"Muso, a research firm that studies piracy, concluded that the high prices of streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are pushing people back towards illegal downloads. Spotify raised its prices by one dollar last year to $10.99 a month, the same price as Apple Music. Instead of coughing up $132 a year, more consumers are using websites that rip audio straight out of YouTube videos, and convert them into downloadable MP3 or .wav files.
Roughly 40% of the music piracy Muso tracked was from these “YouTube-to-MP3” sites. The original YouTube-to-MP3 site died from a record label lawsuit, but other copycats do the same thing. A simple Google search yields dozens of blue links to these sites, and they’re, by far, the largest form of audio piracy on the internet."
The problem isn’t price. People just don’t want to pay for a bad experience. What Apple Music and Spotify have in common is that their software is bloated with useless shit and endlessly annoying user-hostile design. Plus Steve Jobs himself said it back in 2007: “people want to own their music.” Having it, organizing it, curating it is half the fun. Not fun is pressing play one day and finding a big chunk of your carefully constructed playlist is “no longer in your library.” Screw that.
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If y’all got kids, don’t forget to teach them how MP3’s and actual media files work, I see many young people nowadays don’t even realize you can locally store your own music in a portable device-agnostic format. They’re beginning to get used to the idea of not owning anything.
First you’re gonna have to teach them how file systems work since they’ve spent a life saving everything to Google Drive or OneDrive and using a search term to find their files.
We start with Tanenbaum’s Modern Operating Systems. 🥲
I’m continually astonished how I thought grunt-work IT jobs would fade away as my generation and younger aged into the workforce becoming ever more technologically literate. Then the iPhone my rich friends bought in highschool became the new standard for interfaces.
Now I’m helping people several years younger and much older than me navigate the machines they use for their jobs.
Yeah funny, right? I thought the same thing. It’d just be the older people and the younger would be more technically literate. But companies started abstracting a lot of things now and it’s both the older and younger that struggle with IT literacy.
I think thin clients with VDIs will be the future and both make this stuff even more abstracted for users and also bring in the age of subscribing to workstations. At work, it’ll start by just plopping stuff in your documents folder or personal folder or whatever and/or the desktop. They’ll live on a network share and the VDIs will revert to snapshots to be ‘fresh’ every time but the users won’t really know that. Their stuff will be plopped down like it is local every time and ‘follow’ them from VDI to VDI.
Then I think this will push to the home market and instead of spending a lot of money up front, you just get a cheap thin client, probably eventually a small little box with USB ports and mini-DP or whatever. You’ll then pay for the tiers you want. Want just a workstation to check mail on and do ‘web apps’ type stuff? $5 with a whole 5GB of personal space or whatever. Then there’ll be “productivity tiers” with pretty much the same stuff but more CPU, RAM and a small amount of vGPU allocated and you can install programs with something like 500 GB of personal space. There’ll be a “pro” version with more of everything and a “gamer” version with a lot of everything probably costing something like $30/$40 a month starting out per device.
And of course eventually, you’ll be getting ads to “keep the prices increases down” and then that won’t matter anymore and you’ll be given the option to pay for ad-free add-ons, time on the workstation and so-on. Prices will raise nearly every year. Thin clients will turn into all-in-ones and be basically tablets where you buy based on screen sizes and probably able to wireless connect more displays.
Technology in computing will become more abstracted and IT’s specialists will shrink once again because actual tech literacy will decrease.
I think the only reason it hasn’t started yet is due to Internet throughput availability but that’s quickly changing.
A boring dystopia indeed.
your post made me shudder, how bout we stop this?
The main issue to solve is kids not having access to a computer at home, whether it be lack of incentive or money. Most people don’t even own a laptop anymore, so the only computer time they get is in a school setting.
Once the majority of schools have a system in place for most homework to be done on a PC, then there may be some creative ways to incentivise more PC adoption… again. It’s like we’ve gone back to the early 90s again where only kids who were really interested in computing knew anything about it.
I think the solutions comes not from adopting older tech, but making newer tech fairer. As in not locking down phones and tablets as much as they do.
