YouTube sound quality is poor, and 99% of your bandwidth being devoted to video is wasteful. Just use SoundCloud or something. Better yet revanced patched YT music or xmanager Spotify.
YouTube’s sound quality is comparable to Spotify’s - IIRC it’s 128kbps AAC versus 160kbps MP3. Also, a static video’s bitrate is around 300-400kbps, so you’re not wasting that much bandwidth
YouTube supports 160kbps opus, which should be pretty much transparent to our ears. But the audio is reencoded in the uploaded video, which then gets reencoded by YT again.
These multiple lossy reencodes are probably why YouTube audio sounds worse then Spotiy. Artists upload there songs as lossless wav/flac, which the gets reencoded/compressed a single time.
Didn’t know that YouTube had 160kbps audio… I checked a auto-generated upload on yt-dlp, and while it had an Opus stream, all of the audio streams were encoded at 128kbps.
Both Opus and properly-encoded AAC audio should be virtually indistinguishable from the original source, but I do believe that Opus performs slightly worse in blind ABX testing. Again, you’d barely be able to tell the difference, so sound quality is basically the same.
(As for encoding, I believe that YouTube uses the source audio if it’s already encoded as AAC, which most video editors do by default, and music distributors send the same lossless source to YouTube as they do to Spotify, so I don’t think re-encoding will make a difference)
Spotify capping out at 192 was a nope for me hahaha. Someone on Lemmy mentioned AppMus had hi-rez lossless and regular lossless and I was like “yep done”
I don’t like iTunes though, so on my computers it’s still flac o’clock.
ublock origin blocks spotify ads well. I have found a lot of new artists using spotify, I avoided it for a pretty long time. When I find artists I like I usually buy their stuff on bandcamp cause i can get flacs
Eh, I switched to Spotify last year (++, of course) and there’s a lot to be said in favour of the Spotify algorithm when it comes to music recommendations, as opposed to YouTube.
Spotify algorithm pushes artists that pay them to push them to you. Get your recommendations via more organic means if you can. That means blogs, real people. Screw the spotify recommendation slop (and I say this as someone who has spotify premium.)
I do. While I get your point, I mostly use it so that I don’t have to maintain my own music library. But maybe I should try switching to something like Navidrome.
Have you checked out the made for you playlists? The Monday discover and Friday new music playlists have been key in how I find music the past like 10 years.
They don’t really work for me. I listen to different genres, different languages. Sometimes I only like a single song from an artist. My taste is weird. I usually discover new music organically through friends, or sometimes I’ll hear something playing somewhere and stuff.
To me, it seems like the Spotify algorithm has a heavy bias towards newer songs, and also towards English songs. Both of those are a minority in my playlists, but somehow that’s all it recommends me.
The goal is that now that they’ve been caught pirating lyrics, they have to pay MusixMatch for their lyrics, perhaps on a per request basis, so they lose money by making it available.
So someone can ignore the ads, ignore not being able to chose a song, and ignore no download. But having to open musixmatch in a separate app is the straw that broke the camels back
It seems they were right going by how upset people are in here. Many of these people that are carrying on like spoiled children will no doubt subscribe to premium now.
Could someone kindly ELI5 how to lidarr-ize my liked tracks from Spotify, please?
My collection there is quite static and I think I’m a good candidate to go MP3/AAC/whatever 🏴☠️ plus Spotify free just to keep up to date with newly released singles/albums from time to time.
Thanks!
P.S. also what comes after would be great, i.e. how I can batch transfer all those files from my home server running lidarr to my Android phone/PC and keep them in sync after the initial transfer. Plus also a nice feature rich Android app, either free (no ads) or even better open source with an accessible price.
Also, if you’re up for the self-hosted life, what comes next is a music server. If you have good access to WiFi or unlimited data, this eliminates storage as a bottle neck. I recommend Navidrome. But something like Jellyfin or Plex can do Movies and TV, if you want a 1 size fits all.
