Comment by olivierestsage

> one of my goals for the year is to find at least 2 albums per month I want to buy.

Rate Your Music (RYM) has been invaluable for me in discovering loads of music, I'd highly recommend it

> find at least 2 albums per month I want to buy.

Maybe I should set that goal as well, for 2025 I had 120 ;)

Love bandcamp, love navidrome! And if you are on Android and don’t mind using closed source, paid (one-time) software, Symfonium is pretty much the best mobile player you can get for selfhosted streaming.

Man, it was 1997 the last time I bought as much music as I did last year. I'm very happy that neither Youtube Music nor Spotify see a dime of it.

This is great. If you packaged it as a docker-compose YAML and maybe added a periodic task to poll automatically id drop it into Container Station in my NAS today.

Awesome! Something that I had on my todo list the past couple of months, because I also switched from YT Music to Navidrome + Bandcamp. Feels great to own your music again.

Thanks for sharing your work!

oh my god thank you for showing me that

I had been using a combination of aria2 and a link scraper plugin for years to download bulk out of bandcamp because of how fast their API will time out.

What's the navidrome pitch?

Hi subdavis!

To anyone going down this route, there's a surprisingly deep rabbit hole when you look into "how copy the bits off the drive and into a .wav file". There are a lot of places where errors can be introduced: the quality of the CD drive, the condition of the disc itself, how fast the drive is spinning for the rip, etc. I didn't think this was a big issue until I got a load of cheap used discs, started ripping them with my laptop, and later discovered issues with some of the rips, even on discs which looked perfectly fine.

There's a tool called cdparanoia[1] whose goal is to babysit the CD drive and ensure that it gets a complete, perfect, uninterrupted stream of bits off the drive, and will use a lot of tricks to go back and re-read any data that didn't come back cleanly. I always used it with abcde[2], which was a wrapper around it with album lookup, tagging, and ffmpeg support. I highly recommend anyone amassing a CD rip collection take a look at it, both are still packaged in present-day Ubuntu.

[1] https://www.xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html [2] https://abcde.einval.com/wiki/

Slightly off topic but this describes a lot of what I love about used book stores. I enjoy browsing around and often buy things that just seem interesting since the prices are low. I've found all kinds of great books that would never turn up in a regular curated store.

If you can, find an old tape deck at a thrift store and look into cassettes as well. They're super fun to find and you can buy new ones from groups on Bandcamp usually way cheaper than any other merch offerings and still get the high quality FLAC files. I spent some time last year going through a variety of tapes that were up to 40+ years old and was shocked at how good some of them still sounded.

Yes. But shhhhh about cds, don’t want people to realise…

Also the price of decent (Sony hifi grade, not ES) CD players used is great too.

I second this strategy. My suggestion is keep an eye out for soundtracks and “sampler” type promo discs - some quirky gems! Record labels and their relationships with Hollywood did demonstrate money and drugs and music to great together…see: Spawn the movie soundtrack (1990s).

Also my library card is much better for legacy music exploration. It scales too.

There's something magical about picking music based purely on a cover or a vague vibe and taking a chance on it

Replying to myself for anyone that sees this... but I just have to say - within a day of posting, someone purchased my entire discography! I'm so blown away!

So validating to know someone enjoyed my work enough to buy it.

Thank you to everyone who's taken a listen, and thank you to the person that bought it!

<3

I believe if you go down the rabbit hole of "mood playlists" and spotify created playlists, then you'll get a lot of tracks that they don't need to pay royalties for and that could probably include AI generated music.

If you are explictitly looking for music by specific artists, then you get their music obviously.

After an album ends Spotify keeps playing some related music. It's expected to include some tracks that are new to you. Then suddenly you notice "artists" you've never heard of with empty descriptions and "albums" from 2025 only.

This. Lazy/mindless consumption without any discernment has been leading to various rabbit holes for quite a while. Ever saw youtube content which algorithm brings toddlers to if left alone with a device?

Autopilot in, autopilot out.

But still fuck this AI slop.

