Sunset of libspotify | Hacker News Reader

Sunset of libspotify

developer.spotify.com

215 pointsciroduran236 comments

FWIW, this is my rant.

I cancelled Spotify last month. I've been a subscriber since 2006.

The app has become increasingly buggy, especially on my newish iPad. Frequently would refuse to play for minutes at a time.

But more critically, Spotify has become focused on "generating background noise as profitably as possible". I originally liked Spotify as a way of finding interesting albums I haven't listened to before, but now it's all podcasts and easy-listening covers. It's constantly trying to play albums in random order, and even more egregiously, related tracks when the current album finishes.

My relationship with music is now more suited to listening to a couple of tracks on any platform, and then buying it from Bandcamp.

I quite like how spartan and transparent Bandcamp is when it comes to most things. Discovery through other users has been great and (afaik) there is no blackbox algorithm - "this user bought 12 things you have", great I might find something by looking at what else they bought.

The quality of the recommendations is high, because 90% of music can be listened to in full in advance. So users only make purchases when they have a genuine interest. And fake results are less likely, because you can see purchase history.

The official recommendations from the Bandcamp articles tend not to be of interest to me and the chart categories just get saturated by passionate fans of niche genre artists in my experience, but the user graph is refreshingly simple.

The only thing I really don't like about Bandcamp is their lack of an API and the consequent difficulty of automatically downloading purchased albums.

youtube-dl (and yt-dlp) supports downloading from Bandcamp, but I'm not sure if it supports downloading anything other than the publicly-available low-quality MP3s. This[1] Reddit post seems like it may work if you capture your login cookie.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtubedl/comments/lge576/using_coo...

Yeah, I wasn't able to find any way for yt-dlp to download the HQ zipfiles either.

Having bought a few artist compilation on it, after clicking 5 links manually I resorted to writing a script to parse the webpage and get the links there.

But what's even worse is that their CDN throttles your IP after ~15 downloads and you have to wait 1-2 hours before you can download again (which I've already hit a few times, even while clicking on the links manually)

Thanks! That's good to know - I've already built out authentication in the Puppeteer-based sync tool I'm working on, but haven't yet got further, and it'll help a lot once I do to know to account for this.

Granted, that means still a third step to orchestrate - auth ending in cookie capture, then album list fetch and reconciliation, and finally (on the other end of some queue) album downloading. Thank goodness they didn't make it too simple, I guess - I'd have hated for their annoyingly inconsistent login captcha to have been the last arbitrary challenge I had to overcome.

(I can't fairly give them too hard a time, I suppose - they're doing an incredible amount with a tiny team and in that context even having pulled their public API is reasonable, however much I wish they hadn't. Just that it'd be nice if they had the scope for dealing with use cases that aren't the adversarial mirroring they've clearly optimized against...)

CRON the DL?

I really, really hope that Epic doesn't ruin it.

Epic seems to have bought it for the relationships Bandcamp has within the music community -- they see Fortnite as a multiverse, and they've already hosted a couple of concerts. The Bandcamp and Harmonix acquisitions seem to be feeding into that, so hopefully they won't ruin the existing products in the process.

I suspect the real answer is even more cynical: Epic bought Bandcamp to make a point in their fight with Google (and Apple) over in-app billing.

https://9to5google.com/2022/04/30/epic-games-bandcamp-androi...

I feel like that'd be the least bad reason to buy it.

Epic's only interest in it appears to be to pad out their litigation. I expect they'll lose interest in it if they can bribe and sue their way into making it easier to get gambling in the hands of pre-teens.

I am sure they will shorten tracks to samples without logins or try a subscription model. I am just waiting for the platform to go sour. I recently downloaded Soulseek again after 20 years. It feels like we’ve gone full circle. I like Apple Music but I want to have copies of my music on disk.

My way of discovering new music using the magic of AI is to ask Alexa to play something and see what weird song it returns after it either mis-hears me or decides to play a bizarre cover.

> bizarre cover

"Gin and Juice", covered by Sissy Bar on their album "Statutory Grape" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDq2FGsEGd8

Fantastic. My initial find was "I wanna be like you" expecting the jungle book version before it announced to my toddler that it was by the "Psychedelic Porn Crumpets" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD0VpmaSBjs

Great cover!

I realise this isn't reddit. But this totally unlocked this memory in my mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL3EwjWhyUU

What's the original song? This doesn't sound like a cover of Snoop Doggy Dogg's "Gin and Juice"[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DI3yXg-sX5c

It is. Listen carefully... the first line of lyrics in the Sissy Bar version is "So much drama in the LBC, it's so hard being Snoop D-O-double-G..." and the chorus is "Rolling down the street, smoking menthols, sipping on gin and juice."

The quality of the recording makes the lyrics a bit difficult to pick out, but it's the same song.

Ok... this is awful but also kind of cool!

That's similar to my observation that if you speak gibberish into the youtube search bar the first or second result is almost always a song.

I'm beyond mystified as to what Spotify is tying to do with their recent UI, it's messy, it's unusable and reduces the value of the service by a lot.

I'm still a subscriber because it's cheap and an easy way to listen to music but I hate the fact that I no longer discover music like I used to on Spotify.

My guess is that designers are still getting paid, so, 'bring me something fresh!', its the same mess everywhere. Soon as you get a functional UI, designers will iterate infinitely until it becomes borderline unusable.

Its objective is to generate "growth & engagement" to justify those designers/marketers' salaries as opposed to being a tool to pay for & listen to music.

Really, really hate the "podcast invasion". If I could click a button to make all podcasts disappear from Spotify forever, I would.

I still listen on Spotify a lot---I have extensive playlists built up there over a decade. I keep thinking I should find a way out, though.

Indie Shuffle and Funk Whale have been good discovery tools for me lately.

Yep.. This is a classic example of how many subscription services have embraced user-hostile design, and focus on trying to force the behaviour they want, rather than adapt to the behaviour a paying customer wants.

I will never use Spotify for podcasts. Nothing against them having podcasts, but I have other ways to consume them. I would love to turn all that shit off in the UI, the same way I can turn off Radio and other things in iTunes.

But no, Spotify will forever push that shit on me - a paying customer - because they hope I will eventually relent under pressure and start using it, or something.

And that disrespect for their customers really sucks.

> I hate the fact that I no longer discover music like I used to on Spotify

I concur with this. In my experience, ~3-5 years ago was like the golden age of music discovery for me regarding Spotify. These days my Discover Weekly is mostly a complete waste of my time.

Family Mix was incredible as well, I'm disappointed it was discontinued.

It's a bit hidden, but Search --> Made for You is an absolute gem to me. The mixes generated there do often turn up new music for me.

Oh interesting, they have genre/artist/decade mixes there...

I've used the daily mixes and soundtrack to your day, both with middling success.

I'll give the others in that section a try though, thanks!

> These days my Discover Weekly is mostly a complete waste of my time.

OTOH, Release Radar is my go to.

Yet it still forgets to surface new releases from artists I actually follow. Instead, it has pretty much become another Discover Weekly.

I keep the subscription because I use it to play music for my kids (which is a use-case I haven't found a suitable replacement for). If it was just my wife and I, I'd have dropped it at least a year ago.

The Android app struggles with switching off of WiFi to cellular and vice versa -- I have to force stop the app and restart it regularly, I mean honestly it's almost every single day. It's really annoying. The UX is also atrocious. The UI will frequently load with stale state but it takes seconds for it to update. I'll go to tap some album or playlist and it'll get re-shuffled and I'll have tapped something entirely different. It's honestly pathetic.

I try not to view the tech world through rose-tinted goggles but it seems to me that the only thing that keeps this company alive is the fact that they're streaming. Same with Netflix, honestly. And Netflix has been having their lunch eaten for the last decade. I suspect Spotify will go through the same experience.

