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Comment by tormeh

5 days ago

It's a music player, and it's way too heavy for what it does. Well, it does a lot it doesn't need to, too. Uses 1.5GB of RAM on my laptop atm. Since I only have 16GB on my work laptop that's noticeable. I'd love it if Spotify AB could replace its client with a native Rust one, although using an immediate-mode GUI library like fastpotify does might not be the best option...

Is there any music streaming service with fast native cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows, Android) clients? Because I'd switch. Feel like Spotify's recommendations have taken a nosedive lately, so that wouldn't hold me back too much.

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tormeh

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toofy  5 days ago

> Is there any music streaming service with fast native cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows, Android) clients? Because I'd switch.

i use apple music. love it way more than spotify. i originally got it because their descriptions of albums and their playlists are done by actual music nerds. i use the website on linux since it’s my daily/work driver and their app on my phone and macbook when i use it. the apple music app was fine on windows before i switched to linux entirely. definitely leagues better than itunes was.

have the family plan and i never hear complaints from the family members who use it on android.

i hated how spotify would just remove tracks after id spend time making a playlist and suddenly it would just be gone, like not greyed out, just gone. so irritating.

in terms recommendations, apple is a definitely far better than spotify, but it’s still nothing compared to music store nerds, college radio, or friends. recommendation algorithms from every platform are trash and just can’t compete with other people, at all. go to your local record store, look through the employee recommendations or just talk to them, most of them are working in a music store because they love music (its not for the money lol) and then buy the vinyl, you’ll thank yourself later.

  • esskay  5 days ago

    Apple music still gets a bit of a bad rap, the first iteration of the desktop and mobile apps for it were god awful. And if you lived outside of the west coast of the US, buffering was a noticable issue as they rather stupidly centralised all streaming out of one location in California for a long time. If you hit skip a handful of times from a UK/EU machine for example that was it, game over, apps locked up and you've gotta force quit.

    It's way better now, and the recommendations are pretty good. The app is still crap though (although granted significantly better than Spotify!). Theres some bonkers UX decisions and the mix of Apple Music and iTunes store is piss poor. It's just got some illogical crap going on where depending on where in the interface you right click a song or artist it changes what options you'll get.

    • elboru  5 days ago

      "...and the recommendations are pretty good"

      This is so confusing to me, many people say that, but a year ago my wife and I tried to switch to Apple Music. Bad recommendations were the main reason why it didn't stick for us. Every time my children would listen to some kids songs a few minutes later it would start playing "random" songs.

      Maybe it's similar to Apple Maps, it works good for the American market, but once you try it in other countries/languages the quality is not the same.

      3 replies →

cosmic_cheese  5 days ago

Apple Music has native clients on macOS and Windows (the latter being a greenfield WinUI app rather than based on iTunes heritage). No native Linux app, but unlike Spotify they actually allow third party clients to exist and even furnish a library for devs to use, and so third party clients like Cider[0] exist on Linux. It also has a web app that can be installed as a PWA.

[0]: https://cider.sh

lostlogin  5 days ago

> It's a music player

Spotify doesn’t completely agree with that.

‘Spotify is a digital music, podcast, and video service that gives you access to millions of songs and other content from creators all over the world.’

I left in the middle of their ‘we do Podcasts’ bs, where they were pushing Joe Rogan hard.

Yuck.

https://support.spotify.com/nz/article/what-is-spotify/

  • rplnt  5 days ago

    Isn't it just another ad distribution platform? The amount of ads they started to push to paying(!) users recently makes me want to cancel it every day (but I'm also too lazy to seek alternatives).

byroot  5 days ago

> Uses 1.5GB of RAM on my laptop atm.

That's crazy, I just checked on mine (macOS), it's only ~300MiB, about as much as Apple Mail which is native.

Still a bit much for what I need it for, but tolerable.

radiator  5 days ago

For the monthly price of Spotify, one could rent a VPS and host Navidrome on it. In case you already have spare capacity, then it might be (almost) free.