I think about switching from Spotify for a longer time now, but with the recent ICE ads I want to be in solidarity with the people in the US and kick Spotify out.
Now I checked the Quboz app and I am in a test month with Tidal right now - so far Tidal is great on my mobile. However I also need a client for Linux!
I am using spotify-client on Linux Mint and works flawlessly. I know its development is not the main goal of Spotify engineers, but it just works.
Now for Tidal and Quboz it seems to be problematic - only Electron apps without HiFi sound because the chromium engine throttles the quality. How am I supposed to switch from Spotify if I can’t use the alternative on Linux? Any advices/experiences?
I use an alternative to Spotify called “a folder full of mp3s”. If you are into selfhosting you could also stream your collection using Navidrome but putting audio files on your phone works as well. If you need a recommendation algorithm you can sync your listens to listenbrainz.org or lastfm. There are quite a few Linux audio players that support the scrobble API.
s/MP3s/FLACs/, but otherwise, I agree.
Drive space isn’t scarce these days, so I think keeping a lossless copy somewhere is good, if just to compress the audio for a device with less storage.
very much this. server with navidrome and a soulseek script to download spotify and youtube playlists.
I don’t have a great answer to your questions, but thanks for trying to support us during these dark times.
I quit Tidal because even they have BS Ai Albums/Bands/“Singers”.
Fuck SUNO.
Granted Tidal doesn’t randomly start adding/playing them, you’d have to play them, but adding them to recent/growing playlists is BS too IMHO.
Anyway checkout TIDAL Hi-Fi For Tidal + HiFi on Linux.
I’m back to just using Shortwave to record radio station tracks to grow my own local self hosted music cloud now.
Not giving my $$$$ towards enabling Ai slop.
So you say music streaming is taking the same enshittification route as streaming in general? That sucks to hear :/ I really want to switch, but I am only paying like 5€ in a Spotify family… so if it’s just too hard it may be not worth it. However Spotify is fucking annoying me, it always plays the same shitty music and doesn’t learn at all from my taste
+1 for TIDAL Hi-Fi
I switched to that from the web client today in order to enable their “Max” quality streams and enable keyboard media key support; has worked out great so far.
Like Velvet Sundown with 3 albums in 1 month lol.
p.s. Not sure If you saw my link for Linux-Tidal app:
Update from The Guardian:
Shortwave is cool, MusicPod incorporates local music and podcasts into the same app, which is pretty cool. But yes, internet radio is dope.
The what ads???
I gave up on native client for a couple things. So instead of downloading someone else’s electron packaging I use the web app shortcut using Firefox to fake that qobuz is an actual app.
It’s a thing on Linux Mint, not sure about your distro. You can choose icon, and make location bar visible or not. No tabs, it doesn’t get mixed with other Firefox tabs, and that is it.
Honestly, while I still use Apple Music for some things (I don’t like Apple, but I’m unfortunately stuck on it right now), I’m a big fan of building up a collection of digital media files bought either directly from artists or ripped from the CD collection I’m building. I usually go for FLAC, though less for its compression and more for its superior metadata support compared to WAVs.
For discovering new music, Bandcamp allows you to check out some songs; otherwise, check it out on YouTube or something and buy it directly from the artist later.
Like others have said, Bandcamp might not have everyone, but they do have a lot of indie artists and even some bigger ones. Some artists that don’t have everything on Bandcamp might have their own store you can buy from.
@data1701d @gigachad Wait, you still buy songs? Did you know that you can download them from YouTube for free and convert them into an audio file?
Or maybe you want to support the artists: that’s fair, but I personally prefer downloading them from YouTube.Yes, but these are my two thoughts:
- That’s basically just piracy, and my feelings are that while sometimes it’s ethical*, a lot of musical artists have made a good faith attempt to allow you to acquire it in a legal, DRM-free format at a reasonable price, meaning in a lot of cases it’s not ethical, especiallyf with streaming basically eliminating record sale revenue and tour profit margins getting thinner and thinner.1
- When I want to pirate, I would at least do it right; why extract lossy audio from YouTube with yt-dlp when you can easily get a lossless FLAC on SoulSeek or another peer-to-peer network?
*: if the media isn’t easily legally accessible, if it’s stuck under a bad corporation, and fair use like making an FMV. I think it’s much more ethical to pirate film and television, as if you pay for a film (whether a subscription or a Blu-Ray), it’s often just going to go to some ultra-rick executive who had nothing to do with the talented people who worked on the film. Also, DRM makes streaming an inferior experience to just opening a video file. Music is a completely different game, especially with the proliferation of indie labels and self-publishing.
1: Of course, if the artist is some multi-millionaire or billionaire artist, then go ahead.