I'm an Apple music subscriber and I feel discovery is poor there, too. Back in the day iTunes genius was phenomenally good at recommending music. I spent a fortune in the iTunes music store. My guess is they let it stagnate because with cloud music there's no financial incentive to make music discovery good as they get the monthly revenue either way.

Way back in the day, The Pirate Bay was my discovery tool. They recommended other bands that were perfect for my tastes. I haven't even looked at that place in like 10 years or something. On the legal/legitimate front, Pandora has the BEST discovery algo I've ever seen. I can put in one artist and listen for hours. (I just have to thumbs-down Coldplay a lot) I've also found a lot of great music there. The bum thing is, some of it is not available on Spotify.

> My relationship with music is now more suited to listening to a couple of tracks on any platform, and then buying it from Bandcamp.

It depends on your Genre. For me I freaking love Spotify because they have all the music I like to listen to all in one place for one flat rate every month and (almost) no bullshit, but I can see how someone who is into indie artists would prefer to go your route (I probably would if I was into that music).

One major gripe I have about the Spotify app on iOS is they can't seem to figure out background audio for podcasts. This isn't a big deal as I still use PocketCasts, but for Joe Rogan I have to use Spotify.

Weird, I think Spotify is basically the best thing ever for indie artists. I can find an artist I like on TikTok and then immediately with zero friction be listing to all their music. There’s no, “well I like them but do I like them enough to buy an album.”

> I think Spotify is basically the best thing ever for indie artists.

Funny, I know a couple who think that Spotify is the worst thing to happen. Streaming, especially at Spotify's rates, might as well be piracy. The income's no different.

At least in the piracy model you don't have a badly made app between you and your music.

You should still buy the album if you care about it, even with streaming.

> You should still buy the album if you care about it, even with streaming.

I agree with this to a degree. If I really like a small indie artist I'll usually buy a Vinyl from them. But alot of the music I listen to is "mainstream" and made by artists that are already raking in cash, not saying that they don't deserve the same compensation, but I feel exponentially less bad that Taylor Swift is making $0.0005 per stream rather than some indie artist trying to make it.

Best thing for you in terms of getting to listen to indie artists, but what do they get out of it?

I only use Spotify (well, and YouTube for a lot of indie Korean artists...?). At least if they sell vinyl, I regularly go buy vinyl/merchandise from them directly. Not that I'm in favor of the "Spotify pittance", just that it's non-zero in terms of conversions.

They're actually visible? Without Spotify and YouTube I would've never stumbled upon some of the artists, bought their albums or listened to their concerts.

Bandcamp has been my go-to place for music every since they launched. My musician friends like it as a distribution platform. I like it as a place to discover music. I love it as a place to buy (and own) music.

Bandcamp is great, but it’s odd to see all these sites suggested as alternatives to Spotify.

Bandcamp is a marketplace for musicians to host their music, merch, etc. so that people directly support them. There’s a wide range of mainstream to tiny bands started by someone last month. It’s an awesome place to fine new music, awesome place to buy it, as you get your pick of formats, etc. the app/site offer streaming features, but it’s primarily a marketplace.

But I wouldn’t never consider it an alternative to Spotify. Spotify is a music streaming platform. It’s designed for curating and streaming, and for a bit had a decent recommendation engine. Bandcamp could never replace Spotify for me because only a fraction of my playlists are albums/songs available on Bandcamp.

It's true that the lack of catalog in Bandcamp is a huge negative compared to Spotify, but that's a bit of a chicken and egg problem as well. Artists go where music consumers go, and music consumers go where artists go. Spotify got around this problem in the beginning by basically streaming pirated material, while Bandcamp would never go that way.

Other than that (breadth of catalog), Bandcamp can do most things Spotify does, while making things more sustainable for the artists. I generally download FLACs directly from Bandcamp, but sometimes I use the streaming app on iOS if I buy something like on mobile network. Works as well as Spotify.

> It's true that the lack of catalog in Bandcamp is a huge negative compared to Spotify

That depends on what you're looking for in music. If you're a passive listener who just wants to listen to something familiar, sure, Spotify's probably got you covered. But if you're a music enthusiast who's looking for new things, Spotify is severely lacking. Many things simply aren't on Spotify (yet), and even if they are, Spotify seems to make it hard to find new things.

> because only a fraction of my playlists are albums/songs available on Bandcamp

Doesn't the same apply to Spotify? A huge chunk of my local FLAC collection isn't available there.

I thought that they removed the shuffle album button after Adele rose a stink [0]? It was cool to see them make that change - but its a mystery how they got in that state in the first place.

My biggest gripe with Spotify is around their implementation of Play Next and the Queue - which makes it difficult to navigate some of my most basic user journeys. The way it works is:

Current playing song -> Queue -> Play Next

My CUJs that go south with this are:

  - I want to play a song after the current one, but there are already things in my queue. I can only add to the end of my queue, so I have to do that and drag it to the top.
  - I press play on an album to listen to it (and it gets added to my Play Next). I then want to queue up another album after the one that I'm listening to, but the only option is to add it to my Queue. I then have to go and add all of the current songs in my Play Next to my Queue before adding the new album to my Queue.
  - I open my app and press play on album. It will play the first song before starting to play the songs in my Queue from the last time I was using Spotify. I apparently needed to clear my Queue the first thing when getting on.

There are certain things in the UI that signal to me that the abstraction might be confusing them as well - such as when right clicking on songs to remove them from Play Next, the option reads "Remove from Queue". What the heck...

I feel like Google Play got this part of the UI right, with (IIRC) a single queue and treating it as double ended. They exposed both a "Play Next" and "Queue" options on their catalog - and the Play Next functionality would put the song/album at the _beginning_ of your Queue. Clicking play on an album wiped your Queue and filled it with just the single album. Maybe that's just where my expectations for how this sort of UX should work were made, but it made sense to me :)

[0] https://theconversation.com/adele-has-successfully-asked-spo...

I 100% agree with all your issues. Some product manager(s) at Spotify seriously messed up when they designed the queue system. Maybe it's too much to ask for the Next songs to actually play Next?

Interesting, I found a feature request for a "play next" on their community forums [0]. They responded:

> We've discussed this feature in-depth internally and also carried out a variety of tests with different groups. Based on the results we can confirm that for the moment we won't be changing the existing way queueing works. As we don't have any immediate plans to implement this, we'll be changing the Idea Status to Case Closed.

Added my +1 and keeping my fingers crossed that they revisit :)

[0] https://community.spotify.com/t5/Closed-Ideas/Queue-Queue-to...

Also 100% agree, the queue system as designed is almost unusable. I also raised a request on the community about it a bunch of years ago, but it was quickly closed. I’ll send another vote into the void on this one.

> My relationship with music is now more suited to listening to a couple of tracks on any platform, and then buying it from Bandcamp.

I think the music world would be considerably enhanced if everyone did this. Bandcamp is pretty damn artist friendly and I love that about it.

I started doing the same. Use Spotify/LastFM/various sources for discovery and if I find something that I like, purchase on Bandcamp + download FLAC files. Started doing it just to support the artists, but quickly it became invaluable in replacing Spotify as the audio quality seems to be getting worse and worse, even as a premium user.

> Bandcamp is pretty damn artist friendly and I love that about it.

Too bad Epic will eventually run it into the ground.

Yeah not the greatest recent bit of news... and I was pretty dismayed by it. I really hope that doesn't happen, but will prepare for the opposite.

Well the good news is that it's probably somewhat easy to make another bandcamp these days compared to when they started, so if it got bad enough, someone could pop up to fill the void with nothing but a Stripe subscription and S3 if they were determined (and not VC funded) enough.

> and even more egregiously, related tracks when the current album finishes

Not only this, but notice when the current album finishes and the next (random) song plays, the back button doesn't work any more! (it will just keep restarting the song you didn't ask for, rather than allowing you to go back through your selected album/song).