If you’re not, look into Syncthing. You chose a folder on your computer and one on your phone and this app keeps them in sync. After that, my favorite player was GoneMad. It’s offline, with real support for music tags. This allowed song ratings and real smart playlists
Yeah I forgot to mention that I’m already living the self hosted life, I got a small home server with the arr suite, jellyfin and a few other containers.
Didn’t know about syncthing, I’ll definitely check it out. Same for GoneMad 👍🏻
Skip Lidarr for your initial move. Use Deemix. You can find links to premium ARLs on the wiki or with a google search (or DM me).
Deemix has an option to sign in with your Spotify account and download playlists. There’s a weird song count limit, and you may have to manually hit some tracks. But this is the way.
You can also do Flac with this setup. You don’t necessarily need it, but if you’re making the move, I recommend it. Since Flac is lossless, there’s never going to be an upgrade.
Using Spotify without premium, as Spotify offers it, is unusable. There might be other options than paying, but the vanilla Spotify experience is horrendous
Edit: Also, Real-Debrid if you want to directly download any torrent instantly at your connection’s maximum bandwidth (up to 1Gbps) without having to wait for seeds. But this one costs money. (It’s worth it, though, especially if you’re downloading a lot of 50GB+ AAA games like I am.)
Simple, you replace your torrent client with it. Instead of opening a torrent file in QBittorrent or whatever, you go to the “torrents” section and paste the magnet link/open your torrent file there. Then select “convert” and then you can download the torrent directly from their servers. It’s kind of like a seedbox that everyone shares, so that you don’t have to wait for seeds so long as at least one person has added the file to Debrid before.
The funniest thing to ask money for. Just have genius.com open or stream the song on YouTube, the lyrics are probably in the description or at the very least the comments.
Note that it’s not really a Spotify streaming app, rather it uses your (free) Spotify account for playlists, search, recommendations, etc. and then goes and find the song you want to play on YouTube, and the lyrics from scraping websites I think. Pretty clever.
It’s all about having the .lrc file, it gets read automatically (as long as it’s named like the song file) by mpv player and many android players.
It’s a simple text file containing the lyrics with timestamps. You can get them from deezer for example with certain downloaders. Or look for them on Soulseek.
Recently ditched subscription services because of non-stop price hikes. Now I’m on Navidrome with a VPS and using Ultrasonic on my Android for mobile and Android Auto listening. For music, I turn to good old Soulseek and Telegram bots.
Never going back. The control and savings make it all worth it.
I’ve never used the free tier on Spotify and I don’t understand how anyone can. The ads alone would make me throw off my headset in disgust. So yeah, not going to affect me, and I do enjoy reading the lyrics a lot.
That said, I am experimenting with swapping over to Apple Music because I feel Spotify has become too expensive.
I recently flipped to apple music and apart from seeing a few songs missing on albums i don’t really listen to anyway, it’s only been an improvement. the lossless audio is quite nice
They were so much more expensive than Pandora when I tried them out and the free tier was too awful to want to reward them with my money, so I did pay but it went to a competitor. Their music recommendations were terrible compared to Pandora, too.
I don’t use Pandora now though, they got bought by SiriusXM who I will never pay again after they made cancelation such a difficult process.
With xManager, the free tier comes quite close to premium. No ads, play whatever music you like. The only issues are lower sound quality & no downloads, which are really non-issues since you can just find other sources to download the music from, at flac quality
The ads alone would make me throw off my headset in disgust.
For a mobile, there is a modded apk,I’ve never heard ads there.
For a PC, web player in Firefox with uBlock Origin, there are no ads at all there.
The same goes for Tidal, I’ve never paid for these apps.
Well, that’s very specific case to be honest. In that case you can just download whatever you want beforehand, from soulseek, for instance. Generally people make preparations in advance for such things.
Zotify works very well at downloading Spotify lists, from playlists to whole discographies. You have to sort the output a little as you’ll often get multiple copies of tracks due to remastered editions, songs released as singles etc. But overall it’s an incredibly easy way to download music.
spotx - well, I tried, but honestly, I don’t need one more app especially when everything works in the browser. Plus, I prefer portable setups and there’s no portable version of spotx, so, it’s pretty useless for me.
