I Don't Have Spotify | Hacker News Reader

I Don't Have Spotify

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786 pointssjdonado371 comments

I know of a even more impressive website that will transfer playlists from Spotify (or 20 other platforms, including text files) to 20 other platforms or a text file. I will share the link, but don't hug it to death y'all. :)

https://app.tunemymusic.com/transfer

I used this. It worked fine. It's a shame it's necessary though... I wish there was some kind of vendor-neutral import/export format rather than requiring a third party to solve the whole matrix of integrations.

The music industry needs to more widely use some kind of equivalent to the ISBN that the book industry uses. A simple "ISMN" list per playlist/library would be all that would be needed to move between services when both apps have the same songs.

One could also imagine a standardized ismn://<number> URL format that could open in your preferred music app, and this could work even without a streaming service if you already own that song in your personal music collection.

ISMN seems to exist: https://www.loc.gov/ismn/about.html

But, I've never actually seen it used for recordings; it seems to be focused solely on music notation. So, it would be nice to have some kind of recording-focused identifier for keeping track of specific performances between services.

This exists and is called ISRC. This metadata is embedded in a subchannel on CD's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Recordi...

MusicBrainz has also been making a list of unique identifiers for music tracks: https://musicbrainz.org/

They’re called magnet links.

Yeah, but the next step is to make identifier somethink like a has so the media can be content addressable.

Wait, we can't have that. It's too convenient

> I wish there was some kind of vendor-neutral import/export format rather than requiring a third party to solve the whole matrix of integrations.

"vendor-neutral import/export format" sounds like the definition of third party. It's not that there shouldn't be a third party, it's that spotify etc. should adopt it.

I recently made a transition from Spotify to Tidal and found the suggested transfer service to do the job really clumsy. In my case I've transferred favorite artists and the service was just trying to match them by name which failed miserably when there was more than one with the same name - seemingly it picked one randomly. I wonder how this service would do.

I recently made the switch as well and used spotify_to_tidal [1] which is the free and open-source alternative to what Tidal recommends and it worked pretty fine! it couldn't find some specific tracks and I bet it does a somewhat similar name match as the one Tidal recommends, but at least this one doesn't have a limitation by the number of tracks, in case it's useful to someone else.

[1] https://github.com/spotify2tidal/spotify_to_tidal

other than name match, what exactly do you expect them to attempt to do? use a shazam like process to analyze each potential match?

Use the Spotify artist ID[0] to find the Wikidata entry, and then grab the Tidal artist ID from the Wikidata entry to match the correct artist on Tidal. Even better if you use album IDs. (Brain explodes if you could use a song ID.)

Realistically, Wikidata may not have enough of this data populated, but it is nice to dream. And it seems plausible that MusicBrainz or similar might have enough data.

[0] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1902

[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P4576

Edit: P1902 has 57000 uses and P4576 has 7000. So YMMV big time.

My impression is that Tidal does a bad job of this in general. I have lots of artists I follow on there who have albums appearing on their page from identically named but different artists.

Don't get me started on that. How can a company which core business is content streaming be that lazy is beyond me. I often feedback them the errors, but even such feedback is difficult.

Sadly it’s an expensive scaling problem. Not trivial to solve at the scale streaming platforms operate at.

Anyone know of a technical solution to retrieve a list of 'titles' for deleted videos from a youtube playlist? Have at least 10x Playlists full of removed/deleted music that has been inappropriately copyright striked, but I can't even reconstitute the playlists as I don't have the Title/Artist for the removed tracks.

Paste the URL into savefrom, they have a cache

I manually copy pasted the video urls into services that lookup details and check web archive

Or this https://playlists.cloud/

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

Agreed.

Having said that I have used https://ko-fi.com/zzzrod to support (if it can be called that) the dev (the link is from app homepage) as per my personal capacity. Because it is such an excellent service and provided for free and also because it isn't behind subscription. So thought I will share that. But of course it is perfectly fine to use it for free as well if one wants to. Cheers.

I didn't even know TuneMyMusic had a premium service, but fwiw, it's free for the first 500 songs. I've only used it a few times and was pretty impressed at how many services it supports.

I love TuneMyMusic, I exported my Spotify when I left, imported everything to Deezer, and now I periodically export everything from Deezer so I can slice and dice it in Excel for various reasons.

That’s the one I used when I moved from Spotify to YouTube music. Luckily my playlists contained less than 500 songs so the whole migration was easy and free.

I've used this site before when moving from Spotify to Youtube Music, worked really well and didn't take long to transfer everything over.

If this does as you say it does… thank you for posting this. Ive been thinking of trying to get away from spotify but felt trapped at the playlist loss. My kid are now conditioned for instant music that might be the bigger challenge.

Playlisty is a great iOS/MacOS app for doing it locally if you're using Apple Music.

https://www.obdura.com/playlisty/

I used Soundiiz to go from Spotify to YouTube. I paid 5$, but was happy to pay.

Soundiiz does this also. I've been using it for years. Great service

I found Soundiiz pretty bad, at least when transferring from Spotify and Apple Music to Youtube Music. It failed to find about a hundred tracks from the library of couple of thousand tracks, and they weren't some niche, rare things, too. I had to manually search for them, using the same titles, and found most of them.

This is so helpful. This is the one blocking piece preventing my transfer off Spotify.

I made a very simple chrome extension that automatically redirects you to your preferred music service when visiting another service. In my case I have it set to YouTube Music, so if I click a Spotify (or other) link in Slack, I'll be redirected to YouTube Music.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/music-link/gnhphofp...

Do you have a Firefox version of this?

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

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

Can I port it to FF?

From the parent comment: yes.

Is this not a perfect use-case for greasemonkey/tampermonkey? Browser independence FTW

Absolutely!

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

This type of stuff is what make chrome extension development fun

sounds amazing, how did you map the urls manually?

https://github.com/leddt/music-link/blob/8faa5ceb0caa620499e...

I guess this is a free service? E.g https://api.song.link/v1-alpha.1/links?url=https://open.spot...

Exactly! Their docs are here: https://linktree.notion.site/API-d0ebe08a5e304a55928405eb682...

