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Comment by jmuguy

3 days ago

Another reason to use Bandcamp and just buy music. Of course then you've gotta setup a whole stack to store it, make it available to your devices, etc etc. I dunno, Spotify certainly isn't going to get better at this point. Best we can hope is that they die and something better takes their place.

> Of course then you've gotta setup a whole stack to store it, make it available to your devices, etc etc.

I have avoided building my own stack by uploading everything into Youtube Music (which used to be Google Music, which ... whatever.)

It gets a little worse every day, and one day it'll get bad enough where the pain of sysadmining something new will be preferable to them.

  • I haven't set up my own stack for music, so I'm just guessing tbh, but administering Jellyfin has been completely painless. Let Claude write a docker compose file, toss it on the server, haven't had to think about it again. I bet there's something equally good out there for music management.

My impression from the selfhosted sub is that most people looking to replace spotify are not into albums, and want a lot of popular music not available on BC.

Cloud storage (I use Dropbox) and an app to sync it with my phone automatically. It doesn't take a long time to set up.

And if I want to listen to a random song I don't have while I'm outside... I just don't.

If you're on Apple devices it's $25 a year for iTunes Match. You can throw all your Bandcamp purchases into the Music app and they'll be available across your devices.

>Of course then you've gotta setup a whole stack to store it, make it available to your devices, etc etc.

Uhh, no you don't? Nearly all of my Bandcamp purchases, except the literal one or two physical-only purchases that didn't also come with a digital copy, are all available to stream to my heart's content via the Bandcamp app and their website.

I mean, I also download it all because I DJ, but yeah... having access to it whenever I want is entirely effortless and doesn't require anything beyond Bandcamp itself.

> Of course then you've gotta setup a whole stack to store it

No you do not. Just use an external drive and an MP3 player like some kind of caveman. There are plenty of high quality models out there. Additionally smart phones will let you store music on them to listen to using the player app of your choice (VLC or something).

  • For the last 20 years, my "stack" has been a NFS-mounted hard drive full of MP3s, and the occasional rsync mirror to a USB stick if I need to listen to something without a network connection.

  • Well to elaborate on what I meant - Spotify makes it extremely easy to have access to your music everywhere. Once you get into (or back into) storing MP3s you have to solve that for whatever level of convenience you want. I have Plexamp and things setup myself but it does require some work.