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Comment by ioquatix | Hacker News Reader

I can't help feel like a customer stuck in a consumer's world sometimes. I love buying and supporting individual artists on Bandcamp.

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Same, if this article is accurate, it would phase out the channel (iTunes store) that I use to buy singles & albums digitally. I don't buy music files from Amazon or Google, since the UX is better as an iPhone user with iTunes music store.

I use Spotify for general listening, but certain tracks, I'll buy on iTunes to have available offline (for what I thought was an indefinite period of time).

If you download the files to your laptop, you'll still have those files to keep and transfer between your devices. I bought most of my music on iTunes, then copied it across to my Android device via a microSD card.

(Incidentally, I'm still looking for a good Android music player for my offline files. Google Play Music works, but it isn't very elegant & it's hard to browse when you have lots of artists. I guess I'm wondering what the modern day Android equivalent of Winamp is.)

Try poweramp.

Poweramp [1] has a really nice UI (even with an ugly website) and properly refreshes when new music is added to the filesystem. I wrote some code [2] to rsync my music from iTunes to my Android phone over wifi as I got sick of all the buggy syncing solutions.

[1]: http://powerampapp.com/ [2]: https://github.com/jakecoppinger/android-itunes-rsync

I've been using Syncthing [0] for syncing music between all of my devices (Android phone included) for quite a while and it has always worked perfectly for me.

Curious if you also consider that one of those "buggy syncing solutions" you mentioned? And if so, what issues have you experienced with it?

[0] https://syncthing.net/

> I don't buy music files from Amazon or Google, since the UX is better as an iPhone user with iTunes music store.

Well, that and you can't buy music from Amazon or Google on an iPhone because neither wants to pay Apple their required cut.

Agree. All the music I buy online is through artist pages on Bandcamp, and maybe the occasional album from CDBaby.

The only problem I have with Bandcamp is that there are already some many good artists / music on Spotify. It's hard to take a stab at a more "amateur" market - it's not like we are running out of pro musicians to listen to. It's a shame because Bandcamp is actually pretty cool.

But where is the Bandcamp player that competes with Spotify's web player? Bandcamp needs a better player that I can enjoy using all day & in which I can build playlists.

When Spotify takes the next step of their "incredible journey", I want to have more than memories of the great music I found. So I buy music on Bandcamp. And make backups.

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