It has a 10 request per minute rate limit, but no api key needed, so each user runs their own queries.

I'd love to actually buy music and store it myself, as I've started noticing more and more that some of the songs I have on Spotify have started to disappear, but I find it very difficult to buy modern music anymore. Most gets released as singles, and as far as I know, to only streaming platforms. Is there a way to still buy the same kind of music that is on streaming platforms, and actually get the audio files?

The most sustainable way to "buy" music IMO, is to pirate it, and then buy merch from the artist as support.

Or just buy off Bandcamp if its an option.

Or going to their live shows if they happen to come to a venue near you.

Or by buying vinyl at a local record store. Sadly, those are dying out, but you can find one or two good ones in any major city.

In electronic, hip-hop, and a lot of music that has a lot of computer-assisted production, a lot of producers will also release sample packs or VST presets that they sell directly on their websites. While often in small amounts, $50 or less, it more often than not goes directly to the artist with very little middlemen involved. While not a huge stream of revenue I'd imagine, it probably does help smaller artists if they can count on an additional couple hundred bucks a month from people that truly appreiciate their craft and I'd bet that if I reached out to artist XYZ whose music is no longer available on major platforms and said "hey i have been to a few of your shows, bought all your sample packs, and I can't find your tracks anymore" the artist, if small enough, would probably oblige and send along a nice little folder of music.

Record stores are thriving pretty much everywhere across the US. The ones that have been closing are the ones that only hold old stock and don't curate their inventories

If you walk into a shop and all you see are old, worn out Barry Manilow and Bob Seger albums at $30+ a pop, the store isn't meant to last. Thankfully, the problem has been solving itself

> Or by buying vinyl at a local record store. Sadly, those are dying out,

they were dying out but are now coming back

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

It's not. Artists will often enough remove old albums so you can no longer play them.

Buy it, download as FLAC, put in your preferred local infrastructure to play. Plex/Plexamp works well, as does local file storage and a good command line music client if you're less GUI-friendly or don't have the resources for running them.

Yes, downloading is important as even download sites can redact later - e.g. https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/70250-qobuz-may-be-...

Another source are good ol' CDs. If you know where to look you can get them cheap too. Specialist charity shops that specialise in records and CDs in student or wealthy areas are good, as are second hand stores online.

An alternative to self hosting is to use an online music locker. I wrote up a bunch here: https://www.blisshq.com/music-library-management-blog/2021/0... and (disclaimer) operate one myself: https://asti.ga

Downloading large collections can be a pain though, one at a time and in zips.

I made this to help though https://github.com/meeb/bandcampsync

Bandcamp is the only place to sensibly buy music you can own these days which is pretty depressing.

plex alternative: jellyfin + finamp or fintunes. This is my new setup (alongside bandcamp if I haven't yet imported the bandcamp purchase into my jellyfin library). No cloud shit, no subscriptions, but I still support [most of] my favorite artists. Ones which aren't on bandcamp, well either I still have the CDs kicking around or some mp3s from wherever (yt-dlp + ffmpeg is useful when lazy too)

> It's not. Artists will often enough remove old albums so you can no longer play them.

That doesn't happen on other platforms?

I had two albums of a band who's front man died and they disbanded. The albums were removed but I still have them in my collection. You cant find it on the site anymore but I can still download and play them.

Wait, all the music I bought on bandcamp can disappear if the artist removes it from their public inventory?

Artists can also remove old albums from Spotify. At least with Bandcamp you can buy the music and download the files - if you want to.

And you can even send a mail to the artist to ask them why they removed old albums and if they can provide you a copy.

I also buy from Bandcamp.

In a way it seems like it's a practical approach to supporting artists directly

Donating is also an option as soon as you got enough mugs and tshirts. Not mentioning the tot bags.

When I moved country and updated my credit card in Spotify to my card from the new country Spotify also changed my “region”. As a result there are so many songs I have “starred”/“added”/“liked” (whatever fucking language they’re using for it now) are just greyed out and unplayable.

Anyway as for actually getting copies of the music I listen to I think we should just pirate it completely unashamedly.

some time ago when I canceled spotify, they show this special playlist like "we'll miss you" or whatever, and each of the song names, in order, spell out this little goodbye message. Ironically one of the songs in that playlist was greyed out and unplayable. Like, great job reminding me why I'm canceling :)

It's probably not Spotify's fault though, but it's actually on account of being able to finely control legal ownership of licensed songs. This is all insane imo, but legally sound. Welcome to the future.

That sounds really frustrating! It’s one of those cases where it feels like the system is actively working against the listener

I've been doing this, and here in Canada https://ca.7digital.com/ is literally the only option I've found that let's you buy normal MP3s, would highly recommend. I've been able to get modern albums without a hitch, but don't know about modern singles. I think in the US Amazon let's you buy MP3s, but not sure there.

For the price of a Spotify subscription, I can usually buy a new album every month! Which is great; and I love slowly growing my album collection.

While it’s more of a treasure hunt, I really enjoy browsing for and buying physical CDs, especially second hand. Albums are often $1, they sound as good as when they were released and they’re easily convertible to any other audio format, including lossless, 16-bit, 44.1khz formats. The only thing better is SACD, but finding that is like a diamond in the rough and ripping it is its own challenge unless you have the right equipment.

People are crazy for vinyl, but CDs are just _so_ convenient.

A few years back, I did an apples-to-oranges test of an album I had on vinyl and CD. The vinyl version probably sounded better (usual BS about warmth and whatnot) but the CD sounded very, very good and it was way closer than I was expecting. It had been ~15 years since I'd listened to a CD on a real stereo and I'd totally forgotten how good they can sound. I'd certainly been swayed by the vinyl enthusiasts in the interim, too.

The CD was so clean and clear but not in a robotic way. (I don't think this album had fallen victim to the loudness war either, fwiw.) Whereas the record sounded "warm" but also a little muddy and quiet (not in a good way) in comparison. I know there could be any number of reasons for this but that's also part of the problem. Was my setup dialed in and this is how it was supposed to sound? Or, was the table not flat? Was the needle dirty? Was the tracking force off? Yes, it's fun to tweak these variables but ... it's also fun to just listen to music that sounds excellent with zero effort.