What do they have if not a laptop? How would they even do homework? What about coursework at uni? Applying for jobs?
iPad / tablet, and applying for jobs can easily be done on a phone. My wife works at a high school - half the kids can’t even use a mouse, and don’t understand minimizing a window etc
Thats the exact reason I just donated my old pc to my sisters kids as a “practice computer”, encouraging them to go rummaging around.
What woke me up was all these 20-somethings in our uni having trouble using computers. Damn, how can you get through our secondary education in our country and not know how to use a normal Windows pc?
I’m convinced primary education as a system is engineered to teach you how to be a patriotic, service-consuming, rentable employee first and foremost. (Humans As A Service?) Secondary education just levels that up so you require more expensive proprietary tool licenses for the potential privilege of doing more complicated jobs. (Funny how all the critical-thinking specialties are derided for not making tons and tons of money.)
Thank God for the good teachers that inspired us in spite of all the odds against us (and them).
It also blows my mind how much schools and universities are struggling for funding, but take the bait and use hyper-proprietary black-box commercial software for everything from OSs to coursework. Professors outside of CompSci will be shocked and confused to see a student using Linux, and courses love to use stupid niche features of Microsoft Office so your LibreOffice work won’t be good enough.
Do everything on a tablet (that might even be provided by the school)
That brief, magical moment in time of about 2 decades in the “home computer revolution” of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, where you had to be an actual geek to be able to effectively use a computer are gone. That’s how we all got trained. By being forced to learn if we wanted to do anything. Now, it’s one-button instant gratification.
The eternal September.
Partially yeah, but atleast Google Drive and Onedrive still have folders to sort and share more than one file, which sometimes gets the kids to actually use those features.
What also killed the basic understanding of PCs, is the way in which everything is now done “in-Browser”. No longer do you need to open Word to edit a document, nor do you need to open Photoshop. It’s all done in the browser, and if you want to simply “save” a document, well, just don’t close the tab and you’re golden.
I remember my kids crying the first time they lost their school assignments using Microsoft Office at home. They’d only ever used Google docs and no one taught them to save. They also had no idea what the save icon is or represented (floppy disk).
> my kids
> no one taught them
That was kind of your job m8
I prefer the school of hard knocks. Do you think they know what a save button is now?
This comment made me cackle with evil glee.
I worked for a public library and one of the worst things was, despite CONSTANTLY reminding people that when their computer time ran out, the machine would delete EVERYTHING and restart itself, I’d always get some dope who would gasp in horror at closing time when the script ran. “What happened!? It’s just…g…gone?!” “Did you bring a USB? Email it to yourself? Send it to the print queue yet?” “No, I was just about to finish it!” “…There is literally nothing I can do about this.” “But it was 6 pages and due tomorrow and–”
One dude literally asked me: “Can’t you…hack it or something!?”
It’s physically painful.
Yeah the real takeaway is it’s not necessarily the kids fault that they don’t know these systems deeply as much as it is the fault of OS and app developers taking the path of least resistance and building everything around the stupidest users and their mistakes. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for the growth and development of Power Users when everything is locked down and obfuscated to protect the user from themselves.
it is the fault of OS and app developers taking the path of least resistance and building everything around the stupidest users and their mistakes. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for the growth and development of Power Users when everything is locked down and obfuscated to protect the user from themselves.
That’s overly charitable. The developers aren’t doing it just to cater to idiots; they’re doing it because taking away users’ power and turning it into a platform strictly to consume content instead of creating things for themselves gives big tech companies more opportunities to extract money from them.
This is exactly why I’d shut down any of that ridiculous “Kids just know computers these days” crap.
“No, Phyllis, just because 6-year-old-Timmy can crust up your iPad with boogers to consume endless dopamine-pumping content doesn’t mean he has any idea what is happening behind that screen. At all.”
The biggest crime is in my opinion that Android as an OS was made without allowing the user root access unless they jump through a bunch of hoops. Even if it comes at the cost of a bricked phone, kids should be allowed to experiment with their devices.