It’s explicitly said on the Spowlo GitHub page that they use YouTube for downloading, so, there’s no way to get 320 kbps tracks or flacs. Instead, I’d recommend to try some Qobuz/Deezer-based solutions, there are quite a few of them there. Or use slavart or something like this, or good old soulseek, there’s even an Android client for it.
Most people don’t pirate stuff on their phones. I use an iPhone and my hundreds of gigabytes of pirated stuff is available on my iPhone via plexamp/plex/etc.
Even then you might not see them. I’ve noticed recently that a ton of songs that used to have the lyrics attached no longer show the lyrics or have the button to show them. And I do have premium.
Musixmatch has a free, public database where lyrics are displayed. To contribute to the database, users can sign up and contribute lyrics, synchronizations, translations, and structuring to get points and move up levels. Musixmatch’s points have no redeemable value, but are instead a marker of a particular user’s contributions.
It is fucked up that the fans who are transcribing do not get a cut, but it’s not like they were misled to believe they would make a cut before they started doing it. The people doing that are doing it out of a passion for the music.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t be paid of course they should, if it was up to me I’d say make them all rich. I just think it’s a stretch to imply that Spotify is stealing anything here
The writers almost certainly do get a cut. Musixmatch does not own the copyright to any of the lyrics, and as such, negotiated with the copyright holders in order to be allowed to store, display, and sell access to the lyrics. This almost certainly involved some amount of money changing hands.
Spotify is paying money for access to the lyrics and using that as a feature in their product. A chunk of that money is almost certainly going back to the actual writers.
Spotify is not profitable right now; their current revenue doesn’t come anywhere close to covering their costs. The only reason they’re able to survive is investors holding on to the belief that, some day, it’ll be possible to actually make the numbers work.
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I just love watching everyone freak out about Spotify’s shitty business practices while I’m casually looping YouTube videos with an adblocker.
YouTube sound quality is poor, and 99% of your bandwidth being devoted to video is wasteful. Just use SoundCloud or something. Better yet revanced patched YT music or xmanager Spotify.
Edit: or better yet vimusic
YouTube’s sound quality is comparable to Spotify’s - IIRC it’s 128kbps AAC versus 160kbps MP3. Also, a static video’s bitrate is around 300-400kbps, so you’re not wasting that much bandwidth
YouTube supports 160kbps opus, which should be pretty much transparent to our ears. But the audio is reencoded in the uploaded video, which then gets reencoded by YT again.
These multiple lossy reencodes are probably why YouTube audio sounds worse then Spotiy. Artists upload there songs as lossless wav/flac, which the gets reencoded/compressed a single time.
Didn’t know that YouTube had 160kbps audio… I checked a auto-generated upload on yt-dlp, and while it had an Opus stream, all of the audio streams were encoded at 128kbps.
Both Opus and properly-encoded AAC audio should be virtually indistinguishable from the original source, but I do believe that Opus performs slightly worse in blind ABX testing. Again, you’d barely be able to tell the difference, so sound quality is basically the same.
(As for encoding, I believe that YouTube uses the source audio if it’s already encoded as AAC, which most video editors do by default, and music distributors send the same lossless source to YouTube as they do to Spotify, so I don’t think re-encoding will make a difference)
deleted by creator
For the paid tier, yes, but the free tier is locked to 160
I finally got a sub to Apple Music when I learned I get lossless by default. Yummmmmm.
I still hoard flacs, but Apple Music is dope.
Waiting for Spotify lossless to ditch flacs, I really want to like Tidal but I’ve had major issues every time I try and stick with it.
Spotify capping out at 192 was a nope for me hahaha. Someone on Lemmy mentioned AppMus had hi-rez lossless and regular lossless and I was like “yep done”
I don’t like iTunes though, so on my computers it’s still flac o’clock.
