I use an alternative to Spotify called "a folder full of mp3s". If you are into selfhosting you could also stream your collection using Navidrome but putting audio files on your phone works as well. If you need a recommendation algorithm you can sync your listens to listenbrainz.org or lastfm. There are quite a few Linux audio players that support the scrobble API.
this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2025
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s/MP3s/FLACs/, but otherwise, I agree.
Drive space isn’t scarce these days, so I think keeping a lossless copy somewhere is good, if just to compress the audio for a device with less storage.
very much this. server with navidrome and a soulseek script to download spotify and youtube playlists.
I quit Tidal because even they have BS Ai Albums/Bands/"Singers".
Fuck SUNO.
Granted Tidal doesn't randomly start adding/playing them, you'd have to play them, but adding them to recent/growing playlists is BS too IMHO.
Anyway checkout TIDAL Hi-Fi For Tidal + HiFi on Linux.
I'm back to just using Shortwave to record radio station tracks to grow my own local self hosted music cloud now.
Not giving my $$$$ towards enabling Ai slop.
So you say music streaming is taking the same enshittification route as streaming in general? That sucks to hear :/ I really want to switch, but I am only paying like 5€ in a Spotify family... so if it's just too hard it may be not worth it. However Spotify is fucking annoying me, it always plays the same shitty music and doesn't learn at all from my taste
+1 for TIDAL Hi-Fi
I switched to that from the web client today in order to enable their "Max" quality streams and enable keyboard media key support; has worked out great so far.
Like Velvet Sundown with 3 albums in 1 month lol.
p.s. Not sure If you saw my link for Linux-Tidal app:
Shortwave is cool, MusicPod incorporates local music and podcasts into the same app, which is pretty cool. But yes, internet radio is dope.
I don't have a great answer to your questions, but thanks for trying to support us during these dark times.
The what ads???
I gave up on native client for a couple things. So instead of downloading someone else's electron packaging I use the web app shortcut using Firefox to fake that qobuz is an actual app.
It's a thing on Linux Mint, not sure about your distro. You can choose icon, and make location bar visible or not. No tabs, it doesn't get mixed with other Firefox tabs, and that is it.
I've been using the web player for Qobuz, and it appears to allow for high quality output--I'm streaming at 24bit/96kHz at the moment (though I'm no audiophile, so I guess I can't confirm that's what I'm actually getting).
And apparently Qobuz pays the most per track of any streaming service, which is cool. The only thing it doesn't have is customizable "radio", but otherwise it's solid.
And apparently installing the Windows client in a Bottle works well too, or so I've read. Can't say I've tried it.
Honestly, while I still use Apple Music for some things (I don't like Apple, but I'm unfortunately stuck on it right now), I'm a big fan of building up a collection of digital media files bought either directly from artists or ripped from the CD collection I'm building. I usually go for FLAC, though less for its compression and more for its superior metadata support compared to WAVs.
For discovering new music, Bandcamp allows you to check out some songs; otherwise, check it out on YouTube or something and buy it directly from the artist later.
Like others have said, Bandcamp might not have everyone, but they do have a lot of indie artists and even some bigger ones. Some artists that don't have everything on Bandcamp might have their own store you can buy from.
@data1701d @gigachad Wait, you still buy songs? Did you know that you can download them from YouTube for free and convert them into an audio file?
Or maybe you want to support the artists: that’s fair, but I personally prefer downloading them from YouTube.
Yes, but these are my two thoughts:
- That's basically just piracy, and my feelings are that while sometimes it's ethical*, a lot of musical artists have made a good faith attempt to allow you to acquire it in a legal, DRM-free format at a reasonable price, meaning in a lot of cases it's not ethical, especiallyf with streaming basically eliminating record sale revenue and tour profit margins getting thinner and thinner.^1^
- When I want to pirate, I would at least do it right; why extract lossy audio from YouTube with yt-dlp when you can easily get a lossless FLAC on SoulSeek or another peer-to-peer network?
*: if the media isn't easily legally accessible, if it's stuck under a bad corporation, and fair use like making an FMV. I think it's much more ethical to pirate film and television, as if you pay for a film (whether a subscription or a Blu-Ray), it's often just going to go to some ultra-rick executive who had nothing to do with the talented people who worked on the film. Also, DRM makes streaming an inferior experience to just opening a video file. Music is a completely different game, especially with the proliferation of indie labels and self-publishing.
1: Of course, if the artist is some multi-millionaire or billionaire artist, then go ahead.
@data1701d I don’t consider downloading from YouTube as piracy, but I get you point of wanting to support artists.
At least in the objective legal sense, it very much is in the eyes of the YouTube terms of service and the law of most jurisdictions with strong copyright protections.
There is a legal distinction between streaming on YouTube (normal TOS-compliant use) and downloading the video as a whole through a 3rd party tool (circumvention of copyright protection, and YouTube gets no ad revenue with the download), which is usage outside the TOS.