Also, from my experience basic graphic design is the newest version of this. The amount of praise I get for understanding basic color theory, as well as not to use JPGs, or Comic Sans for everything is wild.
To be fair to the basic graphic design point: When I was in high school they were busy killing art programs, and that was in the 90’s. It’s kind of hard to know that kind of stuff when it straight isn’t being taught. Honestly, very similar to the computer stuff, so much of it just isn’t taught anymore, and it’s leaving a lot of kids with degraded knowledge of the subjects they’re pursuing.
Man, I searched desperately for formal art training in school. The best they had was some “how to draw” book that at least kept me on track practicing every day. The colleges accessible to me have had “art” programs that are more the stuffy turtleneck gallery sort of stuff, and not anything practical, so I’m sad higher-ed didn’t work out either.
I’m proud none of this stopped me so far, but dang I wonder if those kids who got to take art classes and have mentoring art teachers around art peers know just how dang lucky they’ve had it…
Dang now I wanna watch “Blue Period” again…
just don’t close the tab
My RAM is screaming.
Take a guess on why people still complain about RAM in the current days of 16Gb being one of the cheapest options
I mean I have 64 GB but I’m not wasting it on browser tabs. I’ve got people at work who never close anything, they’ll have 15 tabs, 28 PDFs and 7 Excel spreadsheets open 24/7 because it takes them an hour to remember where they saved them otherwise.
Literally me when I hear them complain about their slow computer:
Unused RAM is wasted RAM, though. Your computer will know when to free it up for more important stuff.
We open the two Excel “programs” that are the basic tools we need to do our job and RAM usage is at 10gb already.
Our laptops have 16gb of RAM and we need to open even more excel tools and web pages and pdfs…
Just download more.
Of course!
smacks forehead
you wouldn’t download a RAM
What about a EWE?
deleted by creator
This sort of thing is why my kids are getting Raspberry Pis as their first computers.
As a cultured collector of memes, one of the most annoying things ever is downloading images to my phone from the internet with filenames like “124fdgklhhr24.jpeg” and if I don’t separately navigate to it, hold down to rename it, move it manually to where I want it for later, it just falls into the endless “Download” folder.
I think this behavior is encouraged precisely so people don’t understand directories, fill up their phones with random nonsense, and then happily subscribe to “cloud storage” when it’s constantly pushed at them.
I made a concerted effort one evening to go into my downloads folder on my PC, rename all the nameless garbage filenames, and then actually move and sort them into my pictures/documents/etc folders.
Was a huge pain in the ass, but it saved me so much effort looking for stuff later on down the line. Also, changing Firefox’s default download setting to prompt me for a name and location every time certainly helped.
No worries. They’ll reinvent the wheel eventually.
No, they’ll think the corporate dystopia they’ve grown up into is normal. They don’t know that corporations tried and failed to stop people from owning and using VCRs. They think it’s their duty to sit and watch ads from their favorite creators like passive cows.
This is a pretty bleak outlook on the intelligence of kids
It’s an outlook developed by watching the peers I grew up around and the things that they accepted and didn’t question because it was just “normal” by the time they were children.
For example, a lot of kids in my generation grew up with Cable Television, but by the time I was a kid, cable had lost it’s initial “we’re better than broadcast because we don’t have ads” and people just accepted the ads. Most people never knew there was a “time before” when there weren’t any ads, and because of their lack of knowledge of it ever being any different, they never had reason to question why cable television needed ads now when previously it had not.
Once things become a societal “norm,” the people who grow up around that norm tend not to question it simply because they have never known anything else. It’s not meant to be an indictment on the youth as much as the obvious “you can’t know what you don’t know.” If they don’t ever know it was ever any different, how can they expected to do anything but accept how things are? Especially when the adults around them don’t kick up a fuss and keep paying for Netflix when they keep getting screwed. They are learning that this is normal behavior and that it’s normal to get screwed by a company and just keep paying for it.
Wait, did the pitch for cable TV at one point really include that there were no ads?