@data1701d I don’t consider downloading from YouTube as piracy, but I get you point of wanting to support artists.
At least in the objective legal sense, it very much is in the eyes of the YouTube terms of service and the law of most jurisdictions with strong copyright protections.
There is a legal distinction between streaming on YouTube (normal TOS-compliant use) and downloading the video as a whole through a 3rd party tool (circumvention of copyright protection, and YouTube gets no ad revenue with the download), which is usage outside the TOS.
Now, I don’t really give a darn about following US* copyright law for a megacorporation’s sake1 and have gone ahead and downloaded from YouTube, but it’s still piracy in the legal sense. This is not intended as a criticism of your actions, just a legal nitpick.
*Obviously, not everyone here is American (good riddance); this is just my personal experience. 1: Especially considering Google’s breaking it all the time with their ML models in my opinion.
I’ve been using the web player for Qobuz, and it appears to allow for high quality output–I’m streaming at 24bit/96kHz at the moment (though I’m no audiophile, so I guess I can’t confirm that’s what I’m actually getting).
And apparently Qobuz pays the most per track of any streaming service, which is cool. The only thing it doesn’t have is customizable “radio”, but otherwise it’s solid.
And apparently installing the Windows client in a Bottle works well too, or so I’ve read. Can’t say I’ve tried it.
Any reason in particular you need a dedicated client? Can you not just use a PWA?
No particular reason. I don’t really have much experiences with web apps. I don’t like the idea of putting every functionality into my Browser and I like it simple.
Look at it this way, if you run all pws with same browser you’re not increasing the memory footprint, but if it’s electron you do because you have multiple copies of electron in your disk and your memory.
And there’s more electron apps out there than you know. Slack, visual studio and Spotify, apparently, included.
I’d recommend giving it a go and see if you like it.
Can you elaborate on this topic? Are we just speaking about a web player?
PWA is basically just a browser window that looks and functions like an app on your computer. You can launch it from wherever you launch apps. It will open in its’ own window. It’s functionally identical.
Functionally identical to running it on browser, but no match for true speed and experience of desktop app.
I use them but I’d prefer true options.
RAM is expensive.
You think a dedicated app is going to use less RAM than a browser window?
RAM is only expensive if you’re dumb enough to buy a modern Mac.
Uh… yes?
Spotify memory usage: 450MB
Rhythmbox memory usage: 95MB
A browser is one of the most complicated applications commonly running on a computer; its code is massive before you load in the mountains of javascript. Also that is measured by RSS - the difference is even starker when you bear in mind that of the 50MB that rhythmbox might be sharing with other processes, most of it probably is being, because a lot will be graphical toolkits used by other programs. Spotify has a smaller fraction, at about 130MB, and god knows what it’s pulling in and is able to share with e.g. the main browser process.
RAM is only not expensive in desktops. In laptops, getting more RAM almost always means getting a higher-tier laptop in other ways which adds a lot to the price.
Spotify is not a browser, it’s an app.
In laptops, getting more RAM almost always means getting a higher-tier laptop in other ways which adds a lot to the price.
That’s only true if you buy soldered RAM. Don’t do that.
It for a fact uses CEF: https://www.spotify.com/us/opensource/
Chromium Embedded Framework literally describes itself as follows on its Git repos: “Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). A simple framework for embedding Chromium-based browsers in other applications.”
The Spotify “app” is mostly just web app code running on top of a single page Chromium instance, meaning for the most part, it isn’t truly native.
And takes more resources than a tab because it doesn’t share them, it has its own copy.
We are talking about PWAs?
My point, exactly.
So those require what is effectively a web browser to run them - do you know what the “WA” in “PWA” stands for?
None of this goes against the fact that I went and checked for you and indeed the Spotify app takes about 5x as much RAM as the native app. Do you want to, I don’t know, give a hint of recognition that you erred in some way?
BTW when I replied you hadn’t edited your post. I’m getting to get the laptop that suits my needs, not yours. You said RAM is only expensive if you’re “dumb enough to buy a Mac” and now you’ve retreated to, “or any of the hundreds of non-Apple laptops with soldered RAM.”
I mean, it’s OK and good to adapt your position as you come to new realisations, but if you continue to do it this gracelessly, I will just block you because it’s annoying and there’s no reason to put up with it.
sudo apt install youtubedl-guipay money directly to the musicans
2 things:
- A lot of artists, you can pay money through Bandcamp or the artist’s store to get their music legitimately (and in lossless format, if you care about that kind of thing), and they often get a decent chunk of that money, especially when it comes to indie labels and self-published people.
- Why listen to (relatively) crappy YouTube audio when you can just get a FLAC or high bitrate MP3 off SoulSeek or simit?