Spotify runs at 320kbps AAC which is totally fine quality-wise.
ublock origin blocks spotify ads well. I have found a lot of new artists using spotify, I avoided it for a pretty long time. When I find artists I like I usually buy their stuff on bandcamp cause i can get flacs
There are some add-ons that turn off the video to avoid wasting energy.
But they still waste the bandwidth. The YouTube music either premium or revanced is still the “most economical” way.
I’m not sure if the bandwidth is wasted or not with those add-ons.
Eh, I switched to Spotify last year (++, of course) and there’s a lot to be said in favour of the Spotify algorithm when it comes to music recommendations, as opposed to YouTube.
Spotify algorithm pushes artists that pay them to push them to you. Get your recommendations via more organic means if you can. That means blogs, real people. Screw the spotify recommendation slop (and I say this as someone who has spotify premium.)
I have gotten good recommendations from both but of course Spotify more often
This. You get actual bang for your buck
Anyone who uses spotify just to listen to their own music isn’t using spotify correctly.
I do. While I get your point, I mostly use it so that I don’t have to maintain my own music library. But maybe I should try switching to something like Navidrome.
Have you checked out the made for you playlists? The Monday discover and Friday new music playlists have been key in how I find music the past like 10 years.
They don’t really work for me. I listen to different genres, different languages. Sometimes I only like a single song from an artist. My taste is weird. I usually discover new music organically through friends, or sometimes I’ll hear something playing somewhere and stuff.
To me, it seems like the Spotify algorithm has a heavy bias towards newer songs, and also towards English songs. Both of those are a minority in my playlists, but somehow that’s all it recommends me.
Solid business decision by Spotify here, I support this move. I’ll probably switch over to them from YouTube music.
I know right. What’s Spotify’s goal with this move
The goal is that now that they’ve been caught pirating lyrics, they have to pay MusixMatch for their lyrics, perhaps on a per request basis, so they lose money by making it available.
Get people to pay for premium…
So someone can ignore the ads, ignore not being able to chose a song, and ignore no download. But having to open musixmatch in a separate app is the straw that broke the camels back
The idea of suddenly having something taken away fro you really triggers people.
If they had introduced as premium from start, then no would have cared about it.
It seems they were right going by how upset people are in here. Many of these people that are carrying on like spoiled children will no doubt subscribe to premium now.
I pay them for other reasons.
Make the record labels rich so that they can sue and bully people thank you!
Lol you guys pay for premium?
Could someone kindly ELI5 how to lidarr-ize my liked tracks from Spotify, please?
My collection there is quite static and I think I’m a good candidate to go MP3/AAC/whatever 🏴☠️ plus Spotify free just to keep up to date with newly released singles/albums from time to time.
Thanks!
P.S. also what comes after would be great, i.e. how I can batch transfer all those files from my home server running lidarr to my Android phone/PC and keep them in sync after the initial transfer. Plus also a nice feature rich Android app, either free (no ads) or even better open source with an accessible price.
Also, if you’re up for the self-hosted life, what comes next is a music server. If you have good access to WiFi or unlimited data, this eliminates storage as a bottle neck. I recommend Navidrome. But something like Jellyfin or Plex can do Movies and TV, if you want a 1 size fits all.
If you’re not, look into Syncthing. You chose a folder on your computer and one on your phone and this app keeps them in sync. After that, my favorite player was GoneMad. It’s offline, with real support for music tags. This allowed song ratings and real smart playlists
Thanks!
Yeah I forgot to mention that I’m already living the self hosted life, I got a small home server with the arr suite, jellyfin and a few other containers.
Didn’t know about syncthing, I’ll definitely check it out. Same for GoneMad 👍🏻
Thanks again!
Skip Lidarr for your initial move. Use Deemix. You can find links to premium ARLs on the wiki or with a google search (or DM me).
Deemix has an option to sign in with your Spotify account and download playlists. There’s a weird song count limit, and you may have to manually hit some tracks. But this is the way.