I’m the same as you, I search for artists I like and then listen to albums, saving them in my library. I never see any AI generated music or podcasts because I just listen to music.

I have more than enough music made by humans to listen to for the rest of my life without ever turning to algorithmic recommendations.

There's is a quite solid alternative to what.cd: https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html

I miss Oink’s pink palace, what.cd was only almost a replacement

[dead]

This is not Spotify, it's Spotify fraudsters.

It's like being mad at your bank that somebody stole your credit card on the subway and made purchases with it.

I share the disgust at slop music spam sneaking into Spotify's recommendation services last time I used them.

But I absolutely don't agree that Bandcamp does recommendations well. To me, it seems like they don't personalize at all. Maybe you're just lucky enough to share the taste of the (at least human) taste makers at Bandcamp. Spotify's pre-enshittification Discover Weekly was miles better than whatever they do. My experience with old brick and mortar record stores was that at best they stocked a little of the music I enjoyed, but didn't have a clue about it. Most often they didn't stock it at all.

If you saw a video of a person doing something cool, and later found out it was AI generated, would you still be impressed?

Of course, it's not exactly the same situation, but if I listen to a song and appreciate that the vocalist sounds cool and they're doing some technically difficult things, I am definitely less impressed to find out it's a computer program. And it also means I can't find other songs with that vocalist's same artistic sense because they don't have one, they're a computer program who can sound like anything.

If the person behind it pretends to have produced it themselves, or (this actually happened) put themselves in AI-generated photos with celebrity artists in their cover/album art, then I will sour on them and stop listening to their uploads.

This has only happened once. The rest of the time, I will be listening to a radio playlist as I work when a song comes on that makes me go "Wait a minute." Checking the song's cover art, clearly AI. Artist page? 30 singles in 2025, every one with AI cover art. The bio reads like a Suno prompt (and probably is). The uploader then gets tossed in the proverbial bin.

The above has been happening more and more often. To the point where it's about 30% of the songs I hear on the radio playlist, as of this week. I'm in the process of migrating over to Deezer as a consequence. They label AI-generated music and do not recommend them or include them in radio playlists.

Edit: Not the exact same artist, but I searched a generic song name to find an AI slopper. This one AI-inserting himself into pictures with women for cover art is the same idea as the one putting himself in pictures with celebrities like Ariana Grande. https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kEPAFHKkMPF1...

Yes, I certainly would. I might even start hating the song, if that discovery left me feeling tricked.

Yes, and I would be curious to discover which human artists' works were plagiarized to produce the result I liked in the AI song.

Yes, in fact I would never listen to the "artist" again.

No. Just like Owl City isn't his real voice. If the song is good I don't personally care.

Most of the music I like is loops pasted together in some DAW. Sure, it requires taste to make a good song but if AI figure out how to replicate that taste can crank out catchy tunes I wouldn't have a problem with it. I can only guess though that too much of a good thing will lead to be getting bored with it ... maybe.

It's not like most pop music isn't formulaic. I enjoy the currently popular songs from K-Pop Demon Hunters but they're so cliche, if they turned out to be AI generated I wouldn't be surprised :P

Yes. It would reveal any emotional resonance, meaning or attachment to be fake and without value.

If the players played really well, would you follow an AI generated basketball league?

I think I would. This has actually happened in fact.

I generally don't think I'd care, but I don't put most music (or most of any art) up on a pedestal and imbue it with all sorts of stories and meaning about how it's a dialogue or relationship between me and the artist. If I enjoy it, I generally don't care where it came from or how it was made.

BUT I also recognize that is NOT how most people feel, and that's fine.

Absolutely not. Reggae Wars is proof of this.

This happened to me last month. After the first song, I suspected so I checked the cover and the artist profile. It was AI generated. I enjoyed the album nevertheless. You can find AI music enjoyable. People also hated DJ music before. And recorded music before. And electro amplified live music performances before that. This is just another category of music. Doesn't take away from human music. What people are right to be angry is that the tech was made on the backs of other people's non-remunerated work. Whether a human made a song or not shouldn't be as important as actual living artists being taken advantage of.