>The app has become increasingly buggy

They've got some seriously weird bugs going on in the backend with their catalog too. I can open an artist's page and it looks like all the songs I liked are gone. So I add some and then find out I've now got a bunch of doubles. So while I've "liked" one instance of a song, it's not longer the "official" one? Then recently the audio and artwork for one liked song changed to someone else's remix of it!

The original song: https://open.spotify.com/track/6dPgd8QtZKozuh725mZbXw

The shitty cover or whatever that replaced the original in my liked songs: https://open.spotify.com/track/2dJol6YvFoNs8WMRzn8HEp

It didn't affect just me either, my spouse had the same song swapped in her playlists too. How tf does that even happen?

I believe sometimes a song become unavailable for some reason (license issues or whatever) and they replace it with a similar version. Most times it's just the exact same song in a different album, some cases it's a different recording from the same artist, but in the rare cases the algorithm may find a cover version to offer as a suitable replacement. I think the main issue is they don't keep track of the original song that received the like, so when it comes back, it's not restored to your library.

> and even more egregiously, related tracks when the current album finishes

FYI, this can be turned off in the Spotify settings, under "autoplay".

Unfortunately, as of about 6 months ago, Spotify ignores the auto play setting if you’re listening through a smart speaker. And it’s not a bug.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/10/22774897/spotify-connect...

I think it depends on how you are playing it on the smart speaker.

If you are playing it by saying "<trigger> play <song or album or artist or genre>" I think it will behave as you describe.

If however you are playing by having your desktop Spotify or mobile Spotify control your smart speaker using Spotify Connect, in my experience it obeys the "Autoplay similar songs when your music ends on other devices" setting under the "Autoplay" settings on the desktop or mobile device.

With Spotify Connect you should be able to select your smart speaker (and possibly other things) in the "connect to a device" menu. The button to invoke that is in the lower right on desktop between the queue button and the volume control. In iPad it is on the lower left.

Spotify Connect is good about sharing status between devices, so you can start an album playing on a smart speaker from say your desktop, pause it, and later from the couch have your tablet tell the smart speaker to pick up where it left off.

I tested whether it was consistent between iPad, desktop, and my Yamaha amp which acts as a smart speaker. It definitely did not carry the setting over, and Spotify confirmed that behaviour.

I just tested using Spotify on my iPad and my iMac, listening on an Echo Dot, Echo Show, Denon AVR-1913, and Google Home Mini.

The Echos use Spotify Connect, the Home Mini uses Google Cast, and the Denon uses Spotify Connect from the iMac.

From the iPad the Denon was not showing up in the Spotify devices list so I used the option to connect to an Airplay or Bluetooth device to connect via Airplay. Later, I noticed Spotify was asking for permission to scan my network for devices, I gave permission, and the Denon then started showing up directly in the devices list. I don't know if connecting to the Denon from the device list uses Spotify Connect or Airplay, because mobile Spotify unlike desktop Sotify doesn't say on the device list how it connects.

The test was to tell connect to the test target, start playing a one song playlist, then when it starts playing use the position slider to skip to near the end, switch to the view that shows what is playing and the queue and up next lists, and see what happens when the song ended.

Then I'd stop it (if it was playing), disconnect from the target, toggle the autoplay on remote devices setting, and do the above test again.

I'd again stop it (if necessary), disconnect, and toggle the autoplay on remote devices setting back to its normal setting (which for me is off).

For the Echo Show, Echo Dot, and Google Home Mini it obeyed the autoplay setting. When off it stopped after the playlist ended. When on it started playing a list of things it felt were related to the playlist song.

For the Denon it always stopped when the playlist finished, both when I was definitely connected with Airplay and when possibly connected with Spotify Connect.

Make sure you have an up to date version of Spotify. They added the ability to control autoplay on remote devices 2 or 3 months ago.

This is not correct. I use Spotify daily via Spotify Connect and it happens all the time. I have never used voice control.

Maybe it depends on what you Spotify Connect to?

I use it daily connecting to an Echo Dot from an iPad or iMac, and it definitely is not autoplaying anything.

What are you connecting to?

According to this page [1], they changed it earlier this year in response to those complaints the original article talks about:

> We're happy to announce that the option to manage Autoplay has been released for the desktop and now for the mobile app too.

> Once you have the latest version installed, you will find it as "Autoplay on other devices" in the Settings menu and it will apply globally for connected devices and the web player.

> Note that you will need to log in and toggle the setting on or off on either the PC/Mac or Smartphone apps, but once done you can continue using Spotify on whichever platform you prefer and the setting you chose will be reflected accurately.

Mine is behaving like that.

[1] https://community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/AutoPlay-...

There are definitely target dependencies. I just tested on Echo Dot, Echo Show, Google Home Mini, and Denon AVR-1913. On all but the Denon it obeys the autoplay setting. On the Denon it does not autoplay regardless of the setting. So maybe there are devices where it disobeys like my Denon but defaults to autoplay?

Interesting, I hadn’t heard that they had added a second auto play setting. Not that there was anything wrong with the old setting…

Anyway, I’m seeing that new setting now and it seems to be working so far, thanks for the tip!

A big source of my frustration with Spotify has been that the setting is per device, defaults to being on, and is often re-enabled during updates. I wish my account settings could be universal and permanent, considering it’s a cloud-based app.

To be honest I’ve left Spotify for no particular reason other than that ive got a discount for Deezer with the phone subscription, but yeah it never occurred to me but I’ve continuously found interesting songs with Deezer like in daily basis

me2

E.g. for months now when casting play button is >play< instead of >pause< and you can pause music only after you minimize it

Or the fact that adding something to the queue prevents you from using app for 2 seconds waiting for info popup to disappear.

It's a play and stop music app being used on the most popular hardware and software. I don't even know how are they able to screw that badly.

And it keeps putting podcasts on top of my music which I am not using spotify for.

And yes I'm lazy, migrating my music preferences to another platform seems to never be the thing I want to do right now.

> Spotify has become focused on "generating background noise as profitably as possible"

What does this mean? I listen to the music I want to listen to, in my playlists. Where would I get exposed to this new focus? The only "feed" I can think of is my "Discover weekly" but that contains music. I don't think I've ever seen a podcast in my Spotify app.

People who interact with Spotify using the search feature as the entry point won't ever interact much with podcasts. The home screen, though, is filled with them. Given it's what every user sees when starting the app, it is indeed a big focus.

That said, the contents of the home screen heavily vary. I've never listened to a podcast on their platform, but Spotify still suggests me lots of podcasts on my Windows desktop and my phone. For some reason, it never shows them on my work laptop. Maybe it's because I set the laptop's language to English instead of using my native language - I've noticed Spotify only suggests me native-language podcasts.

I had started to receive pop-ups. That was one of the last in the series of annoyances before I decided to cancel.

I have cancelled during COVID since I wasn't commuting anymore.

My rant is I'm fairly certain that I have less freedom with the app and more ads since I'm a user that used to pay than before I became a paid user.

I really smell a dark pattern in there and I'm not joking, the app was treating me like a back alley garbage sack after I stopped paying.

While I certainly wouldn't put such behavior past them, just from that information, it seems like it's also quite possible that the free-tier experience has just gotten worse overall since you started paying.

I canceled last month as well though had been planning to since hearing of this:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90704310/spotify-boycott-daniel-...

I was paying for a family plan with some people spread out and wanted to get everyone on the same page before I just dropped their paid service. I have to say it's been horrendous using the app over what seems like months. I recently bought a car with Apple CarPlay (which is garbage on all fronts IMO though may have more to do with Subaru's console than Apple).