You can also do Flac with this setup. You don’t necessarily need it, but if you’re making the move, I recommend it. Since Flac is lossless, there’s never going to be an upgrade.
Third party apps for Spotify is definitely the way to go if you don’t have premium.
What are those?
Xmanager for android. For other platforms you can checkout Spotx
To be fair, Spotify is unsuable without premium.
Is what someone would say if they didn’t know any better.
Using Spotify without premium, as Spotify offers it, is unusable. There might be other options than paying, but the vanilla Spotify experience is horrendous
That’s fair
Spotify is unusable without
premiumXmanagerJokes on you, I already memorized them all
You say that like you can listen to the lyrics instead…
You say that like there aren’t thousands of songs with unintelligibly fast singing… lol
Why don’t you guys torrent ? I am back to torrenting and its the best.
Have fun
Because direct downloads are better and faster.
https://slavart.gamesdrive.net/
https://free-mp3-download.net/ (don’t use apostrophes in the search for this one)
You’re welcome.
Edit: Also, Real-Debrid if you want to directly download any torrent instantly at your connection’s maximum bandwidth (up to 1Gbps) without having to wait for seeds. But this one costs money. (It’s worth it, though, especially if you’re downloading a lot of 50GB+ AAA games like I am.)
How do we use real-debrid ? I don’t understand it.
Simple, you replace your torrent client with it. Instead of opening a torrent file in QBittorrent or whatever, you go to the “torrents” section and paste the magnet link/open your torrent file there. Then select “convert” and then you can download the torrent directly from their servers. It’s kind of like a seedbox that everyone shares, so that you don’t have to wait for seeds so long as at least one person has added the file to Debrid before.
Select the “premium offers” link to get started.
Cheers mate
The funniest thing to ask money for. Just have genius.com open or stream the song on YouTube, the lyrics are probably in the description or at the very least the comments.
Anything to encourage even a single person to spend more money. It’s just sad, really.
Just google them
Does anybody know of an alternative app that can do live lyrics?
The lyrics source that Spotify uses is free with a few caveats, like ads. The normal synced lyrics are free though.
The source is musixmatch and they have a floating lyrics window on Android which is neat.
Googles YouTube music just got updated for live lyrics.
It’s out of sync and I don’t know how to scroll manually when it happens.
I just use Shazam for that
ViMusic
Tidal. I use it because Id gotten tired of Spotify and YouTube Music’s BS
Spotube.
Note that it’s not really a Spotify streaming app, rather it uses your (free) Spotify account for playlists, search, recommendations, etc. and then goes and find the song you want to play on YouTube, and the lyrics from scraping websites I think. Pretty clever.
It’s all about having the .lrc file, it gets read automatically (as long as it’s named like the song file) by mpv player and many android players.
It’s a simple text file containing the lyrics with timestamps. You can get them from deezer for example with certain downloaders. Or look for them on Soulseek.
Yup. Recently let a foobar extension run through my music library and download .lrc’s. Now I can read them with Poweramp on my phone.
Recently ditched subscription services because of non-stop price hikes. Now I’m on Navidrome with a VPS and using Ultrasonic on my Android for mobile and Android Auto listening. For music, I turn to good old Soulseek and Telegram bots.
Never going back. The control and savings make it all worth it.
I’ve never used the free tier on Spotify and I don’t understand how anyone can. The ads alone would make me throw off my headset in disgust. So yeah, not going to affect me, and I do enjoy reading the lyrics a lot.
That said, I am experimenting with swapping over to Apple Music because I feel Spotify has become too expensive.
I recently flipped to apple music and apart from seeing a few songs missing on albums i don’t really listen to anyway, it’s only been an improvement. the lossless audio is quite nice
The ads aren’t even for anything. It was just really patronising ads for Spotify Premium.
Their business model is genuinely to just annoy you into paying.
It only annoyed me into stopping using their service
You either pay or you leave. Spotify wins, in both cases
OR you get an adblocker
They were so much more expensive than Pandora when I tried them out and the free tier was too awful to want to reward them with my money, so I did pay but it went to a competitor. Their music recommendations were terrible compared to Pandora, too.