I've started buying CDs again (to my spouse's chagrin) and have no regrets. I do need to start ripping them before discrot comes for them. For anyone in the market, library sales are an excellent option to, essentially, buy CDs by the pound. They also often have rare compilations and anthologies that you won't find in thrift stores.

> People are crazy for vinyl, but CDs are just _so_ convenient.

I feel like I might be punished for stepping out of line here but CDs sound better than vinyl too.

CDs are smaller, cheaper, sound great, and have longer playtime. I think they're the superior medium. I get people prefer the sound of vinyl, though.

If the store of your choice offers FLAC as an option (and I think they all do), you can simply make your own MP3s from the FLAC files. That's one of the biggest advantages of lossless audio. (The improvement in audio quality is actually pretty minimal, for most people.)

You can also keep the FLAC files to convert them to some future format later, or even do something really wild like burn them to a CD or something.

I did that for a while, but all the tools seem to have been unmaintained for the last decade. The command line ones still work, but the GUIs to make them easy still depend on qt3 or other such obsolete things. (streaming servers like jellyfin do this on the fly easy, but other workflows for offline use don't work anymore even though they are still sometimes useful)

> ...is literally the only option I've found that let's you buy normal MP3s

I just went to Amazon and found what's advertised as "mp3" for a recent Taylor Swift album.

That's not an option here in Canada, alas!

IIRC those are only 256 kbps. I get that MP3 is a lossy format, but still, they could at the very least offer 320 kbps. I was under the impression Amazon wasn't short on server space.

Bandcamp, 7Digital and (extremely reluctantly) Amazon. The bigger the label the harder it is to buy music digitally.

As an equally reluctant option one side or the other to Amazon, Apple's "iTunes Store" still exists and is "mostly" DRM free, if you don't mind AAC and friends (MP4 Audio) rather than MP3. It's getting harder and harder to find those Buy buttons, especially if you start from an Apple Music link/the Apple Music app, but it's currently no worse than Amazon as Amazon and Apple seem deep in direct competition on how hard they make it to find Buy buttons.

Amazon hates Canada (no Amazon music store, no Household plan) so here the tool of last resort is iTunes Music Store (it still exists, apparently).

Heh, I commented this exact list in order before reading your comment :D

also Bleep

> I'd love to actually buy music and store it myself...

Qobuz. For a start they only do lossless: no mp3. We're soon a quarter of a century into the 21st: gone are the Napster days of needing to stream mp3s.

Then Qobuz often has albums in higher quality than 44.1 kHz / 16-bit stereo. Not that you'll hear the difference: but artists/sound engineer going to the trouble of offering higher sample rate / bit depth typically do care about producing good sounding music so there's that.

Then Qobuz allows you to do precisely what you want: you can buy individual tracks or full albums to download, no DRM.

I've got both a collection of audio files I ripped myself from my own CDs (which I keep too), in a 100% bitperfect / lossless way (verified with an online DB of people who also ripped their CDs) and a Qobuz subscription.

The one criticism about Qobuz would be that music discovery ain't the best out there: the UI is actually quite bad. But it's good stuff for people who care about quality and who love to own their music.

Most network streaming devices now support Qobuz: for example I've got a fully integrated Yamaha amp that contains a network streamer (Yamaha R-N1000A) and MusicCast (Yamaha's music streaming app, like Sonos I guess but Yamaha) supports Qobuz (and Tidal and Spotify).

You don't just rent temporary access to an online service that may disappear under your feet or remove songs you used to listen to: you can actually buy and own individual tracks.

Check the plans they have: depending on how many songs you buy, one may be better than the other.

IIUC Spotify, under the pressure of both Tidal and Qobuz, announced they'll be moving to lossless streaming. It's 2024. At fucking last.

I use a mix of Qobuz and Bandcamp and have been happy with them.

https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/shop

https://bandcamp.com/

Qobuz removed a range of releases a couple months ago at short notice, including from users' accounts. Hopefully their catalog remains strong as it's about the only online-only store with lossless that has a wide variety of mainstream artists.

I'll also mention: Bleep.com, Boomkat, Ninja Tune (label that directly sells), Junodownload.

Yep, "Pink Martini - A Retrospective" was removed after I bought one song from it, when I click on the track in my library the error toast states "It's impossible to play this track. Thank you for trying another playback format."

But that's the whole point of buying it, mp3 is safely on my SD card, plays just fine

> Qobuz removed a range of releases a couple months ago at short notice, including from users' accounts.

What was the deal with this?

It wasn't explained officially. I assume some distribution arrangement changed but the artists/releases were so varied and from various labels that I can't determine the relationship. I'd bought a handful of releases there and all of them were affected.

I look for music on bandcamp, 7digital, and then amazon music in that order. All offering drm free mp3 and flac files. I don't think there has been something I wanted that I havem't been able to find yet.

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

Personally, I have a TIDAL subscription, download everything I like from there, and then store everything on a Plex server.

While not legal, having the subscription fix any moral problems I’d have with the idea.

The subscription pays tidal, but tidal only pays out based on usage... The artist gets about $0.01 per stream.

The best way to support artists is to purchase albums the week they're released... Sales numbers are a key metric when labels decide touring and investment in the next album... Could mean a better studio or more resources...

If you are committed to the download off of tidal strategy, then please make a playlist of the tracks you download and play it overnight... Otherwise, none of your money supports the artists you listen to.

I'm the same, but with Deezer, the Deemix downloader and Plexamp.

How are you downloading from Tidal?

Tidal has lots of downloader clients you can install due to its often technical but niche user base. May I suggest Tidal-Media-Downloader[0]?

Now if only there was a way to download things from YouTube Music with a Premium subscription. It's practically impossible to search for "YouTube Music download" without falling into the 'youtube-dl YouTube mp3 audio tracks!' SEO hole. Vague naming on Google's part.

[0]: https://github.com/yaronzz/Tidal-Media-Downloader

You can 100% download higher quality audio tracks from YouTube using yt-dlp. You have to use session cookies from a browser that you've logged into your premium account with to get the higher quality tracks. There are options with yt-dlp to help with this.