Have you ever seen cable TV abbreviated “CATV?” That’s because the original original pitch for it was as “Community Antenna TV,” wherein it would receive local over-the-air broadcasts and then send them over a wire to folks who couldn’t receive them properly because they lived behind a mountain or whatever.
The second pitch was getting original content on cable-only channels, but because your subscription was helping pay to license it (unlike the over-the-air channels, which they – at least initially – got for free), they would be ad-free.
Of course, nowadays cable companies have been made to pay retransmission fees to broadcast TV networks and cable-only channels are showing ads too, so both content sources are double-dipping revenue streams.
(Side note: that link is to a site trying to sell some kind of service, so ignore the last part of the page – the explanations at the beginning of it are quite good, though.)
Wow TIL. The double-dipping is pretty sketchy, but not at all surprising. It seems hubristic for Netflix to court the same concepts… I guess cable/network TV probably thought they were untouchable so they could squeeze the consumer, then Netflix happens… Now Netflix thinks it’s untouchable and it can squeeze the consumer. Hmm, seems familiar.
Yes, it could be argued it was the pitch, much like Netflix originally was. It’s actually kind of wild how the streaming services are literally following the same path as cable television.
Here’s a New York Times article from 1981 about it:
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-invaded-by-commercials.html
Although cable television was never conceived of as television without commercial interruption, there has been a widespread impression - among the public, at least -that cable would be supported largely by viewers’ monthly subscription fees. These days, however, as cables are laid across the country and new programs constantly pop up to fill the gaping maw, cable experts are talking as glibly about the potential advertising revenues as they are about opportunities for programming.
‘‘The floodgates for advertising on cable are down,’’ says Michael Dann, a leading consultant on cable television. Indeed, even pay television, once assumed to be secure from commercial interests, is attracting some attention as a potential vehicle for advertising. Admittedly, such leading pay cable services as Home Box Office and Showtime, whose programming consists primarily of theatrically released films, staunchly maintain that they will never accept advertising.
Wow, I had no idea. I didn’t even really know that cable was at one time the fancy premium version of TV.
One thing I think we can say though is that a big part of why Netflix was disruptive was the promise of watching uninterrupted-- No ads. So even though folks thought “of course cable has ads, that’s the norm,” they also flocked to services that provided ad-free alternatives.
I’m always surprised when I see someone just sit through a YouTube ad or something, instead of beating their chest and screaming “WHERE uBLOCK? HOW ADS?” which alarms the neighbors but they’re used to it at this point (which is what I do)… But it’s encouraging that people still voted with their feet by dropping cable as soon as a less extractive experience emerged. It gives me hope that the endgame of enshittification is irrelevance.
It is, but it’s also true. Kids in schools have problem saving files in correct format in the correct places. Almost like your average grandma. Most kids dont even have computer, they do everything on their phones.
I mean, I get it, why bother with PCs or laptops, these things are heavy and too complicated. You can take, edit and share pictures from your phone, browse web, listen to music, chat with friends.
But IT literacy goes to hell.
Indeed! Introducing kids to this through the example of Plex is really good.
First they “get it” because Plex works like the streaming services they’re used to and they think “oh neat mom can do that too.”
Then they like it more because I show them how its streaming we can control ourselves - streaming home movies and pics really impresses this upon them.
And then they see that there’s no magic to where the content comes from – it’s a digital file on Plex just as it is on Netflix.
Voila. Free thinkers for life.
If I ever do have children, this is one of the things I want to teach them.
Hopefully, it turns into an important memory for them.
Learning about technology from their parents’ and how it isn’t magic.
This makes me sad. I had so much fun growing up learning about compression and encoding, ripping, tagging, spectral analysis. Listening to 24/96 vinyl FLACs on my parents old stereo with my pinky up. Hanging out with a bunch of 40-year olds on IRC. Good times, man
I do all those things
Hanging out with a bunch of 40-year olds on IRC.
Heh, now we’re the 40-olds on IRC.
I am Gen Z, and my whole social life is on IRC. So weird to be around so many people who were online since before my parents even had a computer…
A/s/l?
