to transfer, easier to share on the web, space still costs money.
Is there any piece of software that can help a degenerate like me fix my MP3 collection to not be such a fucking messy nightmare? Paid or free doesn’t matter to me.
Mp3tag is great if you don’t mind manually editing. I’ve used it plenty of times, specifically for OC audio
Y’know most of us audiophiles are managing actual libraries… but they’re not mp3. Mines mostly flac.
My library is competing with Spotify.