Amazon music still sells the mp3 downloads, though they definitely nudge you away from them as much as they can.

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

I recently learned about buying Mp3s on Amazon. Most CD purchase pages have a "purchase options" and you can do Mp3s. I do that for mainstream things for my kids that aren't on bandcamp (such as music from a kids TV show).

I'm actually working on a IoT device where one of the main goals was selfhosting audio content for my kids. Uses AI for the user interface. Similar to Alexa but battery powered. Still in private beta (orders are closed right now) but here is the link for anyone curious. https://heycurio.com/

Ah. AG Talking Bear meets LLM. I started working on something similar a year back - but tried to keep it restricted to offline which made it more challenging since inference on CPU of raspberry PI limits you to very small models.

Sending voice clips of children to an always listening server is just a bit too dystopian for me.

What a beautiful website! Absolute joy to explore it.

It exploded. I get only server errors now.

What do i even pay Vercel for?! gah

Seems like a smart setup

I've enjoyed the selection on Qobuz, which is all DRM-free and allows mp3 or lossless flac formats.

I like Qobuz too, but have a couple issues with it:

* The prices are a lot higher there than anywhere else

* They don't remember my payment information. I would opt-in to this if it's a legal concern. It's so annoying every single time having to enter it in all over again. I'd do PayPal but they charge a fee these days.

* Their tar'd up download format sucks, and requires me doing a lot of re-naming and re-foldering things to get it to a sane format.

* They started removing some of the things I PAID FOR from my account. Not cool. It's fine if you have to remove it from sale but removing it from my account should not be legal.

* Many popular tracks from otherwise not-so-popular albums are locked so you can't buy just that song, you need to buy the whole album

* If you've bought a few songs from an album, you don't get an appropriate discount if you later decide to buy the whole album - which some digital stores are good about.

I never trust online platforms to keep my library. I download stuff and back it up.

Used CDs are dirt cheap. Local thrift stores here tend to price them at $1-$1.50 each. Of course, the dedicated "record" stores tend to be closer to $6-10, but they're more likely to have things other than thousands of country albums.

I have the most luck going to the artist websites or social media. They often have links to different storefronts to buy physical and digital copies. The majority are on Bandcamp, but larger groups also release on Amazon.

I still buy CDs. It's true a number of modern artists do not release on physical media, although vinyl is making a comeback.

Same. Especially for backfilling your collection, used CDs are incredibly cost effective and DRM free.

Try BookOff, yard or estate sales, or "friends of the library" events. You will burn some time searching, but the hunt can be fun on its own.

>CDs are incredibly cost effective and DRM free

I got one that wasn't; the music CD was published by SONY JAPAN. Had to do some shenanigans to play it on a PC drive. Decided it was best to rip it just in case.

As someone approaching 50, the return of Vynil is quite strange feeling.

I now see record stores so full of Vynil that it feels like I timetraveled back to my teenage years when CDs started to being sold, alongside laser discs on a little store corner.

Most gets released as singles, and as far as I know, to only streaming platforms.

Analog hole.

It takes a bit of time, but if you really care about the music, it's worth it.

Note: I suspect that the streaming services watermark the songs. I have some from Apple Music that it refuses to sync over its cloud service. Doesn't bother me, though, because I primarily sync via wire.

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

But it works fine for songs ripped from vinyl. It's only things from streaming that gum up the works.

Bandcamp and Qobuz have been my only options for anything in lossless quality. Everything else is shitty compressed MP3s.

>Everything else is shitty compressed MP3s.

Check your supposed lossless files in Fakin The Funk or manually in Spek and become horrified at how many of them are complete garbage.

Beatport generally has more mainstream stuff and offers it in WAV and AIFF.

Not FLAC? I mean I guess I can run them through something to convert them, but I'm surprised.

Some artists sell them directly either from the site, or at their concerts, the German region I live on still has several stores, and so far I also managed to get several MP3 albuns.

I don't use streaming platforms other than being aware of new musicians in YouTube, which I eventually buy their albums.

I know that some artists sell their music directly from their own websites. I prefer to buy CD versions actually...

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

iTunes and Amazon have pretty much every song you'd want to buy.

iTunes and Amazon have pretty much every song you'd want to buy.

Nope. Not even remotely. Only if your taste in music is very narrow.

Just this weekend I tried to buy some Christmas songs that were popular and common on the radio in the 80's. I could only find about half of them on Amazon or Apple Music.

Most had some version available, but not the canonical one I grew up with. Some didn't exist at all.

Record company pulled he albums or they are stuck in rights limbo. EBay and record shops are your best bets for these tracks

They even think they can exert rights over used album sales. As one example, pretty much all recordings that have rights attributed to an artist named Al Reed, who died in 1990, are blocked for sale on Discogs. Not just his own recordings, pretty much anything he has writing credit for. https://www.discogs.com/artist/623314-Al-Reed

Found this out when I was adding Johnny Winter / Guitar Slinger to the collection and noticed it was blocked for sale. https://www.discogs.com/release/3318469-Johnny-Winter-Guitar...

What's especially annoying is that sometimes there are albums that can be played on Apple Music but they cannot be bought in the iTunes Store.

Additionally, there's no way to buy the Dolby Atmos mixes of most albums yet. Spatial sound mixes might actually have a chance at going mainstream, but you'll have to pay for these subscription services to access them.

iTunes and record stores still exist!

Bandcamp and Soulseek.

iTunes?

The youtube music matching didn't work for the first two songs I tried:

Two Words by Kanye West: https://open.spotify.com/track/62wtttQzoIA9HnNmGVd9Yq?si=b1b...

Went to Two Words by Milabel Ranque: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=Y64cFG9dfYo

Never Let Me Down by Kanye West: https://open.spotify.com/track/34j4OxJxKznBs88cjSL2j9?si=7ec...

Went to Never Let me Down by Depeche Mode: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=snILjFUkk_A

Even though the correct album art appeared on the site.

Actually none of the songs I put it are working. Is this what it's supposed to do? Find songs with similar titles?