Get your kids a real computer. Show them how to move files around. Show your 7 year old how to manually install a Minecraft skin. Show your teens how to turn an mp3 into a ringtone. Show them the actual practical uses for understanding how a computer works, and what a “file” actually is. You’re giving them tools to save money, make better decisions, and actually control their experience.
Look, it’s on it’s last legs, but Bandcamp and Bandcamp Fridays still exist.
Reasonable cost, money goes directly to the artist, and you get high quality FLACs with no DRM to keep permanently.
I pirate a lot, but I also spend a lot of money at Bandcamp trying to get money directly in the hands of the artists I enjoy.
And Bandcamp Friday is today.
For those who are unfamiliar with both Bandcamp and Bandcamp Friday, can you ELI5?
You can buy music without DRM on Bandcamp, and on Bandcamp Friday a larger share goes directly to the creator. It’s a great way to support your favorite artists.
They waive the 20% fee on bandcamp friday, all money goes to the artist.
So what is the best way to actually own music? I miss having a physical file I could put wherever and listen to anywhere, but haven’t resorted to pirating anything since limewire
Bandcamp first, if you can pay for what you want and then, surprisingly, still Soulseek.
For obtaining music, I check Bandcamp, then Amazon (they have drm free mp3s of most music and cds for everything else), then the artist site if available, then finally I look in the seas.
As for the best way to store and play the music back, I’ve put everything on my Jellyfin instance and then stream the media to my devices. On iOS, FinAmp is a decent music player for this setup.
I’m not even able to put music on my watch unless it’s a mp3, so paying to stream music is out of the question.
One of the main reasons I still pay for Spotify is because it is very cheap in my country, specially when splitting a family plan. However I noticed that the user experience has gone downhill over the past years.
I remember when I could seamlessly switch playback devices, from my car to my phone, to my computer and them a Chromecast almost instantaneously. Now I’m lucky if my devices recognise each other even if they are on the same network.
And if you have a poor internet connection, the app is near unusable because it tries yo grab online content first before checking whatever is downloaded. Time and time again I have to put my phone on aeroplane mode just for the main menu to load, it is so frustrating and this didn’t happen some 5-6 years ago
And if you have a poor internet connection, the app is near unusable
This is an issue I’ve been noticing across more and more apps and operating systems. It seems like there’s no developers out there even willing to consider how their software operates under non-ideal conditions.
It’s not developers, it’s management. We know how to make it better, but that’s extra complexity. Meaning extra developer time (higher cost and longer turn around) to better support a small fraction of normal use, added on every time that part of the system is changed
It’s more profitable and faster to say “forget those users” now that they’re a smaller and smaller part of the customer base
All of those things are 100% legitimate criticisms, I want to add that the UX experience has become more and more horrible. They’ve regressed terribly in most aspects of their apps, wether PC or Mobile. Absolutely unbelievable, this is the thing I see from Google search where marketing takes over from engineering/customer needs/market reality/I don’t know what. Stop shoving shit into the services. You beat piracy for a minute, you can keep that lead, you’re slowly losing it.
Honestly, if this was any other product this would be unacceptable. It’d be like all books went back to only black and white, all movies were only 480p, all music was only mono.
They keep trying to reinvent the library UI, as does Apple. But neither will ever be able to top the way the iOS music app was organized, pre-Apple-music. Every attempt to innovate has been worse
I got caught in a crazy loop of Spotify resetting my password once a week. they offered no help except telling me my 40 char generated password was not secure enough. so I cancelled and deleted the account. the seas are a much more friendly place.
Sheesh, kids have it so easy now… Back in my day, we had to set sail along the Atlantic trade routes looking for ships full of the latest wax cylinders out of Europe and Asia. Didn’t have anything to play them on but at least we owned our collections.