As you said, I was bombarded with Podcasts when the app loads in the car though I NEVER listen to them, ever. Even when my phone isn't connected to my car. Playback has gotten super annoying where if I'm listening to a playlist I've made or my Liked songs when I disconnect the phone and re-connect the song I was listening to will continue to play to the end but then then the app will take over and play recommendations instead continuing with the playlist I was listening to, every time. I also don't like not being able to generate a playlist in the app from Liked songs as I was using liking songs as way to quickly group a few tunes that I want to investigate further at a later time and maybe keep around or remove after a couple listens. They typically don't stay liked for long.

Since leaving the service I've been listening to the couple gigs of songs I had cached locally in iSub on my phone. I used to host my own Subsonic server, over 12 years I think, but had a catastrophic hardware failure in Feb 2021 which brought all my containers down permanently. Fortunately, I was able to recover the array long enough to copy everything to an external drive, nearly a TB of MP3's/AAC/FLAC etc. Not sure where to go from here as I don't really have the interest or resources to build a new/better/more efficient homelab nor do I have the time. These services to stream and never own or curate a thing are killing my interest in general in learning how to roll your own again, which oddly I am somewhat thankful for especially as warmer weather approaches. This has lead me to cancel other streaming services and really question how badly I want to rent content which always ends in not doing so these days. My kids don't always appreciate it but I feel like I've taken back a small amount of control by opting out and not participating. Interested in seeing how far I can go with this purge...

> Not sure where to go from here as I don't really have the interest or resources to build a new/better/more efficient homelab nor do I have the time

Disclaimer: this is my commercial service...

A middle way is to use what is essentially a hosted service for streaming your own collection. I run https://asti.ga/ . Let me know if it seems interesting or you have any questions!

I learned so much when Spotify came out, the recommendation algorithm was remarkable and I'm truly grateful for the music I've discovered.

But that was many years ago. Haven't used it in probably two years. Every time I try to it only suggests me crap. I don't know what happened.

YouTube is my go to when I want to find something new.

For listening to stuff I already know, I'm old fashion and have folder with my audio files. My most precious backup.

These problems seem endemic with these services. Apple music definitely seems no better. Huge bugs that seem to go unfixed for large periods of time. Unhelpful algorithm.

Especially Spotify is trying to make it's algorithm it's main product; and not to give you what you want. They want to make it pay to win and sell it to record companies and podcasts.

It's really odd because these companies spend tremendous amounts of money for content and then skim on hiring technical expertise. It's like buying the cheapest tires you can find for the landing gear of an Airbus A380.

Yeah, I tried Apple Music, and cancelled during the free trial. It was that bad.

I totally agree with this.

I love Bandcamp (and also Beatport). Still have my spotify subscription, but its mostly used for discovery. Foobar2k is how I actually listen to music most days.

My biggest reason for maintaining my own collection is to compensate for the possibility that spotify will arbitrarily remove tracks.

What have you replaced Spotify with for music discovery? I'm a Spotify user on the fence myself

I've been using last.fm for many years now. Hundreds of thousands of scrobbles later, it's still serving up recommendations that I'm now using to build up my personal Jellyfin library that I stream to my phone via Finamp. I use a VPN so I can always connect to my home server when I'm on the go.

Spotify was a pretty convenient all-in-one service for a while. But they've fallen prey to the growth trap and dark patterns for a while now, with no signs of improving any time soon. This solution isn't quite as easy as OG Spotify... but it's free, gives me something to hack and work on, and puts me in control of my music library again. There's something very freeing about consciously thinking about my music library, instead of allowing Spotify to spoonfeed you artists that give up a share of their profits [1].

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/02/spotify-will-now-allow-art...

Long ago the Xbox had a last.fm powered music service that gave the best recommendations. I could put it on auto play and just let last.fm pick tracks for me and I'd rarely end up skipping a song. No service since then has come close. I was really disappointed when it was shutdown and replaced with one of Microsoft's first stabs at their own music service.

I've found the FT's weekly album reviews to be quite diverse. But also... just asking people!

For discovering music, I like Audile (https://audile.app)

It recommends a random album from Deezer’s library on every page load.

> It's constantly trying to play albums in random order, and even more egregiously, related tracks when the current album finishes.

This can be turned off in the settings.

I wound up going back to pandora recently. I had started using Spotify really late (2021) and couldn’t understand any of the praise it had.

I feel like I should, I just can't find the time to commit and buy all the songs from my Liked playlist..

Just use NewPipe and locally download the audio of the tracks you want for free. It's much simpler.

> It's constantly trying to play albums in random order, and even more egregiously, related tracks when the current album finishes.

(The following may vary in some details between desktop and mobile versions of Spotify, but the general idea works in both).

On my iPad it only shuffles playlists by default, not albums. To play a playlist without it being shuffled the trick is to start it by clicking the first song rather than clicking the playlist's play button.

Clicking the first song starts that song playing and sets the "next from" list to the rest of the playlist not shuffled.

Starting an album by clicking the first song instead of hitting the album's play button works the same way, so simplest is to always start both albums and playlists that way unless you actually want shuffle.

The above works if what you want to do is listen to a specific album or playlist and then when it is finished choose another album or playlist, assuming you start with a clear queue.

If there is anything in the queue it will play the song you clicked, then the queued items, then the rest of the "next from" list so clear the queue either before you start your album or playlist or before the first song finishes.

If what you want to do is listing to more than one album or playlist in a row, without shuffling, and without having to wait until one ends to choose the next, you might think you could start the first one using the above method, and then while that is playing add the others to the queue but that fails. The queue has priority over the "next from" list.

The best way I've found to play multiple preselected albums is to simply make a playlist for this and add the albums to it in the order I want to hear them, and then play that playlist as described above. Next time I want to listen to a different set of albums I delete the previous play list and remake it with the new albums.

I'm not sure how to play multiple preselected playlists in order. You don't seem to be able to copy a playlist to another playlist, so the trick for multiple albums does not work. You can queue the playlists one after the other which mostly works, except that if there is anything in the "next from" list that will be played after the last song from the queue.

I don't know how to clear the "next from" list, but here is a hack. Make a playlist with a single song. Start that playlist and then hit pause. Now add your other playlists to the queue, and then hit the "next song" button to start the queue. When the queue finishes that song from the one song playlist will become the next up song but it won't start playing because it already played.

It seems like Spotify’s developers are cut off from public input. For example, when the Electron client was released, they removed the standard back/forward keyboard shortcuts native to macOS (cmd+[ and cmd+]). Clearly, this was a regression and a relatively straightforward fix, but the issue was ignored in the community feedback forum because of “lack of popularity.”

These threads always degenerate into a general airing of grievances. There are multiple issues with Spotify (E.g. no lossless/HiFi, usability issues etc). But in this case I think they have gone above and beyond expectations by supporting libspotify for 7 years after it was deprecated.

Supported is a giant overstatement; some basic features stopped working as early as 2016.

Also for example, search died in 2020, which broke Spotify support in what was my favourite player, Clementine.

But it was the only way for desktop apps to use playback, without going electron and negotiating a widevine license to use the web SDK

I was appalled when they removed long-press to preview. I cancelled because of it. Yes, I'm that petty.

Really tiresome how off-topic threads get from just the bare mention of a product name in the title. Extremely generic complaints and rants.

Developers or project managers telling the developers what to implement?

the thing is, most commercial products are deconnected from reality because they do not have public issue trackers like e.g. github

Meh. Plenty of commercial products have feedback mechanisms which are basically user-placating black holes for one reason of an other.

Sometimes it’s because it’s a small product and the dev has a specific vision, but more generally it’s because the PMs want to lead flash so they get hierarchy visibility and the devs either have to work on what the PM says or want to work on fun stuff, which user feedback drudgery often is not (not to mention you first need to trawl through it in order to evaluate and classify it)

Just look at discord for instance (because it infuriates me), their zendesk is full of stuff which is broken or requests for more polish / improvements to recent features (like making threads more useful).