Same. I just searched through my texts to find the last song a friend sent me:

https://open.spotify.com/track/5qFL2uwfnGU8FccwLMgPNQ?si=b-a...

https://idonthavespotify.donado.co/?id=b3Blbi5zcG90aWZ5LmNvb...

is missing the link to YouTube Music:

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=0IHBCxs7QPE&si=QYvCtGCjKav...

I would get lots of use out of this if it was reliable though! Very useful tiny tool idea.

Tried a random track I happened to be listening to.

https://idonthavespotify.donado.co/?id=b3Blbi5zcG90aWZ5LmNvb...

The deezer link was correct, tidal didn't work, others were incorrect.

Still a great idea, I thought about implementing something like this years ago.

When sharing music with a mixed group that I know some don't have spotify, I tend to just fall back to the common denominator of youtube links.

I don't understand why other people are hating on Kanye's music. I understand that he is not a very likeable person, but his music is damn good y'all. Especially the ones you tried :D

I don't think hating or lauding his music is really appropriate in this thread --it's kind of off topic. We can admit it's subjective and tastes will vary.

Kanye West?

Maybe the misdirection is a feature, not a bug.

i miss the old kanye

I don't see the problem here: it looks like it's working extremely well, and in fact doing you a huge favor, if it redirects you from Kanye West to anything else. Why on earth would you want to listen to Kanye West when you can listen to Depeche Mode instead?

They do need to fix the bug with the album art though.

I have to deal with spotify links sent to me often and this is great. The better link would be to the actual service page, not github repo:

https://idonthavespotify.donado.co/

It would be fantastic to have this as an extension for us, Firefox users. I hope someone makes one someday.

> It would be fantastic to have this as an extension for us, Firefox users. I hope someone makes one someday.

If there's some easy way to figure out where that id parameter in the results page comes from (I assume some simple hash of the link), then you could probably even just make it a bookmarklet.

Why do you get Spotify links sent to you often?

Probably because his friends use it.

I know what services my friends use and make sure to send them the appropriate link whenever I suggest music

I use this page to create a page with links to all kinds of music providers: https://odesli.co

Works per artist, album, or song.

Create a login to customise URLs.

I'm just a user; I don't have a dog in this race.

Yes, I also really like Songlink/Odesli! Their search also works faster than Spotify’s or Apple Music’s search.

I made a Discord bot which used songlinks API 5 years ago! Unfortunately not used much and not maintained anymore.

They also have Slack integration (/songlink {url})

One of the best services I get from my Nas is the ability to save the music there and be able to stream to my phone. I prefer to buy some music and have it there than relying in any subscription service.

Would you share what setup you use or recommend for this, both NAS and software for phone streaming?

Not op but I have a similar setup.

I have an old synology nas thats running Navidrome in a docker container.

On my iPhone I use play:sub and point it to the local ip and port associated Navidrome.

When I’m away I access the network through a WireGuard connection (set up on a protectli router running opnsense). Before I used traefik to expose it to the web.

Takes some setup but once it works it’s great.

When I used to maintain a discord music bot, it used to stream from YouTube. For Spotify urls to work though, I had to get YouTube search to work reliably. One trick which I found worked well was including the Spotify URL in the YouTube search along with the song name, artist name, etc. This helped quite a bit with picking out the "official" youtube video, since the official one often includes Spotify links in the video description, which YouTube search also matches against.

Thank you for the submission! Should this be a Show HN? https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

This service connects to a few more services, but you can't just paste in an existing URL. https://odesli.co/ it's more link tree type service but since you can search for songs and albums it makes it easy to find things.

Example https://song.link/i/1051394215

You can paste in an existing url: https://odesli.co/https://open.spotify.com/track/1Yk0cQdMLx5...

The placeholder in their search field even says "Search or paste URL"

I built something very similar the last time I got laid off and needed something to do https://github.com/kudos/combine.fm

I've never taken Spotify or any other music streaming service seriously. They are a joke for the same reason Netflix is, they only play limited licensed content so their selection inevitably drops and drops until everything you search ends with zero results. Obscure indie artists? Forget it.

Add average 4G reliability to that and you have a service that never has what you need, and if they do it never works when you need it (e.g. long car rides in the middle of nowhere). And then they expect you to pay for it or listen to ads too. Nothing beats a good ol' folder of mp3s. And 128GB of the average phone can store many an mp3.

Huh, that looks very interesting. A friend of mine made a streaming service back in the day where you could paste in youtube links, they got downloaded, added to a playlist and then you could listen to that together with friends on multiple computers.

I always wanted to rebuild that and adjust to my needs. Now this convert thing from the OP seems to be an interesting extension to that. Just paste in spotify links, grab the YT one, yt-dlp it and there you go. Ill put this in my favorites, thanks!

The hoops to go through to have a ”legal” napster.

Also not sure yt-dlp is any more legal than just downloading mp3s.

Obviously it's all just a dream in a fantasy world. And even in that fantasy world it would be for friends only, not anything commercial.

Edit: also we don't use mp3, we use free (tm) opus! (as in just yt-dlp -x )

It has a Raycast extension too https://www.raycast.com/sjdonado/idonthavespotify

Slightly off topic but does any one of the music streaming services actually not suck? Like I tried a bunch of them but each one made me quit in it's own unique way!

Am I alone on this?

It would help if you specified exactly what you didn't like about them.

I use Apple Music, I use it because it's lossless and it's integrated in the Apple ecosystem. The UX of the actual Music app is... not great, but tolerable, better than the iTunes before it.

I listen to some pretty obscure stuff and I don't think I ever found something missing on it. YMMV.

Well I can tell you as a Spotify user that their random play is horrible. It's not truly random, which is extremely frustrating when you have 1000+ playlist and keep hearing the same 10 songs over and over.

Here's an ongoing 150+ page, 4 years old thread about it on their forums: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/All-Platforms-Op...

The silly trick I found is to use Apple's Smart Playlists to help. I've been creating playlists like "Not heard since Jan 1, 2023". Songs drop out after they are played in a shuffle.

You're not alone. Streaming services' selling point is access to the catalogue. Everything else about the product tends towards being aggressively mid.

