Comment by browningstreet
3 days ago
I’ve almost entirely given up on managing music. Just done with it.
I listen to soma.fm and radioparadise.com .. I read one music magazine and listen to some of the music recommendations from there, but following any of it, over time, is a lost cause for me.
I was just remarking to someone how music apps are the least interesting, personal, and innovative of all the things I live with.
Examples: we still can’t manage playlists of albums, or down signal genres of music or even artists, or separate “calm” music for sleep from all the other generative playlist rankings they use.
Apple Music is entirely useless to me since the only “for me” stuff they’ll generate is music for sleeping. As if I don’t do other things.
How would you like to manage those things? I listen to a lot of music and I'm pretty happy with Spotify. When I want to discover new music, I pick an artist I like and start the artist radio. I always get good new recommendations
I gave up on Spotify after 3 months. I did not like how it just kept repeating the same songs. With a catalog as large as they supposedly have, it was not entertaining me hearing the same things so frequently.
Way back when, I had a very impressive iTunes catalog of actual media files that I had locally. I spent hours curating my CD rips and even the recordings from vinyl. I added id3 tags and artwork. It was glorious and was larger than my 80GB iPod could handle, so my iPod had curation as well.
Then iTunes went all streaming and wiped out my local library, not the media files, just the library. Gone. Poof. And just like that, I was done. I recently dug out the hdd with the media, and using iTunes now to find local stuff loaded onto my device is a constant fight with trying to avoid its clearly preferred Music+ nonsense.
I'm close to getting back to looking for a better music app to source my large local library. Just haven't quite gotten there yet.
"I'm close to getting back to looking for a better music app to source my large local library."
Well, I am close to finally build that better music app for my large local libary of music.
(I actually do already use my own written player since 15 years, but it was always just a quick hack and never the thing)
I also do use spotify for finding artists, but have the same complaints that they are just repeating. (Also I hate the spotify app)
Pandora is still around, but their library is a lot smaller
Artist radios almost inevitably become a mix of songs I’ve listened to the most that have even the faintest crossover with the artist genre. It’s very, very frustrating and my biggest peeve about Spotify. I now ask an LLM for an artist radio playlist and copy it over to spotify, which is kind of a pain.
That's really weird. I have heard of people having the same experience as you though. I'm not sure why my radio plays songs that I have never listened to
I’ve never really had good luck with the artist radio, but I’ve found a lot of music I like by starting at a band I like and going through the Related Artists. It’s a little strange because I’m sure the artist radio includes a lot of songs from the Related Artists. It’s probably a psychological thing, wanting to feel like I’m in control instead of the app choosing for me.
I just never stopped downloading music. We have modern download stores selling CD-quality music completely DRM free. I like knowing that no matter what happens short of an actual apocalypse, I will never lose access to any of my music.
I recently learned that two tracks on one of my favorite recent albums are straight up missing on streaming services. This only strengthened my resolve to stay the hell away from them.
Same here, music is too important for me to give up this kind of control. I probably miss out on the discovery system of streaming services, but there are enough other sources (e.g. radio paradise).
Hop on plex amp. Take control of your music.
I realize that sounds like an Ad but I’ve been using it for a few months and I feel like I’ve rediscovered my joy for music again.
Given that Plex just bumped their lifetime subscription price to $750, I can no longer recommend them. They are clearly more interested in becoming another streaming service, and are I think trying to push out their core users who probably make them very little money.
Interesting, their price bump announcement actually just went and made me upgrade to lifetime (at $250 while I could) instead of write them off completely.
Netflix will never allow you to pay a one time fee for life, neither will any other streaming service on the planet.
Meanwhile, plex is a company that has employees. If I like plex, use it heavily, and want to support them I can do so with money. There are alternatives that are completely free, but I don’t like them as much and the minimal cost for plex is totally worth the value for me.
To each their own!
Their site says $250? https://www.plex.tv/plans/
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It’s worth 750, which is about ten years worth of yearly subscriptions.
Plex is 16 years old and the Lindy effect applies.
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OrJellyfin or Navidrome if you want to use free open source that does a decent enough job.
It's good, but you still have to pay monthly for it. Feels like it kind of defeats the point of having a local collection.
I have a collection of flacs which contains the albums that matters deeply to me. I don’t mind not having access to unlimited music (I do have a spotify account but I rarely use it). I much prefer to do mindful listening, spending an hour or two, playing a full album at a time, or quickly composing a mood queue. I don’t even shuffle.
iTunes Match. It's entirely your own stuff. You pay for it, or upload your own stuff you have from elsewhere. You own it. You stream it wherever.
Pandora still exists and is quite good.
I came back to Pandora recently and I think it has the best discovery out of any music platform. I don't pay extra to play what I want, I curate radio stations and it's been great. The only catch is you have to be diligent with your curation, because it starts to reach and while you may love song X from genre Y, the station is genre Z. If you're not careful every station will become a mix of everything.
Former Pandora employee. The music recommendation team was amazing when I worked there, and the use of global song frequency capping across seeds helps prevent too much repetition at a user level but I agree on the genre bleed. They may have changed it but the music recommender was an ensemble model that polled 30 or so distinct models that would provide their own next song recommendation. One of the last resort recommenders used only the music genome data for the song (no collaborative filtering).
My trick is to be liberal with downvotes and excruciatingly sparing with any thumbs up.
Youtube Music is quite good for what you're describing.
> Examples: we still can’t manage playlists of albums, or down signal genres of music or even artists, or separate “calm” music for sleep from all the other generative playlist rankings they use.
Youtube music thinks "videogame music" is a genre and lumps them all together, if you make the mistake of including even one song from a game OST any recommendations go out the window.
For example, a "chill" mix with videogame music in it will happily start including Doom Eternal tracks because "they're the same thing, right?"
It feels like the quality of the Youtube Music app took a dive when they fired the whole team and outsourced development around a year or so ago.
This happens with Spotify too TBF. Listen to one single genre, suddenly the only thing you hear is from that genre.
Whenever Spotify removed human curation from their recommendations to rely on more ML-algorithms was when it stopped being useful to me.
Went back to trackers myself, only place where musical discissions/recommendations are actually useful and wanted.
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YouTube music’s recommendations suck hard compared to Spotify and all the people I know who use it (a dozen) say the same thing. The only reason any of us use it seems to be because we only want to pay for one music service and we all use YouTube premium anyways. It’s amazing how big a hole that is in the service, that everyone I know agrees with the same thing.
I gave up on recommendations and I just playlist my own music preferences over time. Like in the days of old.