What were their most recent releases? Fucking Party Mode. And breaking notifications (I assume due to the Highlights beta). And whatever the fuck “land-io” is.

Meanwhile there’s still no way to rebind or disable the application’s built-in shortcut, in a gamer-oriented program.

Github’s “feedback” repo is a similar graveyard.

Ha ha, Discord. You can map things like mute to joystick buttons, but the lazy devs/people couldn't be bothered to enumerate the device ID along with the button number.

So if you have multiple USB controllers, the assigned button number on every single one of them will send the toggle mute signal.

Meanwhile we get the Party mode like you mentioned; cute typing games with overlays telling us how many key presses we managed to string together without pause..

Sometimes you wonder whether there is more than one full time paid dev working on those apps..

Usually there’s loads.

However, there are lots factors which cause this issue, partially repeating the previous things:

- devs want to work on fun / sexy stuff

- or they want backend work and there’s a lack of staff on the client side (because the hardcoded shortcuts or the random beeping are entirely client-side issues)

- PMs want to design new whizbang stuff they can wank themselves over or add to their portfolio or whatever, triaging and fixing papercuts and usability bugs is not sexy unless an n+x hit them and tells you to get them fixed, this is even more of an issue if development is PM/manager-driven and deviating is risky

- you may not want to put your finger in that trap if that tags you as the person who fixes the shit bug, doing it once in a while can be nice / interesting / rewarding, doing it all the time less so

- discord is a social network (or at least social-network-adjacent), meaning they probably have a lot of staff involved in mitigating abuse (spam, scams, fraud, …)

- discord has received a lot of investment (500m last year), I don’t know how their cashflow is but the issue of investment is growth chasing, chasing network effects is more useful than fixing minor usability bugs here and I doubt anyone’ll leave discord over random beeps

> devs want to work on fun / sexy stuff

I've heard numerous times developers saying that they'd gladly fix some annoyances in {{megacorp product}} but product managers couldn't care less to allow spending time on those.

I agree, but why present the facade of collecting bug reports via a community forum? Years ago Spotify implemented gapless playback because people asked for it. Then they got rid of mail because it wasn’t popular enough.

I think they have the capability to improve their product, but they have become too reliant on what casual users want. Crowdsourcing isn’t a replacement for product management.

> they have become too reliant on what casual users want

Isn't that the fate of all software as it grows big? Optimize for the casual users, leave the power users in the dirt. Companies keep forgetting that casual users eventually become power users on the most expensive plan, if you give them the freedom to do so.

That is false. That’s like saying most gym members become gym rats that take premium classes.

No, most users never use it and just forget to cancel and those are the most profitable users to have. Just like for gym memberships.

Let's get rid of the heavy weights and squat machine and fill the gym up with stationary bikes. Then you piss off the power lifters and the mum that wants to go from stationary bike to a more serious routine will have to look for another gym, because here they're only catering for the casual users and people that forget their membership.

This is what happens with popular software.

You just described Planet Fitness to a T.

Don’t drop your weights or the alarm will go off!!!

Yeah, I wouldn't say everyone becomes gym rats, but I think that a lot of users have some power user functionality they use.

In the same sense gyms do not only contain machines being used by everyone, there are overlapping subsets people use.

The feature equivalent of Pareto's principle or something.

Why does a public issue tracker lead to not being disconnected from reality? It's only a tiny minority that contributes to that and I don't see how that helps them be more grounded in reality. I am not saying it can't help but I don't think it is a sufficient condition.

with github you are basically significantly reducing the psychological barrier of entry toward the action of reporting bugs or feature requests. I very frequently create issues on OSS projects. I've ~never done it on non-OSS projects, which is ad-hoc.

Public issue trackers aren’t even reality. More often than not they give voice to the vocal minority.

Used to work for Spotify back in the days. I was the maintainer of libspotify since its inception (early 2009) and a few years on. TBH I'm surprised it was still being supported up until this day by the backend. Though, some of the earliest hardware integrations were made using libspotify (before the eSDK came about) so I suppose it just had to be kept alive longer than otherwise would have been needed.

RIP <3

Hey, Cool to see someone who worked on this :) Back in the day I wrote a (probably really bad, not a C/C++ developer) wrapper around libspotify for Node.js: https://github.com/FrontierPsychiatrist/node-spotify

At some point it could do enough for me to build a webapp with Node.js running on a Rapsberry Pi to stream Spotify.

I even got contacted by Spotify to take down the domain node-spotify.com for it.

I agree. Seems it had a good run. I still remember the fairly long discussions of whether to make the public API C or C++. Fun times. :)

> C or C++

How did Spotify land on C?

The client itself was C++, so it would have been the natural choice. But we didn't want the ABI liability since it was shipped in binary form. So libspotify became a thin C-wrapper over the C++ core. That way, we didn't have to worry about vtable layouts blowing up.

How was it working for Spotify? They are kind of an interesting company for me

Too bad to see this go - this was the only API out of the modern streaming services that you could actually use to build something truly new.

The new Spotify API (along with others like Apple Music) basically allow you to do some of the things the official players offer for browsing and managing music, and give simplistic playback options - effectively, you can build a Fisher Price version of the official app, following the official app’s template, and that’s about it.

I get that it’s all DRM driven, but it really sucks - from Spotify to Netflix and everything in between, we have all these online services with great(ish?) content but terrible UI, bloated embedded browser-based apps and just all around bad user experiences. So much could happen to better these services if they offered open APIs to subscribers.

It’s frustrating that we have so many tools for building apps that run everywhere, yet everything seems so increasingly locked down.

This should be one of the most tinkerer-empowering times of humanity, and yet it feels like it’s becoming one of the most restrictive times.

> This should be one of the most tinkerer-empowering times of humanity

Why? The internet is a massive, low-friction distribution channel. The economic incentives and legal/commercial imperatives are almost entirely geared (and heavily so) towards the centralisation and walled-gardening of value.

I get the sentiment, and wish it were so, but it just isn't so and nothing in the current "times" suggests to me that we have much outside of token pockets of resistance to these practices.

So what's the problem here: is it laws (DRM) or is it profit driven?

If it's law/DRM - then the law is broken, no? How then does the law/policy exist to allow "the most tinkerer-empowering times of humanity"?

Those are good questions.

I think the primary driver is DRM, which itself is driven by the content owners more so than service providers.

While the streaming services themselves surely want to protect their service from theft, they would largely benefit (with some caveats) from having a platform that's extensible and flexible as a competitive edge, similar to how a phone vendor wants to have a thriving third party app scene.

Meanwhile, the content owners still use misguided tactics that punish legitimate users in the hopes of stopping piracy. Piracy that always seems to find a way to continue.

This leads to some good questions around what kind of policy can be made to give content owners legal rights to their IP while also respecting user's rights to build and extend.

Because ultimately the core offering of these streaming services is their breadth of content and the license negotiations and library management they do. Their apps are just front-ends to that.

So, a "right to extend" initiative that pairs with the "right to repair" initiatives could be something interesting to explore.

Late responding, though the conclusion I always seem to reach regarding piracy is that it should be frowned upon as a society with the caveat that it not be illegal, and that it being some version of legal or tolerated sufficiently to act as a counterbalance to a potential system out of balance: 1) if platform providers suck (which maybe includes a lack of interoperability, e.g. walled gardens for only Disney content), and/or 2) content providers are trying to extract too much value from society - which balances with how wealthy society is on average - then if you can only afford shelter/food and other necessities for a minimal acceptable quality of life (including whatever telecommunications and entertainment or education access is arguably necessary for enjoyment of life including being able to have interests to talk about with people, which may be movies or series you pirate because government policy has structured society to suffocate the individual or not help them adequately - arguably driven by industrial complexes capturing our political systems and influencing to dictating policy that helps them at cost of the individual), etc...