You are not alone

A similar service that I use frequently to generate song.link URLs for sharing: https://odesli.co/

Thanks for this, I used an automated script to create a post with links on my gh . This looks great, ty

It would be fantastic if this site were a pwa that supported the chrome api [1] that lets you share directly to it on android. I would make a pr but my company owns all my ip and getting an exception takes months :(

1: https://chodounsky.com/2019/03/24/progressive-web-applicatio...

They probably don't, especially if you're in California. Employers love to intimidate with unenforceable terms in contracts.

In CA, the contracts often say something obnoxious to the effect of “we own all your IP except for the IP that the law says we don’t own.”

Unfortunately I live in Texas.

Maybe your wife can make the pull request?

I know it's a tough job market, but that's unacceptable! They won't change, but you shouldn't put up with that.

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

Won't help you now OP, but I've always negotiated an IP carve-out for any product(s) that I develop that:

A. Are developed with my own hardware

B. Are developed outside of hours of employment

C. Are not designed to compete with existing company products

Every place I've worked with was amenable to these terms, but I always make sure to get it IN WRITING.

> Every place I've worked with was amenable to these terms

What is the largest company you've successfully gotten to agree to these terms?

It's got to be easiee for a larger company to agree to. What would you be inspired to make that doesn't compete with an existing product if you work at big tech? It feels like they have products in all spaces.

I knew about this ahead of time. I was kinda going through it mentally at the time and I didn't have the energy to negotiate.

I had that in my contract when I started in the games industry, it was made very clear to me that if I don't like the terms there are 500 other juniors willing to take my spot. Not excusing it, I'm just saying that sometimes you're not in a position to negotiate this if you really want the job(and I really wanted the job at the time, we can argue whether that was the right thing to do or not but the fact remains).

Your cat wrote this pull request? It must be a genius cat!

This is the strategy most of my coworkers take. On principle, I'm just not willing to lie to a project and tell them I have the right to contribute my work under their license.

... don't do it at work?

If your company owns your free time as well, you've fucked up and should talk to HR.

You're correct, I signed a contract that says they own my free time. I didn't exactly want to, and I firmly believe it's wrong. Nevertheless, it's easy to say I fucked up when you don't know my exact situation. This is my first job and there are a lot of other benefits that made it the best option for me personally, even when there were alternatives that had no such clause.

That's fair, I don't know your situation, and my tone was overboard. I don't mean it as a criticism of your actions as much as a warning for others not to do the same without good reason.

Does that mean if you do something semi-illegal or immoral on your freetime they put their name on it? Start doing work on decrypting media (legal if the content is out of copyright, but good luck finding such a thing), porn (again, legal but many won't like it and you can find weird stuff that is even less liked while still legal), or something else that might technically be legal but they don't want their name associated with.

Just create an anonymous new GitHub user, it's like jaywalking. They'll never know.

WTF I've never heard of this. I hope you're getting compensated well.

Unfortunately it's not uncommon here.

Nice work!

It got me thinking how useful something like an "I don't have instagram" app would be. Unfortunately I suspect it would be impossible to implement.

Finding equivalent content elsewhere is probably not going to happen. The best the service could do is show you Instagram content without requiring an Instagram account.

Is there a DOI equivalent for identifying music tracks?

https://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Identifier

> One of MusicBrainz' aims is to be the universal lingua franca for music by providing a reliable and unambiguous form of music identification; this music identification is performed through the use of MusicBrainz Identifiers (MBIDs).

used it for a project a few years back and it does the job if you listen to music mostly made in the english-speaking world.

the complications with the same song appearing in multiple albums (including compilations) would give weird results sometimes, but it is totally useable if you only care about finding basic information.

A damn shame they want $5k for mbid.org

Could you tell me who? I love MBID but didnt read about that. Thanks in advance

Yes, the International Standard Recording Code (ISRC): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Recordi...

I don't know how to look up music with a known ISRC, though.

The DOI equivalent for audio and video is also DOI. Good luck getting the industry to use them.

I don't have Spotify, I have Navidrome. Self-hosted on a cheap old mini PC.

Not seeing Pandora, apparently 46 million people still use that as of 2023

Highly recommend Hermes with a free Pandora account (Mac desktop app, no ads), if you just want to set a station and listen for hours.

https://github.com/HermesApp/Hermes

Thanks for the Hermes.app recommendation...

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

46 million active users or 46 million accounts created?

I’d believe either, though the latter feels tiny. Pandora is still better than any of the others listed for discovering new music, IMO. Spotify always seems too conservative with its suggestions, making it worse for discovering new music. Subjective, of course.

I don't think it's subjective. Royalties aren't paid equally, and considering Spotify is partly owned by the record labels themselves, it makes sense to steer listeners.

I agree, I feel like Pandora recommendations are far better than Spotify ones, at least for me. Spotify keeps me in my bubble, Pandora is constantly expanding it.

It is tiny - It's US only.

Pandora is also way more trainable. You can train that recommender with your thumbs up/down, and it's been like that for 15 years.

I haven't tried Pandora lately but Spotify is horrible for suggestions. My goto remains BBC 6 Radio Music.

I started using Tidal earlier this year, simply because they pay artists more (it's still basically a pittance, but it's better.)

If you share a song link using Tidal, it actually shares a landing page where the user can select from Tidal, Spotify, Apple Music, or Amazon Music. It's really great.

Me neither, still buying CDs and MP3, making my own playlists, with music that will outlast me.

I'm still mad that they killed Rdio because Spotify was "free". Will never use it.

Best user interface for music ever. It was nearly perfect IMO. Still mad too!

The first song I tried mapped incorrectly. Even though there was a green verified checkmark!

> https://open.spotify.com/track/1Pfc1Qpj0s9vQumI0JvpBp

mapped to

> https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=ogoeWS6CDbI

but it should have mapped to

> https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=dfgKYWrRfoc

Love it! Even since Spotify CEO Daniel Ek's investment company invested $100m into weapons tech, we've been looking at how to move off his platform.

https://inthesetimes.com/article/spotify-military-industrial...

