Hacker News Reader

Comment by KAdot | Hacker News Reader

I ended up uploading my music library to S3 compatible cloud storage (DigitalOcean Spaces) and creating[1] a minimalistic audio player that plays music straight from S3. S3 serves as a live audio library and as a backup at the same time. The web interface lets me listen the music from a desktop or a mobile web browser.

[1]: https://github.com/akrylysov/bsimp

View on HN

Unless you add a layer of encryption S3 is unwise to, the files are still at a risk of eventually being identified as music and deleted without your consent.

The problem with this is that I don't want to maintain an iOS app. I've considered RSS feeds, etc. But at the end of the day holding onto a song you love that you paid for shouldn't be this hard.

For subscription services, I get it. I don't love it, I think the contracts they've all negotiated are stupid, but fine. I get that a bunch of lawyers leads to me not being able to play almost any of my music while I fly over the Pacific.

But the combination of locked-down-OS (something I'm actually for) and legaleses / constant access negotiations means the effort I would have to go through to legally pay for music and actually hold onto it for good and then play it from my phone is too hard.

Why upload anywhere instead of buying one sdcard?

My iPhone doesn't have an SD card slot. It sounds like it would be a useful feature to have - perhaps they could add a headphone jack as well.

I've heard a lot of argument about the headphone jack. For my iPad, I bought an apple plug (i don't even know what they call it, is it a lighting port?) to 3.5mm phone jack. Can you explain what that solution doesn't work for everyone? The only thing I can think of is that you can't listen and charge at the same time.

Thanks!

When you have a USB A socket, dongle flash drives are a valid permanent solution.

On a phone's tiny port, storage will stick out very far, snag constantly, and something is probably going to break.

So external storage is just not viable if you're going to be plugging it in for more than a few minutes at a time. And buying more internal storage won't be reasonable until someone puts out a phone where it's "only" twice as expensive as high-end microsd cards. (Right now iPhone storage costs 8x as much, Pixel storage costs 8x as much and requires buying the top model for larger sizes, and Galaxy storage costs 6x as much and requires buying the top model for larger sizes.

Dongles are ugly, inconvenient, flimsy, and they use up the single port on the device. The apple dongle's cable in particular is so thin, I feel like it's about to break every time I use it.

Well, that’s one reason. Another is that sometimes my headphones run out of charge while I’m away from an electric socket and would like to keep listening - a 3.5 mm socket allows me to do that.

Its almost like you gave money to someone treating you like a walking talking MRR.

The alternative is to use a phone OS that has become so unbearable to me after 13 years of being a loyal user, that I decided to switch to iOS. So yeah, I gave them my money but am reluctantly satisfied with the trade-offs… for now.

Why not do both?

What is the cost per month for running something like that?

It costs me $11/month. $6 for a small DO droplet instance[1] and $5 for DO spaces storage[2] which gets me 250GB of space. I use both the instance and the storage also for other purposes. E.g. I also host my personal blog and store backups there.

If you want to save a few dollars, you can get it close to $5/month if you go with cheaper S3 compatible storage from Backblaze[3] or Cloudflare[4] + the cheapest $2.5 instance from Vultr[5].

[1]: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets

[2]: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/spaces-object-storage

[3]: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037814594-B2...

[4]: https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/platform/pricing/

[5]: https://www.vultr.com/pricing

can this be integrated with subsonic like servers?

https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome

https://github.com/sentriz/gonic

these have good app support so this could be nice

I'll take a look, thanks for the links! As for apps, playing from the web browser doesn't require additional apps and works surprisingly well. Bsimp is integrated with the Media Session API which lets you control the playback from the notification bar or the lock screen.

Nicely done!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com