Comment by wilted-iris

Yes! This launched after I left Spotify but I agree it looks neat. I find the three month build expiration concerning, but I also have a low risk tolerance for my music experience.

Author here.

I haven't seen any evidence of Spotify killing librespot. To me the project looks active and works totally fine. I don't have a new Spotify account to verify the claim above.

I suspect wilted-iris is conflating it with the recent changes to the Web APIs: new developer apps can't use all endpoints anymore. In Fastpotify if you add your Client ID I use both an older developer app and your app to keep everything as fast and seamless as possible.

Librespot no longer works for new accounts. APIs are being gated off and they’re applying legal pressure to dissuade projects from reverse engineering anything new. At the end of the day, they can turn the tap off anytime they want, whether by technical or legal means. I tired of having so much of my music experience at risk and chose to migrate on my own terms.

Thanks for sharing. I loved buying then downloading cheap samplers from punk and hardcore labels when I was younger. That was part of the culture and that really helped me discover new music and shaping my tastes. This is something that doesn't exist that much anymore and I'm glad to find this initiative. I try to listen to classical music but that's a very difficult world to discover, this will probably help by helping me to focus on few titles instead of jumping in the gigantic and maze-ish pool !

Your comment really brought me back to my first job out of college, I worked for Tower Records (RIP) as a call center customer service rep. Tower was known for being the best place to find rare classical recordings, and I recall the Hyperion label as being well respected. It always fun to talk to our customers that were classical and jazz aficionados.

I think they've archived all the old Linn Records stuff, which is excellent.

Thank you for sharing!

I left spotify around two years ago for a self hosted option (I mostly use navidrome+feishin). Music discovery was a concern for me as well, but then I realized that I didn't like the idea of spotify curating which music I discovered. So far, this is what has worked for me:

- Actually listening to the music I have now. I think the art of listening through full albums has slowly died, but there is so much music we're ignoring because we just listen to Artist's top tracks.

- Word of mouth. Asking my friends what they listen to. This is a way that people used to discover music and I've found so much good music this way.

- Bandcamp. Bandcamp is SUCH a good way to discover new music. You can listen to the music in app, there are great articles and you can actually support the artists!

> radio for discovery

was a big question mark I had as well. The Clear Channel and iHeart stations are not known for discovery. Now if you find a college station or by some miracle an independent station you can get some new stuff. My favorite local college station is also ad free. They also have an app which I lean on as it's not the strongest transmitter so their coverage is spotty. Maybe there's other indy stations with apps as well??

I listen to Flow State, SomaFM, and aggregate from local shows and a few people I follow on social media among other discovery platforms. (I don’t have a favorite yet.)

I found that Spotify was increasingly recommending AI artists and songs I already knew. It surfaced very little outside of my comfort zone and effectively nothing that wasn’t new. There’s a whole world of music out there that Spotify wasn’t showing me.

using nts.live and and fip radio -> https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip at the moment for same purpose. Radio France allows to save liked track names in profile to look up later.

I use https://radioparadise.com for this, since more than 20 years.

Hype machine used to be so good for this. I haven't used it for a long time but it looks like it is still going in some fashion.

There is nothing better plexamp but unfortunately after plex raised their prices it might not be worth it for most

Call me a boomer but I’ve had a ton of fun with XM radio. I can find new music on Bandcamp but nothing compares to hearing some classic from the 80’s that you would have never thought to put on when you’re driving home after work on a Friday.

I just listen to NTS most of the time.

> its almost impossible to find new music otherwise

I don't know where this opinion came from (Probably Spotify's PR department) but it's just so weird to me. Do you think people didn't find new music before streaming? It's not impossible, you just have to talk to people.

I don't know about you but spotify discovery feels like the least organic discovery possible. Its so homogeneous and predictable and corporate slop adjacent it makes me cringe just thinking about it.

You're right, they can't prevent that, but they can change their APIs in breaking ways enough to make librespot unreliable, to the point it's just not worth it.

I assume that for a long time, Spotify was content to ignore projects like librespot... they didn't help those projects, but didn't harm them either, and generally to keep things stable enough that a project based on librespot basically stayed working, which is why you saw so many OSS tools that used it behind the scenes. It does seem like that balance shifted over the last year, and now librespot is constantly breaking in new and mysterious ways. Some accounts work, others don't. Some tracks play, others don't. The devs did a great job fixing that stuff, but it's a game of whack-a-mole, and Spotify seems to have really upped the frequency of how often they break things. And that's for the lossy decoding, which is functionality that used to be pretty stable. Spotify reached out and (I assume) made some threats that explicitly shut down their work around lossless audio [1].