Helsing is currently helping Ukraine. It's easy to say "military bad" when you're in the US, but for Daniel Ek it's about self-preservation. As a fellow Scandinavian, I fully support him investing in defense tech.

It has shareholders which benefit from killing people, and who benefit more from war proliferating. How do you think that turns out in the long run? How has it turned out for Ukraine?

War companies sell war, and they sell it to evil people (see Israel's apartheid and genocide in Gaza). The privatization of war is bad for everybody.

This is great. I don't have spotify but everyone i know has spotify.

I wish I could just share the spotify link to a WPA app using the Web Share API and have it share back the url for my preffered music streaming app.

I guess I can ask claude to do it for me and use the code here for the UI, but I can't find the license file

I run an ios shortcut to do the conversion when a friend messages a spotify link:

https://x.com/justinprojects/status/1708184379326144925?s=46

Bring back echo nest's Rosetta stone.

https://musicmachinery.com/2010/02/10/introducing-project-ro...

this feels more like an art piece or statement, not an actual tool

what if i have a youtube link and i want to stream on spotify? what if i have an apple music link but want to play it on a linux device where only spotify works?

it's more likely that you discovered a song on youtube and wanted to add it to your spotify playlist, rather than browsing spotify and then deciding to listen on another platform.

someone should make a service like this, but make it universal for all platforms.

however, i found the ability of matching a spotify artist profile to the artist's platform profiles impressive.

>a linux device where only spotify works?

Huh? What linux device might only have access to spotify? Pretty much every Linux distribution (with the possible exception of Linux From Scratch[0]) has multiple local apps to play music, both from the command line and via a gui in their standard package repositories.

Not to mention dozens of sites (if you can get to spotify you can get to them) that perform the same function.

Please do explain, as I'm pretty confused.

[0] https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

apologies, i meant i only have a linux device with only spotify installed, because it's the thing i use. no, i'm not talking about music players, only streaming services.

you're completely right other services and software are available on linux. but the point i'm trying to make is, this tool is spotify -> others, but a common use-case is others -> spotify.

>apologies, i meant i only have a linux device with only spotify installed, because it's the thing i use. no, i'm not talking about music players, only streaming services.

>you're completely right other services and software are available on linux. but the point i'm trying to make is, this tool is spotify -> others, but a common use-case is others -> spotify.

No apologies necessary. I misunderstood your point, which is certainly a fair one.

And given your use case, I get your frustration. That said, there are, apparently, a number of Linux apps and plugins for said apps that will allow you to play not only local music, but streams from Spotify as well as from other streaming services.

I get that's not really what interests you, but it is an option if you choose.

I don't use Spotify, so I haven't looked for tools to convert to Spotify links, but I'd expect they're out there, given that the reverse exists.

Edit: Fixed typo.

I don’t have Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, Deezer, SoundCloud, or Tidal. Would it be too much to ask for a link to be simply converted to the text “Songname by Artist”?

This failed completely after trying to search for songs that don't have a unique name. This seemingly just does a basic string search on other streaming platforms. Sad...

For me, it didn't work. The artists and tracks on almost all of the tracks I pasted were incorrect. I suppose it would only be compatible with mainstream music.

Switch out alternative streaming services with torrent links or alternatives ways to listen to the content. And you would actually have something here.

You can create an iOS shortcut to convert Spotify to Apple Music as well. This is how my gf and I share (she has apple music and I have spotify)

Spotify literally plays the same songs over and over...and creates features no one wants

Doesn't appear to work for Youtube Music links...

"Something went wrong, please try again later"

Could that be restated as "Spotify doesn't have me"?

I built a proof of concept for a VC-scale app, and something like this is one of the core features. I applied to YC S24 and didn't get an interview (SUPER understandably). If anyone wants to hear details, shoot me an email (in bio); this project's vaporware until I find the right partner.

Bandcamp + iTunes Match is the sauce for folks in the Apple ecosystem.

Omg I was planning to build this for ages! That's very good.

Hear, hear! To more inclusive projects like this one.

I should create something simlar for Apple Music links

I like this idea

This works with Apple Music links too. From the site: "Paste a link from Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, Deezer or SoundCloud to start."

No support for Amazon Music is a bummer.

The EU should mandate that this gatekeeper (Spotify) make their links interoperable with other music streaming services.

https://dtinit.org/blog/2024/08/27/DTI-members-new-music-too...

Apple, Google and Meta are Data Transfer Initiative members. I hope Spotify joins soon.

The minimum financials for consideration as a gatekeeper for the DMA are 75bn EUR market cap, or 7.5bn EUR turnover (in Europe). In the last week, Shopify's market cap exceeded 75bn EUR for the first time.

So, y'know, might be coming.

Me neither, never used Spotify. I do use Apple Music, YouTube and SoundCloud though.

no tidal support yet but looks very useful for one off uses

Now that the app algorithms are horrible can we all go back to something like last.fm so I can discover new music?

Let's go back to the word "algorithm" being used for what it actually means, instead of the opposite—like the way it's used here and in every article about social media written in the last 7 years.

The real reason why last.fm lost to Spotify: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR8az1UMOiQ

You need to use webradios, there's lot of them.

But you can't skip to the next tune so you need to skip to the next webradio instead ;)

last.fm is still there and you can still use it to discover new music!

As soon as they add Youtube music I'm in. I no longer give my money to Spotify.

This is great, thanks!

I left Spotify when they signed Rogan.

I don't follow. Is he anti music or something? Afaik he's on Apple, Amazon, and Youtube as well. Do you not use anything related to him? I'm honestly curious for some reason.

His podcast was exclusively on Spotify for a while, for a measurable amount of money (the article is from February when that portion of the deal ended): https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/joe-rogan-renews-spoti...

Some people are intolerant and think that "they allow someone who I disagree with" is grounds to stop doing business with a service. It's a toxic attitude, but sadly common.

Spotify was paying someone who disseminated anti-vaccine misinformation. I consider that dangerous and will not support it with my money.

Being principled is not toxic.

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

Exactly

> Tidal No No No

Well I guess I'll just go fuck myself, then.

the tidal API was not publicly available last year. I tried it today and it seems it is no longer in beta, will get this adapter done soon!

