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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2709 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 5, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What constitutes "better" in your view? For me, having your own collection of music + using something to stream (e.g. Plex) blows Spotify out of the water because I don't value the ability to browse new music on Spotify. If you do value that, then obviously hosting your own music isn't a great option. So you need to lay out requirements a bit more to get recommendations.

I have a music collection, but I switched from my mp3 player to my phone around Covid, when I couldn't be bothered to keep the former charged. I now try to listen to my own collection when I don't have any conference calls, but foobar2000 has a discoverability problem.

A streaming service might not have everything I want, but it's a skippable radio: I can tell it to play me some synthwave, or classic hard rock, or EDM, and it will, throwing both familiar and less known performers at me. If I don't like a song, I can skip it, if I really don't like it, I can dislike it, and the service will remember.

I have a well-organized collection, so I can drag the "classic rock" folder into the playlist and it will play the songs from there, but the number of songs by each artist doesn't really reflect how much I want to listen to them. I am not going to delete the discographies of The Doors and Pink Floyd just because I only like a handful of songs from each band. I am not going to split my collection into "hoarding" and "listenable" piles, either. So I have to make playlists, and I don't have enough patience for that.

So I find myself resorting to the streaming service simply because I can tell it, "computer, play me some more terrible upbeat pop like The Ting Tings", and it will.

Right.

I enjoy the possibility of getting instant access to most music without having to go via a site/torrent etc, and having it available on my phone too without any in-between. Just searching up a track or a podcast and listening instantly is worth something to me. I do feel Spotify is a tad overpriced versus what I actually get from it though. Most of the time I just listen to tracks on my liked list/a playlist.

It sounds to me like you may want to have a private collection of music for most of your listening, and just keep free Spotify around for the cases where you want to go listen to some random song. Assuming the free tier is still a thing, that is - I haven't used it in a while. That way you can still pull up something for instant access to music, but don't have to pay a sub where you aren't really getting much value most of the time.

Free Spotify has a long ad, if I remember correctly.

Do you need access to your music collection if you aren't home?

Not all of it, no.

You could look into self-hosted options. Another popular music streaming service is Apple Music, which works best if you are already in the Apple ecosystem.

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