FYI -- I'm not associated with the librespot project, but I was actively working on a project that relied on it. Eventually I gave up in favor of self hosting, because I want my music to not break all the time. Shame, because I used to like Spotify a lot and now I'm actively looking to move away from it. That's one premium family plan subscription they're gonna lose! I'm sure they'll feel the sting.

[1] https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/issues/1583#issue...

Depends on how much they care. They can take down repos containing any keys, or use heuristics to block clients.

Technically no, but they can just ban you. It would not be impossible to detect.

Anthropic can prevent people from using their models with the subscription plan outside Claude Code, why couldn't Spotify?

DMCA has entered the chat.

How would the plausible deniability piece work? If you stream some bytes to someone else, you can't deny doing it. Unless you imagine this working over Tor, idk what the performance of Tor is these days but I never thought it could support such an application.

Have you heard of Soulseek? It's an active p2p music sharing platform.

> There was a world before Spotify

There was, and it was definitely not "the golden age of music streaming".

I have a free Deezer account from my family. Shit is extremely barren. Some examples:

1. (already posted on HN) Wanted to try Midori's early stuff, but no "1st" EP nor "2nd" LP. Not on Spotify nor Apple Music either.

Only yesterday:

2. Looking at Bleach (the Japanese hardcore punk/noise rock band): nothing and they aren't extremely obscure or anything (https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/bleach-4). They're on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/artist/5gRsPZZNgrkagQnDlyFZUC) but missing two LPs; on Apple Music too (https://music.apple.com/us/artist/bleach/74570682) and one more LP available.

3. Okay, let's try Meat Puppets' lauded second LP from my backlog... artist is there, but four first LPs aren't. On Spotify and Apple Music.

4. For fun, let's try to find that very obscure kote kei demo, (螺旋 (Rasen) - Hysterical Noi「z」e / Like「M」(1997)). Nothing, of course, but well, I can't even find it on private trackers or SoulSeek (got some mystery mp3s "somewhere").

So, if I were to stoop down to streaming, looks like Spotify/Apple are less worse here.

I use Deezer (in a browser tab, and on my iphone.) It's good, but far from great.

If several artists / bands share the same name, there will be one artist page with all of the artists/bands releases. The queue management sucks, I can add stuff to the queue, move / remove individual entries. That's it. If I added an album to the queue and want to remove it, I have to click a little cross one time for each track of the album. Notifications about new releases: great. Except the UI is a tiny dropdown, and hovering over an item removes the little marker signaling it's a new one. It's really difficult to catch up when there are more than 5 new entries. etc.

I pay for Deezer but I've never used the app. I download the music I want in FLAC using deemix.

Probably for the same reason Twitter killed their API, more control over the experience and to serve ads/cross-promote. More cross-promote for Spotify.

The first Spotify client, the one in Qt was actually really good. Things started going downhill slowly when they integrated Facebook then very fast when they threw everything through the window to rewrite everything in electron.

> Spotify has always been terrible.

It wasn't, really. At least not completely. I fully agree on the algorithm - I miss times of scrobbling to Last.fm, which was much better at this. (Spotify always supported scrobbling to Last.fm from their client, surprisingly).

Spotify used to be snappy and worked really well on Linux. I even used it for local libraries, as it was one of the few options that didn't crash on mine.

It was at the beautiful time when we realized web apps can have local storage, Google released that experiment called Chrome to "show public how modern browser can evolve and inspire other browser makers how to progress". We know it ended up in "extinguish the market with it", unfortunately.

But Spotify chose native app approach - they distributed it as packages. Deezer on the other hand, back then (I don't know now) had just native web app that could pull music locally. I think it was an extension of Chrome (?). It also worked perfectly fine on Linux, almost two decades ago.

We had a lot of decent options back then.

https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/issues/1649

> We're going to vibe code the entire enshittified internet to be ours once again.

It’s such a wishful thinking, but no it doesn’t and won’t work this way. Code != useful product. Plus today’s web is all about fabricated content, AI bots, cloudflare challenge walls and all other annoying stuff. The very idea of being able to create something in seconds is already killing internet.