Never left, baby! Although ripping from YouTube should be a last resort. And even then, use a proper tool like Yt-dlp.
i’m a big fan of music streaming, the way i listen to music only really works with a discovery algorithm. but the way streaming services and labels have been unnecesarily fucking over the customer as well as the artist is getting ridiculous.
qobuzz could be a possible alternative, with them providing FLACs and/or CD quality tracks to purchase and download, but also having a subscription plan. they say more money is going to the artist. the only thing missing is the algorithm.
go ahead, tell me i’m “corrupted by capitalism” or whatever. this is the way i want to do it. there’s no point in building up a collection worth hundreds and thousands of euros now, apart from FLACs being gigantic files and taking up all of the storage on my phone. plus i would cut myself off from being able to discover good artists the way i’m used to.
the way i listen to music only really works with a discovery algorithm
People have been listening to music without an algorithm for hundreds of years. Even digitally, algorithms for discovery are fairly new. What’s so different about how you listen to music?
i have more than 10 playlists for different genres and occasions, the ““smart”” shuffle helps pad those out since otherwise the playlist would be like 20 songs long.
the recommended songs at the bottom are often pretty bad, but for every 10 shitty songs there’s one worth adding to the list.
occasionally i also listen to full albums, often only from bands i really really like.
i get that spotify influenced how i do it, and i don’t have a problem if people do it differently. but an algorithm is a major plus for any music platform (from my perspective)
i probably won’t start pirating music, but if spotify continues to enshittify itself i’m gonna have to look for alternatives.
I get it. I really enjoyed Spotify’s recommendations, but I had to quit as part of my “fuck streaming” pledge. My questions were genuine, I hope they didn’t come off as antagonistic.
I switched to Plex / Plexamp, and I have to say whatever algorithm they’ve implemented has greatly helped me discovery things in my local library. It does a great job at “vibe mixing”, by that I mean you’re not going to shuffle from rock to classical to electronic. It’s even nailed some transitions that were both beat- and keymatched.
Might be more than you’re willing to undertake, but it allowed me to drop the Spotify sub.
Did it ever go away?
Not in the slightest.
The apps is definitely a part of it for me. One if my friends got YouTube Premium, and since he has 3 profiles he can attach to it, hrs letting me use it. It’s nice for the ad free videos on my TV. But it also comes with YouTube Music. It’s honestly kind of annoying at times.
Like yesterday I wanted to listen to an album by a band, and they only have like 2 of 3 albums. The one I wanted to listen to is the one they didn’t have. So I had to make a Playlist by finding videos of the songs.
And thats for a band that’s not super underground. I listen to a lot of grindcore and black metal, and a lot of that isn’t even on there.
And when you download things, you can only have it organized by albums. I can’t organize it by band and then have all the albums.
It’s also sometimes slow to load up stuff I’ve downloaded.
Over all its not the greatest experience. I’m currently looking at getting a mobile game device for my emulators so I can free up space on my phone, and then I’m thinking about just going back to having all the music on files on there and using an music player app. And like you said, I can have it organized how I want and customize things a bit more. Especially since I no longer have Comcast, so I can use Soulseek again.
@HipHoboHarold @flintheart_glomgold
Yes, I have noticed a trend of homelab hobbyists going back to something like this:
- Soulseek -> Nicotine+ for plentiful, lossless content
- Jellyfin for self-hosting
- Infuse for streaming the content remotely to save storage on your phone.
I don’t endorse piracy for ethical reasons, but I get why this is trending up:
-Increasingly aggressive pricing models
-Service quality and content accessibility going downReally makes it hard for consumers…
Just a small tip with yt music if you are not aware, you can upload your own mp3s (50k files iirc). It’s the main reason I use it since so much dnb is missing from all the streaming platforms.
What DnB artists/tracks are we talking about here?
A large portion of the metalheadz back catalogue is missing, and also an absolute shitload of jungle is absent
Oh shit. I didn’t know that. Might be able to get some other albums on there then. Thanks for the heads up.
No problems, it’s the only reason I stuck to yt music when Google play music died.
It’s a whole torrent of alternatives, that’s for sure.
What are you saying OP? You don’t want video and paid, exclusive podcasts on your streaming service? /s
What you don’t want to pay for the streaming service that brings you Joe Rogan and his disinformation? Why not?
They don’t want a bad experience so they use shady websites to download music in the shittiest possibile quality? I don’t buy it.