This is a bit off-topic, but: am I just dim or could the README be a bit more informative? What it's for, who it's for, etc. (I'll give partial blame to me or github for the About section/link being there... it's offscreen by the start of the README, so I missed it)

(I also... don't use spotify... so had less-than-average context to guess the purpose of this project with.)

Anecdotally speaking, Spotify has become a sort of cultural default for a bunch of people.

If you're in a DM or a group chat, you may not hear "You should listen to X by Y" but rather "Check this out: https://open.spotify.com/blah"

At my current workplace and a previous one, both had Slack channels for sharing music and they were 99% Spotify links.

Partly because of genuine Spotify usage but even not using Spotify at the time, I would find the Spotify equivalent for my own recommendations (to reduce friction for the majority so they'd be more likely to actually listen to the recommendation)

Presumably for those few users not using Spotify, rather than having to find the equivalent song via text search, which may or may not contain a result for Provider Z, this service straight up just converts the Spotify link you've been given into all of the other provider equivalents.

Do the spotify links not just open the song in some kind of web app if you dont have spotify installed?

I always thought giving a straight link to the thing was better for all. If they had Spotify it would open there and without ads if they had the subscription and if they had neither it would still open the web app and let them listen to it with ads and stuff.

> Do the spotify links not just open the song in some kind of web app if you dont have spotify installed?

The page won't even load if you don't have the DRM plug-in installed.

I don't think you can _listen_ to the song without an account anyway.

That was true in the past but it's no longer true. I don't know when it changed.

Yeah, the generated preview (depending on what application the link is shared in) can play a 30 second sample, but if you want to listen to the whole song you need to have an account, and if you don't have a subscription you'll likely get an ad first.

It's why I often share a youtube link instead, it plays inline a lot of the time and when it plays inline it often doesn't have ads. But that may also be because I have an effective ad blocker (for now).

I’m in a dedicated music discord, about 70% of links are Bandcamp, 20% Spotify, 10% Tidal. BC percentage could be higher, but good enough, most of the time it’s only for those weird bands that don’t sell on BC anyway ;)

That said, I do miss Songwhip. It was a website where you could search for a release, and then generate all links for it, including streaming services and bandcamp.

I miss Songwhip as well. We used to have a bot in our music sharing Discord channel that looks for links to any streaming platform and convert them to Songwhip links via the Songwhip API. The good thing about Tidal is that, like Songwhip, it provides you with a list of links to various streaming platforms when you're not logged in.

> for those few users not using Spotify

That's quite the extrapolation from your anecdotal experience. Technically, it would be more accurate to say, "for those few users using Spotify."

What you've noticed is that Spotify has the biggest market share, but that doesn't mean that the number of users not using it are "few". According to https://explodingtopics.com/blog/music-streaming-stats, Spotify has a 30% market share. That implies that up to 70% of streaming music users aren't regular Spotify users.

Apple Music = few users??

From what I could tell when choosing AM over Spotify, the latter has a lot of playlists for discovery and I would never use my streaming service for discovery as it encourages the service to promote music it is paid to promote.

Of course AM is annoying too because 3 out of 5 navigation icons along the bottom of the UI are for discovery. But AM has Siri integration, which works some of the time… :-/

Apple Music has been utterly awful on desktop for years, with virtually zero positive progress. I made this angry video [1] 4 years ago, and have tried using Apple Music multiple times since then, and it never failed to disappoint.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE8ZikfrpFU

I used to use Apple Music but when my Credit Card expired I missed two months payment and Apple happily deleted all of my playlists and library. I don’t think they realise how bad this is, but I will never use it or subscribe ever again.

Apple Music also integrates with your own music library, which is the killer feature for me.

I find the user experience of Apple Music to be subpar, and keeps pushing young genres in which I have zero interest.

I use Cider on my desktop but mobile is still a challenge.

Huh, ok. Thanks for explaining.

I just don’t listen to music, full stop. Never used Spotify in my life, or any other streaming music service. Was really confused about all of this.

Spotify doesn't require you to create an account to hear a song from what I recall, so why wouldn't someone send you a link? That's what the web is for.

That said once you have heard it on Spotify, yeah you might want it on your service provider of choice so as to add it to whatever equivalent of playlists there are.

The previous comment was already absurdly america-centric. But with this response, the cake is taken. I have never been sent a spotify link, nor do people really over here, because you need an account.

You can just try any link in incognito mode to find out that is not true. Spotify is a walled garden

the repository description sums it up already: Effortlessly convert Spotify links to your preferred streaming service

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

The readme also doesn't specify how to set up the development environment. I'd like to make a PR adding support for the two Russian streaming services most people here use, VKontakte and Yandex Music, and the code looks simple enough, but I have no idea how do I actually run it. It probably involves some npm commands?

Looks like a pretty standard npm-based application, so just clone the repo, run `npm install` and then `npm run dev` (see `package.json` scripts section for available commands to use with `npm run`)

Yeah, but as I musician they pay you next to nothing unless you're already on top anyways. I know touring musicians who can comfortably live from their physical record/merch sales who say they can basically ignore their spotify revenue since they earn more with their merch sales on one concert than they earn during a whole year of running on spotify.

So if you care about your musicians consider seeking out other ways to get your records, e.g. bandcamp

> as I musician they pay you next to nothing unless you're already on top anyways

More like "as a musician they pay you literally nothing for a song unless it receives 1000 streams/12 months". This is total bullshit for small musicians.

The project description on the right hand sidebar says a lot more:

> Effortlessly convert Spotify links to your preferred streaming service

That's one sentence; it's a good sentence, but it's not a lot. Nothing about running it.

And I already noted (in a very offhand way):

> the About section/link being there... it's offscreen by the start of the README, so I missed it

I think 10 years ago, that sidebar didn't exist on github, so I've got some old skimming habits I could modify... but I think the bar for READMEs should be higher. I was pleasantly surprised to see I wasn't alone in having too little info, though. This project is far far from being an outlier in this regards. 95% of ROS repos (robotics code packages) are worse :)

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