Spotify is in the process of killing the librespot project that this and most third party Spotify players are built on. I think the golden age of music streaming is coming to an end. I’ve migrated to a self hosted library with streaming and radio for discovery. I hope we’ll see many projects in the space flourish. Many, like Navidrome and the whole OpenSubsonic ecosystem, seem to be doing quite well.
What makes you think Spotify is killing it? I know they aren't supporting FLAC but otherwise I don't think they're actively trying to stop it as opposed to not really caring if they support it (which is more "We don't care" as opposed to "We have to stop this")
Would you be willing to share a bit more about this setup? The only thing keeping my on streaming is the fact that its almost impossible to find new music otherwise. I know LastFM exists but it just doesn't click for me the way that streaming does. I like discovering music organically.
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!
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.
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??
This radio station is local to the city I live in, and they've been great for music discovery for me, although heavy focus on local artists, but they've put me onto a few international artists as well.
I subscribe to them, have done so for ~10 years I reckon. I don't listen as much as I used to, but I want them to continue existing either way.
Be aware, the quality of their playlists is incredibly variable, but that's part of the charm. I guarantee you'll hear something you haven't heard before... for better or worse.
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.
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.
Tools for piracy are much better today than they were back in the Napster or grooveshark days. It’s actually kind of shocking to me that we haven’t had a popcorntime moment for music again. Nothing technical is preventing the creation of a perfect decentralized anonymous p2p FLAC streaming platform with plausible deniability.
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.
Music is relatively small. Tor is totally capable of hosting zlibrary without bandwidth restrictions getting in the way.
By plausible deniability I simply meant adopting a similar approach that Stremio has, to keep it on the good side of App Store approval processes. The app itself only allows for creative commons content by default, but with the right incantations it can host anything.
Stremio and other apps like Fusion have gone up and been (reasonably quickly) taken down off the App Store though.
Not really "on the good side" when your main distribution method is "add this app to your account within the first 1-2 weeks of it being in the App Store or never again", or sideloading.
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.
> 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.
Garbage being created at unprecedented rates does not diminish the fact that LLMs are acting as a positive multiplier for useful tools; this very item being one.
No one in all these years had gone through the effort of replicating the Spotify client with a snappy fast interface for a reason. Everything had been an integration into already existing software, or simpler interfaces, because the effort was not worth it. The equation has changed.
You can look at the glass half full all you want, my glass is overflowing.
This is the best year in all of my 20 years in tech. I'm creating so much stuff and it's all I've ever wanted.
This is the dream of the 2000's, and big tech can't stop us anymore.
I think I'm going to write my own music player soon that behaves exactly like I want it to. Maybe this weekend. Or maybe right after my home automation project. But I can probably squeeze them both in.
> You are creating so much stuff, but most of them are useless garbage that no one cares about.
Are you so sure of that?
One of my projects is at $5M ARR in just six months. I passed $400k in sales this month. It's an open source project.
I'm teaching my wife to code and we're going to make a video game together. Surely you can see the value in that bonding experience? She never would have been interested prior to Claude Code.
I've been writing my own SRS software for drilling typing in Japanese. It's pretty fantastic. Nothing like that existed before I made it. So many needs that went unmet are just being filled.
That's just top of mind. I've been doing a ton.
Nobody likes to tag music the way I like to (multiple scalar quantified dimensions with clustering), so there's literally no music player on the planet in the shape that I want. If I'd wanted to build that before, I'd have to spend opportunity cost over several weekends to start building, plus the ongoing burden of maintenance. That's likely a few months burnt plus fixing things when API integrations break down. Now it's a few hours plus a bug fix here and there.
This is 3D printing for software.
I don't get the negativity. This is all so magical.
Software has finally started to get faster, and I love it.
Pls don't consider this a spam, but if anyone is interested in a fast native Slack client, I'm building one, since Slack themselves don't want to: https://msga.app
If you're focused on lightweight, native and fast, I don't think you should use an immediate-mode GUI toolkit. Why does an app like this need to hit a 60fps framerate? It's not a game.
It’s not specific to this program, but I lately get this feeling that distributing widely a piece of software that exists for 5 days and saw a dozen releases in that period is stretching the open source trust model.
