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.

> 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.

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 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

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.

Thanks for sharing! I didn't want to sign up for a monthly subscription to transfer my music...

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.

No, sorry. The code should be pretty easy to port, if you want to give it a go.

https://github.com/leddt/music-link

Orion supports FF and Chrome extensions, if you're in the market for a (good) Safari clone.

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...

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.

I Don't Have Spotify should add Bandcamp support. Bandcamp is great for just playing the music too.

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.

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

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.

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.

> ...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.

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

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.

Bandcamp is the way to go. Artists get paid and I get to keep my data.

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?

This is a great way to use those digital rewards Amazon gives if you delay/combine shipping if you haven't dropped Amazon yet.

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.

Seems like a smart setup

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.

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.

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.

They don’t have to watermark them to do that. They can just do the regular content ID thing YouTube does.

>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.

I can never justify it to myself if the shipping cost is more than 25% of the product price.

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.

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.

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 miss the old kanye

Probably because his friends use it.

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.

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 )

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...

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.

I'm not done trying to convince them. They're small enough that I think I have a legitimate chance.

> 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?

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).

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.

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.

Unfortunately it's not uncommon here.

Thanks for the Hermes.app recommendation...

Even as a paying Pandora member I plan to use this (over their website).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Personally, I don't like the idea of my money supporting people who oppose vaccination, among other things.

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.

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.

> 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… :-/

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.

Honestly doesn't sum it up very well, given that it doesn't even mention that it's an extension.

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`)

> 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 :)