People are just not able to afford what they want, that’s it
shady websites
There are no innocents here. There’ s a case to be made that nothing is more shady for consumers than the mass data harvesting, profiling, brokering and content shaping that flows from using Facebook, Twitter, Amazon or TikTok
shittiest possible quality
You’re doing it wrong
“The problem isn’t price. People just don’t want to pay for a bad experience.”
The experience using a paid service is way better than pirating, let’s be honest here. The problem for some people is price.
For music, I think yes. For other forms of media, not so much.
Music is getting worse though. Spotify is bloating all searches with stuff you don’t want. The “Artist top songs” is rarely the most popular songs and is limited to 10 song. In the beginning you could list all the songs from an artist and sort it on “Plays”.
Spotify needs to connect to network to play songs, and there is no option to not play on metered network. So I sometime would play songs that Spotify mysteriously deleted from downloads, and loose a month of data.
Now, I mostly get my music from bandcamp and only listen to couple classical album on spotify, since there is no good place to buy them.
The day that Spotify pull a Netflix on their family plan is the day I leave Spotify.
I’m willing to say that this is probably true for most, but not for all.
If you run your own music streaming server, in some cases it’s better than streaming services.
This isn’t sour grapes either. I had Google music for a couple of years, and I currently have a ninety day trial of Spotify unlimited…these services might be better for most, but if you care about the things I do they’re worse.
I haven’t really even used my Spotify trial because my streaming setup is so much better in a variety of ways.
All that said, I’m an album listener, an older cat, and borderline music obsessive. I’m likely a dying breed. But I find music streaming services much worse.
I honestly think it’s much easier to have a catalog of music than, for instance, TV shows. I listen to the same albums over and over again, but I’m not nearly as keen on rewatching the same shows or watching the same movie more than even once.
The experience using a paid service is way better than pirating, let’s be honest here. The problem for some people is price.
I’m willing to say that this is probably true for most, but not for all.
If you run your own music streaming server, in some cases it’s better than streaming services.
This isn’t sour grapes either. I had Google music for a couple of years, and I currently have a ninety day trial of Spotify unlimited…these services might be better for most, but if you care about the things I do they’re worse.
I haven’t really even used my Spotify trial because my streaming setup is so much better in a variety of ways.
All that said, I’m an album listener, an older cat, and borderline music obsessive. I’m likely a dying breed. But I find music streaming services much worse.
Don’t use shady sites. Use yt-dlp.
but yt audio quality is terrible.
It’s very fine unless you decide you just must and have to convert that audio to MP3 (the audio loses quality with every lossy compression), because you are an old boomer and other formats scare you even though almost all modern device can play OPUS or at least M4A or you are one of those people who call themselves “Audiophiles” to feel more special, but wouldn’t recognize a shit if I played OPUS 192kbps on their 2000$ home audio setup instead of the 32 bit uncompressed FLAC that has over 40MB in size each. I have most of my library from YT Music which is ~128kbps OPUS and it has been transparent on all audio devices I have played it till now.
Look, we all have bad days, but there’s no need to be so aggressive to random people online. Everyone’s hearing is different. Some people are more sensitive to certain sounds than others. I tried youtube, spotify and tidal. And youtube is the audio quality I disliked the most. Just for clarification. I’m not a boomer, I’m a millenial, I work in computer science so I enjoy testing new formats. I have tried everything from atrac (sony) to DSD, I don’t have a $2000 home audio setup but I have a couple of decent pairs of cans, with mid-range DAC and amps. And I have tested multiple audio formats at different levels of compression and bitrate to find what I like the most. To me 128kbps feels like listening to the radio over the phone. If that’s enough for you, then great, more power to you. No need to be disrespectful.
I am sorry. I went to a little rant, but I meant it rather funny even though I realize it feels aggressive 🤣. I am just enthusiastic about this topic even though I don’t know that much.
- typed on a vacuum tube keyboard
Most people can’t tell the difference between low bitrate vs high bitrate. Usually just confirmation bias.