Now, I don’t really give a darn about following US* copyright law for a megacorporation’s sake^1^ and have gone ahead and downloaded from YouTube, but it’s still piracy in the legal sense. This is not intended as a criticism of your actions, just a legal nitpick.
*Obviously, not everyone here is American (good riddance); this is just my personal experience. 1: Especially considering Google’s breaking it all the time with their ML models in my opinion.
Any reason in particular you need a dedicated client? Can you not just use a PWA?
No particular reason. I don't really have much experiences with web apps. I don't like the idea of putting every functionality into my Browser and I like it simple.
Look at it this way, if you run all pws with same browser you're not increasing the memory footprint, but if it's electron you do because you have multiple copies of electron in your disk and your memory.
And there's more electron apps out there than you know. Slack, visual studio and Spotify, apparently, included.
I'd recommend giving it a go and see if you like it.
Can you elaborate on this topic? Are we just speaking about a web player?
PWA is basically just a browser window that looks and functions like an app on your computer. You can launch it from wherever you launch apps. It will open in its' own window. It's functionally identical.
Functionally identical to running it on browser, but no match for true speed and experience of desktop app.
I use them but I'd prefer true options.
This is the way to go
RAM is expensive.
You think a dedicated app is going to use less RAM than a browser window?
RAM is only expensive if you're dumb enough to buy a modern Mac.
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I use the web app for Qobuz, and it looks and feels like a regular Qobuz app.
I use volumio, it has integration for tidal and qobuz
Sounds interesting. If I understood correctly, it's about 5 bucks a month for remote access and tidal/Quboz integration? Also I need to set it up on a server or raspberry pi? Could be a bit overkill for just a music player...
Mines on a Pi2b with a DAC hat, access through web or android app. I suppse you could add it as a docker image.
It may be overkill for your needs. I like it because I can browse my own music library or, online stream, plus it has a slew of internet radio stations included in the free version (you can custom add others)
I've been using this Qobuz client for Linux, it's electron but seems to handle HiFi - at least to my untrained ears.
if youre willing to sail the seven seas, nicotine+ with tauon music box
I second this, but with a few things I wish I would have known:
- Before you hope on SoulSeek (with an application like Nicotine+), please study up on the etiquette - downloading someone's shared files without sharing any files that they can choose to download for their collection is called leeching, and while some people don't really care, a lot of SoulSeek users will get really angry if you do this because they're giving you their internet bandwidth for nothing in return.
- To share files, you have to port-forward; be sure to check your ISP's terms of service. I hear that as long as you're not using a huge amount of bandwidth, even stricter ISPs can be pretty lax on enforcing their anti-p2p rules, so you may be able to get away with the risk of breaking the terms of service. However, to truly reduce the risk, you should probably use a VPN.
Of course, there's a whole other ethics of piracy rant I have, but I'd rather not pull it out right now. The main time I used SoulSeek was to download a rip of a rare TMBG CD (like, not a single copy on Discogs and only 1 on eBay).
Mostly MP3s but I also use internet radio for streaming. I use the RadioDroid app from F Droid for that
There is also https://github.com/Nokse22/high-tide
Open source Tidal client
Is it good, can you recommend it? And most important, does it have dark mode?
Idk, check it out. There are articles on google. I don't use tidal.
Oh yeah and it's free to try
I've been thinking about this too. Does anyone know if band camp is any good for this sort of thing?? I know that you can listen to some music there.
Music is one of the few things where I actually like for the service to have a recommendation algorithm. I don't think Bandcamp has anything like that. I'm not opposed to switching up my ways of discovering new music and instead just finding it by engaging with communities... But let's be honest that isn't quite as effective nor as plentiful as a good algorithm. If bandcamp doesn't really have any way of discovering artists then it just seems sort of supplementary.
Bandcamp has a whole editorial section, lots of stuff to discover there. The only reason I spend more time on Spotify is the limited catalogue...a lot of the artists I already enjoy aren't on Bandcamp.
What about the other way around? Are there artists on Bandcamp that aren't on Spotify? I would imagine that Bandcamp has more small indie artists and Spotify has more major ones, right? That's great that they have the editorials. But what I really crave is some sort of "tracks similar to this" feature - a lot of times I'm in a very particular mood or looking for something very specific where I know one or two songs that hit the mark and want more.
Yes. Bandcamp has lots of great independent artists & labels
times I'm in a very particular mood
I feel like Spotify is useless in this regard, it only seems to understand my tastes in the broadest possible sense, but hey if it works for you, cool.
When I want specific recommendations, I need them from humans. Sometimes unpredictable, sometimes gold. ifyoulikeblank on reddit (spits) has led me to some really great stuff. Unfortunately I don't yet know of a good place for this on Lemmy, but if anyone has recommendations 😁
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