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Comment by littlecranky67 | Hacker News Reader

I'm very happy that I mostly listen to electronic music (house & techno in its various forms). The predominant way to listen to that is via DJ mixes and recorded Livesets. This field has always been ignored by the commercial streamers, and there is a culture of uploading sets to platforums such as youtube and soundcloud - where you can easily download (albeit youtube making things more difficult in recent years). Since a set is a minimum of 1hour, you don't care for song search, album art etc. You basically need 5-10 files to have music for weeks.

I'm using audacious on macOS installed via homebrew - it has a winamp-like skin. That was peak audioplayer design.

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Something I don't get is if you search Spotify for some classic mixes, like Sasha and Digweed's Northern Exposure, for example, you'll find that someone has compiled a playlist of all/most/many of the individual tracks from the mix. But of course listening to the individual tracks is a completely different and much less enjoyable thing. I also don't get why people spend their time doing things like that on closed platforms.

Most of my favourite mixes, like the Global Underground series aren't on there at all. And that's just stuff that came out on CD. Some of the best mixes are things like Radio 1 Essential Mixes or live events.

I've also noticed some artists "redoing" their own tracks on Spotify. If you look for Chicane's Behind the Sun on there you won't even find the original, only a redone version that's nothing like the one you remember.

So yeah, having a personal music collection is still very important.

> Since a set is a minimum of 1hour, you don't care for song search, album art etc.

I do care for song search in sets; has the use of .cue files fallen out of fashion as a solution[1]? Amarok supported .cue files since forever, its descendants (Clementine, Strawberry) probably do too.

1. Insofar as you can handle hundreds/thousands of tracks in your library named `ID` because the song hadn't been titled at the time of upload (or uploader didn't know the title).

Yeah audacious is where it's at. I've never understood why anybody would want to use an audio player that doesn't look like winamp. I even use (a lightly modified version of) the original winamp 2 skin: https://skins.webamp.org/skin/5e4f10275dcb1fb211d4a8b4f1bda2...

Honorable mention to qmmp, too.

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