If 100% of people pirate and no money is going to funding creativity then something is likely incredibly wrong with our systems' designs and society, but at least if piracy is not illegal then authoritarian control and punishment can't be a violent-force tool to extract value that sovereign individuals decide isn't worth it to them compared to their other costs; this then would arguably cause all parties, all industries, to align to make sure the foundation - the floor - of society is solid and generating/producing [in sustainable way] to extract some value to then reinvest to generate more ROI for society; there are some more recent theories regarding a Universal Basic Income that the ROI from the UBI will actually [at least eventually] pay for the cost of the UBI itself.

TL;DR - Piracy is a useful and valuable mechanism to keep a competitive greed driven for-profit industry in check.

Kudos to Spotify for supporting libspotify and its use-cases for so many years. I'm sure it hasn't been easy and that copyright owners haven't been very fond of it.

Any sufficiently advanced act of benevolence is indistinguishable from malevolence. Or, perhaps, and somewhat less grave, they needed this time to build their case / simply hadn't gotten around to this yet.

Spotify has become pretty hostile towards its users, which makes it hard for me to believe there was any good will involved here.

I really don’t get the hostility thing. I’ve been paying Spotify for like a decade — I give them money and then I play music with extremely broad device support, a massive library, and seamless offline with no upcharges.

Spotify has got to be one of the least shady services I use.

> seamless offline

I've experienced a massive downgrade of the offline experience in the Android client over the last couple years. It used to behave offline-first, so if I drove out of cell service and played a saved album, it would look locally first. Now I have to force it to offline mode explicitly, which is a pain when on a long rural road trip. If I don't, it'll spin endlessly trying to load album art and tracks I already have saved.

They use some of the darkest and most unobvious manipulative techniques to steer you towards some very nasty content - most of which comes in the form of their podcasts.

Edit: It doesn't seem to me like the content itself is of any particular interest to them beyond the engagement its resulting in. It's that same hateful and harmful content you see on all these platforms where money has become more important than humanity.

Yeah I notice they push the Joe Rogan Experience on me pretty hard even though I’ve clicked the button to stop showing me that rec. Can’t really blame them for trying after spending all that money on him though.

They're quite mean to free users; ie. they can't listen to Spotify in other countries, and they have a song skip limit. But that's at least understandable from a freemium perspective.

The most hostile thing they do to paying users, IMO, is not implementing basic features that people have been crying about for years. One example: you can't just select a bunch of songs and put them into a playlist.

Wait I do that all the time, I multi-select and drag songs into the playlist I want to add them to. It’s great for combining multiple public playlists with a similar vibe.

What? What the hell I've been trying to do this for years. This is on the desktop app?

Just checked, they finally added it...

NO kudos for barely doing the job.

Raspotify uses librespot and should keep working https://github.com/dtcooper/raspotify

Unfortunately its a bit unstable. I used to run raspotify and it always crashed due to some network issue or session timeout or whatnot and then wouldn't recover until the service was restarted. I'm glad it exists, but it cannot be relied upon. Maybe in a year or so.

I've been running Raspotify on a Raspberry Pi Zero W for nearly a year. And I've had to restart the service 4 times; mildly annoying.

It might be a good idea to make a cron job that restarts the service every night.

If only, its crashing after ~1h or so.

Can confirm this. This is also one of the reasons why I moved to librespot-java.

Is there a player similar to raspotify which uses librespot-java?

It's really sad as this library has no official replacement. There's libraries like the Web API, but this is a library running on a browser. libspotify allowed playback for custom applications (such as Mopidy[1]).

[1] https://mopidy.com/

I stopped using Mopidy when I started having weird playlists and song history crop up in my account. Very clearly nothing I'd played.

Best I can guess either there's a market in cracked auth tokens for the interface Mopidy use(s/d), or there's some sort of collision going on.

Changed password, de-authed Mopidy and shut it off, and all of a sudden the random crap stopped.

The way auth tokens are setup for Mopidy-Spotify you hold the encryption key for the blob with the OAuth data, and the intermediate server just has an id and the encrypted data. Note that the id is not a Spotify OAuth client-id but an internal one. This is done so we don't have to ship Mopidy-Spotify with the client-secret for the App registration (this was pre PKCE auth).

I.e. I would be highly surprised if our OAuth integration was the source for this issue, but I'm obviously biased as the author of https://github.com/adamcik/oauthclientbridge

As for libspotify, there you had to put in a (device) password and username, so if something scraped that config I guess all bets are off...

This happened to me using the official client. All was well after password change.

Turns out, spotify gets their data breached regularly and I'm assuming that's the case here.

It happened to me and my brother too (in separate occasions), with the official client.

The data and music "being played" with our accounts seemed so random and niche that I doubt that it was result of human interaction, seemed like something wrong with their DB. Also, changing the password didn't fix it.

Had to change the password and also delete all the data in the account, losing also my data of course. It had so much garbage that it was pretty much ruined anyway

Is this an alternative? https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot

Yes, that uses the non-public API for smart speakers and the likes. If and how Spotify can crack down on this is not well known at this point, but here's hoping they're using API keys from an old but popular device that's no longer receiving updates.

My raspotify/librespot install stopped working last week until i blocked apresolve.spotify.com on my network.

It seems they are switching some regions to a CDN that is not supported by librespot. There is some discussion on the librespot issues github page (https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/issues/972)

Yeah it sucks, I found mopidy-spotify to be janky in it's usage but it was the least worst means of playing audio from various backends. It doesn't look like there's much hope for it in the future https://github.com/mopidy/mopidy-spotify

edit: after looking a little deeper it seems there is indeed quite some activity and hope https://github.com/mopidy/mopidy-spotify/issues/110

AFAICT the community of unixy-hackers who used libspotify had moved on to librespot, eg. with spotifyd. Though of course, I don't know about every use case, and mopidy does seem stuck with the web api instead, which is weird considering the rise in popularity of spotifyd and spotify-tui.

The plan for mopidy-spotify was to move towards web-api for everything we could to be on the official APIs where possible. So the end state would have been only streaming left on libspotify, then figure out how to get librespot and GStreamer to play well enough together (there is a plugin but it's missing at least one feature we need).

But as you can see in issue #110 this goal hasn't been reached yet.

Isn't a library like this essential for companies that build e.g. active speakers which support streaming from Spotify?

So, shouldn't there be an official library?

There is an SDK behind a "Contact Us" button and presumably an NDA. librespot uses that API.

They have also shut down Spotify Stations this week :(

It was the best alternative for Pandora, which still isn't available in Europe.

I hadn't heard of this, apparently it was a small standalone app that only played Spotify radio stations.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/06/spotify-stations-shutting-...

I have to admit I'm curious why this is a loss, as one can listen to the exact same stations on the main Spotify app?

Stations had a super-simple UI. You just start the app and the music starts. Only a single swipe was needed to change the station. It was perfect, especially in the car.

The Spotify app is a mess. My stations are supposed to be in there, but I haven't found them yet. If I just want to play one of my playlists (and it's not in 'recently played'), I need to go to 'My Library', filter for playlists and then find it in the list. Beside 'recently played' the home screen is filled with stuff I don't care about.

Fwiw, (on Android) you can add playlists to your homescreen and they'll start playing immediately. It's in the playlist's ... menu.

Thank you, but it looks like this is not available on iOS.

How are they going to push their podcasts and other sponsored content if you use an alternative interface?

Wouldn't surprise me if their API won't be around for much longer either.

>What are the alternatives to libspotify

Torrents.

No, I’m dead serious. How big is your music library? Less than 1TB, isn’t it? Last year I’ve bought 1TB SSD for some 50$.

Streaming services for music simply don’t make technical sense anymore. What we need is a mirroring service.