Have you truly tested whether you can? I don’t mean playing each side by side and seeing whether you can tell the difference, but actually testing yourself in a way that you don’t know which is being played (like having someone else play it for you).
Maybe you can’t, what headphones/avr setup do you have?
but yt audio quality is terrible.
So are the bluetooth speakers and ear buds that most people use to listen to music these days.
So are the bluetooth speakers and ear buds that most people use to listen to music these days.
Heretic! Nothing that my Lord and Savior Apple bestows upon the unwashed is less than divine!
LDAC codec seems enough for me to tell the difference for music i know in high-rez, and I don’t like it.
I do have good quality android player and wired, but pointless to use with Spotify.That’s why we gotta give them the chance for good audio!
I have a dream…
fair point.
yt-dlp can use your browser cookies for YT premium and therefore YT music. That’s 256kBit/s AAC, it’s okay.
is there an android version?
It’s a Python command line program, so yes. I use Termux (a Linux terminal emulator), and I installed
yt-dlpusingpip, a package manager for Python. I also haveffmpegfor command line video editing on my phone.I have it setup such that when I click “Share” on a URL from Firefox or YouTube, and I choose Termux as the receiving app, I am presented with a menu that let’s me choose if I want the video saved to a normal folder or a hidden folder (for reasons), or if I want to download just the audio and save it to an MP3. yt-dlp can download from much more than just YouTube.
The script is just a bash script with a specific name in a specific folder that Termux knows to invoke when sent a URL. You can do anything you want with such a script.
Only get Termux from F-Droid or Droid-ify. Not from the Play Store. The Play Store version is way out of date.
Like the other person said, Newpipe can also download from YouTube. It’s a YouTube front-end that scrapes the public HTML website for YouTube. You can also download that from F-Droid or Droid-ify.
Seal is a yt-dlp frontend
It’s like a kiss from a rose on the grave.
I wasn’t aware of that. That’s neat. It can be found on F-Droid and Droid-ify.
If you use the NewPipe android app to watch youtube, you can download directly from there, as video or audio, in a selection of formats.
Or you could use some app like InnerTune and listen to YouTube Music content without ads.
Or you could install YTDLnis and (optionally) ReVanced, then click the download icon in the video box and you can download it in any other format.
… I didn’t even realize. that’s amazing. thank you!
Pretty sure revanced has a download option too.
It’s taken longer than I expected, but more and more people are realising streaming services as a model are not good, by any measure.
They cost more in the long run, you are made powerless as a consumer (perpetually increasing costs and removing your favourite content), and you can’t even get ‘everything at the convenience of your fingertips’ cause the market is fragmented and they remove things periodically. You own nothing and pay more. Absolutely stupid model that deserves to die.
I’m surprised everyone didn’t realize it right from the beginning before things got to this point. Better late then never, I - suppose.
My theory is that it’s just the fact that there is always a new generation of people around the corner who haven’t learned the lesson of how capitalists work. Therefore, there is always a market vulnerable to being swindled. They can keep using the same tactics, there’s always a delay in people figuring out the grift, then by the time they do there’s a new group of suckers ready to fall for it.
Yeah, that is true for video steaming, but not music. Spotify has almost every song on the planet, and with a family account it’s very cheap. Unless you only listen to a very small music library it’s vastly cheaper than buying all the music
Spotify has almost every song on the planet
Until a contract negotiation with UMG goes south and they lose half the catalog overnight. See what’s happening on tiktok right now for a good example of this.
I understand the convenience draw, but I’m not a fan of continually paying for content that can disappear at any moment.
Well if that happens, then there’s always piracy. But until then. I’ll use my family account. Because I don’t have the resources to download all the songs that my other 4 family member likes.
Or, since I cannot download each and every song they like, I’ll turn to another form of piracy. Revanced yt music.
I do use streaming (although for free) to find new tracks. But I cannot imagine having my PRIMARY collection there, mostly because it’s so locked-down. You can’t use it on a dumb MP3 player, you can’t use a player application of your choice, etc.
Their android app is total garbage and frustrates me to no end. I’m seriously considering just going back to pirating my music just because I hate spotifys music app…