I hacked the official client apart to hide some bullshit (like podcasts) and fix bugs that were pissing me off. Shared it exactly once and it stopped working within a month. Bugs were still there too
Fuck Spotify. Even if you don't care about the ethics of Daniel Ek's investments, the platform itself is crap. One of the lowest paying to artists, not paying at all unless they hit a threshold, and the catalogue is filling up with AI slop, which they push on users via 'radio' and 'mix' playlists, so they can pay even less royalties. No, thanks.
I've tested Deezer for half a year. The software quality was horrible.
Had a lot of crashes, it often took many many seconds to change between the songs and often getting stuck, the buffering algorithm was nuts and eating a lot of bandwidth.
Everything on a standard Pixel. Full 5G coverage was available.
Qobuz have the highest per stream payout rate for artists [0], and have the best audio quality of all streaming platforms (better even that Tidal imho). They have desktop, mobile and android auto (and presumably carplay) clients, and an equivalent to Spotify Connect whereby streaming can be switched to a different client.
Downsides are no native client (same webview approach as Spotify), not as strong recommendations (though slowly improving), good but slightly quirkier UI (also slowly improving). For me the trade offs are worthwhile.
Tidal is the last streaming service I use, split between that and a jellyfin+arrs setup coupled with buying music from artists directly.
Fuck Spotify and their rotten leadership. Was amongst the early adopters (2009). I'm sure they won't care for the loss, and I won't miss th when they're gone.
Tried Tidal? The one gripe I have with it is no remote control, as in using phone to change what's currently playing on the device connected to my sound system, without it thinking I want to start playing on my phone.
The best is to host your own, navidrome is great and easy to set up. But if you really wanna hate on one, it’s Apple Music, believe it or not, they will actually delete ALL your playlists that you made over the years if you stop paying subscription for few weeks or sometime for days, why? Because Apple says fuck you, you are renting and you are not entitled for anything, which also explains why they are now trying to have hardware as a service with their new renting hardware program.. at least spotify doesn’t do that and keep your playlist to export later.
If it was a site made with AI it would be stuffed with way more ad copy, components, UI toggles, and small text. If this was made with AI, they seem to have restrained it from going on the gaudy UI mess of most AI generated sites that are what I like to think of as "Maximalist Minimalist". A hodgepodge of a design library.
The website looks great to me, clean and simple, perfect for a project like this. “Not looking like it was made by AI” isn’t something I value for itself in a website, any more than “not looking like it was made with injection molding” is something I would value in a plastic item.
Either it’s good or it isn’t, but it’s not good or bad because of how it was made.
Spotify is in the process of killing the librespot project that this and most third party Spotify players are built on. I think the golden age of music streaming is coming to an end. I’ve migrated to a self hosted library with streaming and radio for discovery. I hope we’ll see many projects in the space flourish. Many, like Navidrome and the whole OpenSubsonic ecosystem, seem to be doing quite well.
What makes you think Spotify is killing it? I know they aren't supporting FLAC but otherwise I don't think they're actively trying to stop it as opposed to not really caring if they support it (which is more "We don't care" as opposed to "We have to stop this")
> radio for discovery
Would you be willing to share a bit more about this setup? The only thing keeping my on streaming is the fact that its almost impossible to find new music otherwise. I know LastFM exists but it just doesn't click for me the way that streaming does. I like discovering music organically.
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!
Epic bought bandcamp many moons ago. Did they enshittify it or is it still going strong?
Epic actually sold Bandcamp 3 years ago. I only started using it lately so I can't say how it was before, but I think it's still good.
https://pitchfork.com/news/epic-games-sells-bandcamp-amid-la...
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.
> 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??
This radio station is local to the city I live in, and they've been great for music discovery for me, although heavy focus on local artists, but they've put me onto a few international artists as well.
https://threedradio.com/
I subscribe to them, have done so for ~10 years I reckon. I don't listen as much as I used to, but I want them to continue existing either way.
Be aware, the quality of their playlists is incredibly variable, but that's part of the charm. I guarantee you'll hear something you haven't heard before... for better or worse.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zHR0HMFY60 (with 2 minutes of silence at the start to, presumably, avoid auto-copyright claims).