I've gone back to buying music downloads, if people want a legal/sanctioned option. iTunes is still around, and Qobuz is entirely web-based for mainstream music, plus Bandcamp for indie stuff.

I could be wrong here, but is iTunes still selling you the lossy .aac files?

Yes, iTunes still sells you AAC files. The comparison here is Spotify though, which is also not lossless.

I miss allofmp3...

Being a product of the late 90s burn mp3s to CDs generation, I had a huge collection. Most of it was of Napster/WinMX/Kazaa/Limewire quality. I spent years curating it, and cataloging it. Then one day I opened a new iTunes on a new computer and it re-sorted all my files on my hard drive. Years of work... gone. I basically lost my interest in having my own collection after that. Pandora and Spotify have basically been an okayish replacement.

I'll use this as an opportunity to ask others: how large is your music library in bytes?

I used to collect music until one day I lost everything (it was all on one harddrive) - these days I just keep the stuff that is now rare / cannot be found anymore.

If I know even the average largest music libraries are ~1TB I will gladly buy two 1TB drives and begin collecting and buying music again.

Been there (lost ~120G, 50k songs), done that (music on RAID1 + backup drive). Current stats:

My "sorted" folder is what I sometimes listen to, and music that I collected or assimilated out of my own interest. That's 139G, containing ~18k files in ~2k folders. This includes about 500 flacs, the gross remainder is mp3. I try to get 256 to 320kbps these days, true stereo. My old collection started in the days of slow internet and 128kbps joint stereo (and sometimes even 96kbps), hence the massive difference in size.

My "unsorted" folder is an additional 266G with 35k files (60 flacs) in 4400 folders. This is mainly collections I got from friends and contains stuff I don't regularly listen to, and for which I have not yet checked the quality. Probably also a bunch of duplicates.

1TB sounds fair, though I'd go with a RAID1 of 2TB drives just to be sure. I wouldn't bother with SSDs, but if physical size matters check out 2.5" HDDs.

TBH, most of the time I just use tidal; unless I want a something that's not on there (or some specific version).

One problem with RAID is that it doesn't help with software failures (from filesystem meltdown to ransomware). It's also not geographically distributed, so will go down in a house fire or robbery.

Occasionally synced SSD kept at parents/friends' house solves both. In the old times it was (somewhat) costly and (somewhat) clunky, but with 1TB M.2 drives I'd consider both problems to be solved - and drives are only getting cheaper.

Also: let's not pretend that cloud services are more reliable than something you own. They aren't. iTunes sometimes stops playback midway with some "URL not found" error; songs disappear due to copyright reasons, and let's not pretend iTunes - or any other service - will not get phased out eventually, taking your entire library with it.

My main curated collection is 1.2TB, FLAC, about 3500 albums by 850 artists. Those transcoded to mp3 [0] take 190GB. Additionally I've got about 50GB of MP3s kicking around of my old music folders, things I couldn't find in FLAC, etc.

I'd say we're well into the territory where a respectable music collection doesn't occupy an appreciable amount of storage. A $30 flash drive would fit MP3s, a $150 SSD would fit FLACs. The challenge is managing multiple copies, but these sizes are even small enough to be practical for cloud backups.

[0] 128k CBR it seems? I forget. I used to use this for devices that didn't support FLAC natively, and when storage was smaller. I should probably either upgrade the quality or just zap it.

My library is long gone, but let's do some math instead.

A CD can hold 700 MB of data. 1 TB will hold 1428 full CD images. Of course, not all albums fill the whole CD, so it'll be even more once the audio is extracted to uncompressed audio files. That's already way more albums than I listen to on Spotify.

Then add some compression: my rule of thumb is 10x for mp3 and 2x for flac, but that may be a bit optimistic. Even assuming a low compression ratio of 1.5x, that leaves us with more than 2100 full albums.

I don't think I will ever listen to that much different music.

And Spotify doesn't even have the good version of my favorite Robyn album, and Kyle Gass Band only just reappeared after missing for months. Maybe I should start a collection, too.

I don't download music much anymore - that was much more of a thing for me in the college days. I've used Spotify and some vinyl and Bandcamp for years.

BUT I still have about 100G of music of varying organization and bitrate.

FYI, AWS Glacier Deep Archive (disaster recovery, cold storage) costs $1.00/TB/month - so if you love your data and want to make sure a fire or drive failure doesn't bring you down, I recommend using it.

Currently, my main library is 114 GB. It contains albums I like from artists I follow. Then I got another 110 GB of compilations. All the files are lossless, for no particular reason other than archival. There are a few MP3 mixed in there, but mostly because I can't find lossless versions, or I can't bother to download them in FLAC.

My music folder is at 410 GB right now, of which 160 GB are FLAC, the rest is MP3.

7345 songs (including 815 FLACs), 63GiB.

4.5G (90K bitrate opus), about 2k songs

This doesn't solve for discovery, which (IMO) is the real value of a service like Spotify.

Now that I think of it, an even better option would be IPFS. And since it's kind of obvious - like with Sci-Hub - it probably already exists, I just don't know about it?

The way I used to find new music was to read reviews in magazines, then buy the album. Later, it was blogs and torrents, but the principle is the same.

Using algorithms to discover music works for a lot of people, but I'm not sure that, for me, it ever outperformed just reading what other people said and then listening to the album if it sounded intriguing. It is more labor intensive, but the results were higher quality. Finding one artist I really, really like is worth sifting through a hundred mediocre ones, so whatever process gets me there is the best.

I like Spotify for other reasons, like being able to really deep dive into some artist (or some song: just listening to 20 different cover versions obsessively to see who did it best), but even before it was supposedly ruined, I was never blown away by their recommendations to me.

If I’m not mistaken the device I bought to play music in my living room uses libspotify. It’s a closed source device from a manufacturer that never open source stuff. So now I’ll probably end with a glorified cdplayer.

It should be using the embedded sdk, unless that manufacturer went particularly rogue.

https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/commercial-hardw...

Strongly suggest using the Spotify desktop web client. Content plays in album order. Even on free tier no restrictions for skips or playing specific songs. Ublock origin works just fine but will sometimes need a nudge after a while if it gets stuck on an ad.

[cancels subscription]

I am not interested of using the official client that requires 2 gb of memory and is full of bloat.

The sad thing is Spotify used to have a really, really, really good native client.

Spotify have been continually reducing their offering since inception. This reminds me of when they stopped supporting Djay, a djay software where you could mix spotify tracks. It was genuinely a super useful bit of kit.

Instead their devs waste time on useless features and UI rewrites that they have to go back and re-add old features to and never seem to optimise for performance.

Right super sad, it was the best native client I have ever seen, and they trashed it so they could make the interface more dopaminergic.

Yeah the old Qt? client was great & snappy. It took quite some time to get basic features like cmd-f for the new client and it still does not support searching playlist by typing directly. Or at least didn't support year ago I still used Spotify.

I wonder if there are alternative clients based on the Rust library nowadays?

DJay was incredible with that integration. It seems we are constantly regressing.

Yeah… the removal of Spotify from Djay made me go back to download music from torrents :(

Plugging my ex-colleague's Spotify client called Psst[0] and built with Rust. Not as feature-full than the official client (yet) but way lighter and gets the job done.

[0] https://github.com/jpochyla/psst

I can recommend this as well. I've since moved away from Spotify, but I can definitely say that Psst is a better experience for my core Spotify use case: listening to albums from my favorite artists. When I used it it wasn't the best for discovery but it certainly worked.

Nice, bookmarked it.

For anyone on GNOME I'd recommend Spot

https://github.com/xou816/spot

I find that even using https://open.spotify.com in Safari is incredibly snappier and much less of a memory hog compared to the official client, at least on my own computer.