I don’t use Pandora now though, they got bought by SiriusXM who I will never pay again after they made cancelation such a difficult process.
With xManager, the free tier comes quite close to premium. No ads, play whatever music you like. The only issues are lower sound quality & no downloads, which are really non-issues since you can just find other sources to download the music from, at flac quality
For a mobile, there is a modded apk,I’ve never heard ads there. For a PC, web player in Firefox with uBlock Origin, there are no ads at all there. The same goes for Tidal, I’ve never paid for these apps.
Doesn’t solve the offline mode/taking a 13 hour flight use case, unfortunately.
Well, that’s very specific case to be honest. In that case you can just download whatever you want beforehand, from soulseek, for instance. Generally people make preparations in advance for such things.
Zotify works very well at downloading Spotify lists, from playlists to whole discographies. You have to sort the output a little as you’ll often get multiple copies of tracks due to remastered editions, songs released as singles etc. But overall it’s an incredibly easy way to download music.
https://lemmy.ml/comment/3223099 For both PC and Android.
Does it convert them to 320kbps when I choose that quality? Because when I play those downloaded songs, it indeed shows as 320kbps.
That’s the question, because as far as I know, the highest ytmusic quality is 256 kbps. I would avoid using it
I use an iPhone though and I’d prefer not to use YouTube for music, or anything, really.
Oh man, you shouldn’t be using iphone in the first place, the most useless device piracy-wise.
Most people don’t pirate stuff on their phones. I use an iPhone and my hundreds of gigabytes of pirated stuff is available on my iPhone via plexamp/plex/etc.
This isn’t an issue about piracy anyway.
Spotify gives me ads and when I complain they tell me they’re not ads and that they’re offers lol. My only complaint.
Even then you might not see them. I’ve noticed recently that a ton of songs that used to have the lyrics attached no longer show the lyrics or have the button to show them. And I do have premium.
I noticed that as well, and I, too, have premium
Meanwhile, I’m sitting here with my pirated apk and I can still see all the lyrics 😂
They also broke adding songs to playlists on mobile lmao
Do the people who wrote those lyrics get a cut of Spotify gatekeeping them?
Spotify purchases their lyrics from Musixmatch
So no?
You as an individual can go access the public free database. Spotify as a corporation is a customer of musixmatch.
https://about.musixmatch.com/business/customer-stories/Spotify
I’m not sure what exactly you’re trying to say?
Spotify is receiving money for something they did not create.
Neither the writers of the lyrics nor the fans who transcribed them get a cut.
That is fucked up.
It is fucked up that the fans who are transcribing do not get a cut, but it’s not like they were misled to believe they would make a cut before they started doing it. The people doing that are doing it out of a passion for the music.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t be paid of course they should, if it was up to me I’d say make them all rich. I just think it’s a stretch to imply that Spotify is stealing anything here
I like stealing. According to my belief system theft is good.
It’s the fact Spotify is charging users for something stolen is what I think is fucked.
Something stolen should be freely shared.
Spotify are paying musixmatch for the lyrics.
musixmatch didn’t create the content either.
Irrelevant. It’s up to musixmatch to pay the creators or supplier of their content, not Spotify.
The writers almost certainly do get a cut. Musixmatch does not own the copyright to any of the lyrics, and as such, negotiated with the copyright holders in order to be allowed to store, display, and sell access to the lyrics. This almost certainly involved some amount of money changing hands.
Spotify is paying money for access to the lyrics and using that as a feature in their product. A chunk of that money is almost certainly going back to the actual writers.
hahahahaha spotify and paying someone lol
Spotify is not profitable right now; their current revenue doesn’t come anywhere close to covering their costs. The only reason they’re able to survive is investors holding on to the belief that, some day, it’ll be possible to actually make the numbers work.
The majority of their investors are record labels now, so there’s also an incentive to prevent competing streamers from taking Spotify’s position