Public radio is great, NPR and the member stations have some great streaming channels. KEXP and KCRW are two favs
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.
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.
Tools for piracy are much better today than they were back in the Napster or grooveshark days. It’s actually kind of shocking to me that we haven’t had a popcorntime moment for music again. Nothing technical is preventing the creation of a perfect decentralized anonymous p2p FLAC streaming platform with plausible deniability.
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.
Music is relatively small. Tor is totally capable of hosting zlibrary without bandwidth restrictions getting in the way.
By plausible deniability I simply meant adopting a similar approach that Stremio has, to keep it on the good side of App Store approval processes. The app itself only allows for creative commons content by default, but with the right incantations it can host anything.
Stremio and other apps like Fusion have gone up and been (reasonably quickly) taken down off the App Store though.
Not really "on the good side" when your main distribution method is "add this app to your account within the first 1-2 weeks of it being in the App Store or never again", or sideloading.
> Spotify is in the process of killing the librespot project
How could they possibly do that? They cannot prevent people or AI from reverse engineering their APIs.
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.
Spoiler: Spotify has always been terrible. The golden age of music streaming was Zune pass where you could stream and download 10 songs/mo.
And arguably Pandora always had a better radio algorithm than Spotify.
> I think the golden age of music streaming is coming to an end
There was a world before Spotify. Though the music labels didn’t much like that world we can easily go back to it.
> There was a world before Spotify
There was, and it was definitely not "the golden age of music streaming".
Why are they killing librespot?
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.
>I think the golden age of music streaming is coming to an end.
Already ended for me. They killed the plan I was on, and then started sending me begging emails to sign up for a new, more expensive one.
But once I experienced their platform with ads, I just stopped using it entirely.
CIUT has some great shows and most are available online. University of Toronto.
> I think the golden age of music streaming is coming to an end.
It's just getting started.
We're going to vibe code the entire enshittified internet to be ours once again.
The dream of the 90's and 00's is alive again. The indie web is going to become unstoppable.
We can build anything of size and scale with the limited spare energy we have now. Every product will be reborn without big tech tendrils.
> 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.
Garbage being created at unprecedented rates does not diminish the fact that LLMs are acting as a positive multiplier for useful tools; this very item being one.
No one in all these years had gone through the effort of replicating the Spotify client with a snappy fast interface for a reason. Everything had been an integration into already existing software, or simpler interfaces, because the effort was not worth it. The equation has changed.
You can look at the glass half full all you want, my glass is overflowing.
This is the best year in all of my 20 years in tech. I'm creating so much stuff and it's all I've ever wanted.
This is the dream of the 2000's, and big tech can't stop us anymore.
I think I'm going to write my own music player soon that behaves exactly like I want it to. Maybe this weekend. Or maybe right after my home automation project. But I can probably squeeze them both in.
It's like Christmas every day now.
Buddy, it’s the same big tech gave you this opportunity. You are creating so much stuff, but most of them are useless garbage that no one cares about.
> You are creating so much stuff, but most of them are useless garbage that no one cares about.
Are you so sure of that?
One of my projects is at $5M ARR in just six months. I passed $400k in sales this month. It's an open source project.
I'm teaching my wife to code and we're going to make a video game together. Surely you can see the value in that bonding experience? She never would have been interested prior to Claude Code.
I've been writing my own SRS software for drilling typing in Japanese. It's pretty fantastic. Nothing like that existed before I made it. So many needs that went unmet are just being filled.
That's just top of mind. I've been doing a ton.
Nobody likes to tag music the way I like to (multiple scalar quantified dimensions with clustering), so there's literally no music player on the planet in the shape that I want. If I'd wanted to build that before, I'd have to spend opportunity cost over several weekends to start building, plus the ongoing burden of maintenance. That's likely a few months burnt plus fixing things when API integrations break down. Now it's a few hours plus a bug fix here and there.
This is 3D printing for software.
I don't get the negativity. This is all so magical.
Well, happy for ya.
Software has finally started to get faster, and I love it. Pls don't consider this a spam, but if anyone is interested in a fast native Slack client, I'm building one, since Slack themselves don't want to: https://msga.app
Spotify used to use Qt for its desktop client. Good times.