(I'm not at all trying to convince you to "stay", or even claiming that this solution is as good as a proper lightweight client. Also, I only ever use [free] Spotify to check my own music/page)

As everyone moves towards using Electron and Webviews for their native apps the apps just get worse than their web pages. Spotify, Discord, Slack, and many others are best off without the app. If 2010 was the decade of Smartphone apps I think 2020 will be the one where everyone returns to the web. The only thing really preventing this is Apple's obnoxious refusal to support web push notifications but that's eventually going to change.

I think this will be very good. The native app world will have much less corporate garbage and will be returned to the hackers at least to some degree.

I’m not sure, players like Reddit and Twitter seem dead set on purposely making their web experience as bad as possible to push people towards their app.

I use the linux client and it consumes like 300mb at worst. That being said I think that Spotify is the worst application I have ever used, it is like they hate the users.

It got worse a while ago, but it's quite fine again. Compared to the rest of music apps, it's a mile above.

Truth. This electron crap is really a disgrace to computing.

They should provide something like foobar2000

As a linux user electron has been a blessing. Before it, not many apps did support linux for obvious reasons but now most do.

Tbh, the election app is hardly better than using it in the browser. The browser version is better in some ways. It works on electron and now supports media keys.

I prefer Electron so that i can use it like a normal app.

If those fancy web page bookmark app things (i forget what they were called) had better support maybe they would work just as well, but generally i've had a better experience with Electron behaving like an App.

It costs me RAM, sure, but it exists. For Browser, if you prefer it.. use it, it's already there.

As the parent comment pointed out, if not for Electron i'd be missing probably 25% of my necessary apps. Net win for me, and browser options still exist for non-Electron folks.. seems a win to me.

I'll be interested to see Tauri (and similar tech) replace Electron, though.

I love PWAs on linux as well tho. I would rather install the PWA than use electron but if there is no choice, there is no choice :)

I use Tidal as a PWA for example and it works great.

They used to

Which OS? On my system (Windows 11) the official Spotify client occupies about 300 MB on RAM when just running songs from a playlist.

I'm sorry, am I the only one shocked when reading "300 MB of RAM" for a software which just plays music? mplayer uses a 6th of that to play videos.

Well there's more to the client than just playing music. As GP said there is bloat but to me some features are very useful.

A big part of the client is for browsing through music/album/playlists/artists. Of course you could search for music outside of Spotify but it's really convenient to have it integrated in the client. There's also a social media part (definitely bloat, I have disabled it) and more hidden features like being able to control the client from other Spotify clients (e.g. on my phone) which I use all the time.

300 MB is not great but it's low enough that I don't really care.

Using the API, is it possible to create an alternative app that is on par with Spotify itself? (That is, play music, playlists, shuffle, skip forward/back, er... not much else, maybe the home/discovery pages)

On iPhone, anyway, Spotify is much better than Apple Music.

Apple Music refuses to work at all on my iPhone, just won’t play anything at all.

I don’t even care enough to fix it, tbh. Will cancel it when the trial expires. Bummer as the spatial audio tracks do sound pretty badass on AirPods max :)

as I sit here at work my client (with hundreds of playlists and tens of thousands of downloaded songs) is using 200mb of memory? I wonder why the discrepancy

Last time I checked you can only control the official Spotify application on iOS with your own app, wich also means your app has to throw the user into Spotify to be able to start playback and then Spotify kicking it back to your app once playback started. A truly horrible user experience. I think a lot of small music discovery apps will either break or have to fall back to the above experience. My guess is this is the actual reason for the sunsetting, similarly how Twitter cut back the API access back in the day.

I note there is an archive of libspotify:

https://mopidy.github.io/libspotify-archive/

I would bet they're deprecating it because they plan to make incompatible changes on the API side

I have never used Spotify in my life and I resent the notion that I must do so. I consider them part of the race to the bottom I want no part of. I love music, particularly original music that’s a bit different. I dislike a €4 billion company having any monopoly on suggestions and this whole playlists thing is just eye rollingly bad: pay for placement on some guys glorified mixtape? No thanks, I don’t want to discover sycophants that way.

Has anybody else also started getting ads within podcasts on premium membership?

I recently read an article[1] where Spotify said they wanted the ad revenue to make up 20-40% (up from like 10% or so now) of their income, and so they are trying to push more ads. As a premium subscriber since 2010, I promised myself that the day I hear an ad on Spotify premium is the day I cancel my subscription.

The direction Spotify has taken the past few years really saddens me.

[1] (Swedish, paywall) https://www.svd.se/a/Kzgvm4/spotify-spellistor-nyckel-till-a...

I'm only a recent paid subscriber to Spotify, but, like you, will drop it like a hot potato if ads make their way into premium.

I've previously stated I'd never pay for a subscription service again after Google Play music shutdown, effectively losing any record of the 'license' for some music I actually purchased from the platform. Whilst I have broken that promise, I have stayed true to my commitment of purchasing the equivalent of the monthly GPM subscription from Bandcamp, however.

Footnote: I just checked, and I'm ~$30 behind, gonna buy those two psych-rock 50+ minute album-songs by The Asteroid Belt: https://theasteroidbelt.bandcamp.com/. Gotta support local first!

Alright then, lower the premium subscription costs for users!

What is the _fucking_ point of premium if you still deal with ads?

I was really confused and heard it only once. It was also wildly irrelevant.

There are others.

I am happy with Deezer - no ads as far as I can tell.

This happened to me too at some point. I contacted Spotify support, who, to my surprise, actually answered me (kudos for that, at least). The answer was bewildering though: apparently this can happen(!?!) in the web player! Not having time to get into a fight, I just bit the bullet and spun up their dedicated client app in a VM (no way I trust that monster to run wild on my computer). That got rid of the ads for me.

Overall, I share the sentiment that so many people in this thread express: Spotify is slowly getting worse and worse. A shame. But luckily it's not outright terrible yet, i.e. we're not outright at "pay us, and we'll show ads down your ears". Yet.

It has been reality for Joe Rogan listeners since forever. They also encrypted his stream with Widevine so simple youtube-dl/yt-dlp broke(where it used to work).

Really sucks because it just stops the podcast at random times and then plays 3-4 ads in a row.

This is only peripherally related, but if you were using libspotify to work on a a command line client, I have an alternative approach. Shpotify offers command line control of the Spotify app on Macs: https://github.com/hnarayanan/shpotify

Is there currently any music streaming service with an officially supported API?

You are making it sound like they shut down their API. They didn't, they just stopped maintaining an already deprecated project and asked developers to switch to the new ones.

The other streaming services also have APIs like that. I'm not saying they are extremely powerful and you can do everything with them but they exist:

Apple Music: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applemusicapi/

Spotify: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/

Their new API does not cover the use cases of their old API, nor is it likely to as copyright holders are more likely to object to the lack of DRM in the old API (which was basically "authenticate, get direct access to audio data". The new official API is tied into EME DRM, which only works if you are a browser with a valid CDM. They also have Android and iOS APIs that support those platforms DRM implementations, but nothing for apps that are neither web nor mobile

The question was about an "officially supported API" not specifically about an API with doesn't use DRM.

They do not have an API comparable to libspotify. libspotify was mainly used in desktop apps and headless apps. There is no currently supported option for those apps, only the unofficial librespot, which is using the private APIs without a license.

My reply is to the question "Is there currently any music streaming service with an officially supported API?" not "Is there currently any music streaming service that offers an API exactly like libspotify".

However, the question was asked as a top level reply to a post indicating Spotify has shut down libspotify. So congrats, you answered a question with an an answer that was technically correct to the literal text but misses the point with the context that's there in a way that can't be useful to the asker.

I use last.fm connected to my Spotify.

At least there is still https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot I just hope they don't rely on libspotify's api endpoints or I need a new solutions for my Raspberry Pi connected speakers.

The wording on the rust crate suggests that it's the correct way to interact with spotify these days https://crates.io/crates/librespot

I have same concerns.

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