If you're focused on lightweight, native and fast, I don't think you should use an immediate-mode GUI toolkit. Why does an app like this need to hit a 60fps framerate? It's not a game.
Most immediate mode does a scene graph diff so it's not that bad
I have a custom IM GUIs based ide thing in C++ that uses like .2% of my 10yo CPU.
It’s not specific to this program, but I lately get this feeling that distributing widely a piece of software that exists for 5 days and saw a dozen releases in that period is stretching the open source trust model.
That seems like the kind of name that's gonna earn you a C&D.
You had me at Winamp
It supports WinAmp skins too… Dare I say it?
It really whips the llama's ass?
I hacked the official client apart to hide some bullshit (like podcasts) and fix bugs that were pissing me off. Shared it exactly once and it stopped working within a month. Bugs were still there too
I stopped sharing after that.
Have you seen Spicetify[0]? It allows for this kind of stuff and seems to be a lot more stable than doing it all manually.
[0] https://spicetify.app/
Another site tricking users willing to look at the code into starring the repo instead.
How desperate do you need to be to resort to this?
I had to read the comment a few times. Do you mean "starring" instead of "starting"?
Yes sorry, fixed. Thanks!
Fuck Spotify. Even if you don't care about the ethics of Daniel Ek's investments, the platform itself is crap. One of the lowest paying to artists, not paying at all unless they hit a threshold, and the catalogue is filling up with AI slop, which they push on users via 'radio' and 'mix' playlists, so they can pay even less royalties. No, thanks.
I've tested Deezer for half a year. The software quality was horrible.
Had a lot of crashes, it often took many many seconds to change between the songs and often getting stuck, the buffering algorithm was nuts and eating a lot of bandwidth.
Everything on a standard Pixel. Full 5G coverage was available.
Alternatives?
Qobuz have the highest per stream payout rate for artists [0], and have the best audio quality of all streaming platforms (better even that Tidal imho). They have desktop, mobile and android auto (and presumably carplay) clients, and an equivalent to Spotify Connect whereby streaming can be switched to a different client.
Downsides are no native client (same webview approach as Spotify), not as strong recommendations (though slowly improving), good but slightly quirkier UI (also slowly improving). For me the trade offs are worthwhile.
[0] eg. https://resources.onestowatch.com/ethical-music-streaming-pl...
I've been happy with Qobuz as well. I use the third party open source QBZ client on Linux desktop.
Tidal is the last streaming service I use, split between that and a jellyfin+arrs setup coupled with buying music from artists directly.
Fuck Spotify and their rotten leadership. Was amongst the early adopters (2009). I'm sure they won't care for the loss, and I won't miss th when they're gone.
Tried Tidal? The one gripe I have with it is no remote control, as in using phone to change what's currently playing on the device connected to my sound system, without it thinking I want to start playing on my phone.
Apple Music pays artists better, too.
The best is to host your own, navidrome is great and easy to set up. But if you really wanna hate on one, it’s Apple Music, believe it or not, they will actually delete ALL your playlists that you made over the years if you stop paying subscription for few weeks or sometime for days, why? Because Apple says fuck you, you are renting and you are not entitled for anything, which also explains why they are now trying to have hardware as a service with their new renting hardware program.. at least spotify doesn’t do that and keep your playlist to export later.
I left when they forced podcasts into my music app and never looked back
Without looking at the codebase I am pretty sure it’s a vibe coded rust app, because this is what today’s most programmers understand about software.
and?
That's boring, and unmaintainable.
It takes five minutes to make a website look less obviously AI-generated.
It takes five seconds to scroll to the bottom and see that it's a Jekyll theme before posting a negative comment
Surely they're referring to the llm-isms in the text?
A Jekyll theme from the same person as this project, yes.
If it was a site made with AI it would be stuffed with way more ad copy, components, UI toggles, and small text. If this was made with AI, they seem to have restrained it from going on the gaudy UI mess of most AI generated sites that are what I like to think of as "Maximalist Minimalist". A hodgepodge of a design library.
The website looks great to me, clean and simple, perfect for a project like this. “Not looking like it was made by AI” isn’t something I value for itself in a website, any more than “not looking like it was made with injection molding” is something I would value in a plastic item.
Either it’s good or it isn’t, but it’s not good or bad because of how it was made.