I know the main topic is ditching Spotify, but on the secondary topic of screwing over Spotify…
I realized that you can “pirate” Spotify (i.e. listen indefinitely as if you had a paid account) if you have uBlock Origin on Edge. No setup needed, it just works. Most likely any Chromium-like browser will work.
Unfortunately, I haven’t got it to work with Zen browser which is Firefox based so I’m not sure if all Firefox based browsers are affected. The workaround I have for now is just have Edge open with Spotify in the background, and control it from the Spotify interface on Zen. Never download the app, they control that fully.
Funnily enough, I also got ad-free Spotify play on Amazon Echo when I was controlling it from Edge, though I never tried with Zen because I don’t use Echo anymore.
PS: For audiophiles this is probably not gonna fly, as you don’t have access to the highest bit rates iirc.
*It’s no longer running*
Friendly alert that it’s currently Bandcamp Friday - one full day that the site gives 100% of purchases to the artists. It’s a good way to support small artists and build up a personal collection.
That’s some bullshit right there. Every day should be Bandcamp Friday. I understand charging a small 1-3% fee to cover server costs, but nothing more. Otherwise Apple is just another evil record label profiting off of peoples’ talent.
From what I can find, BC takes 15% for most sales, 10% for high-sellers. Dunno if that’s good or bad, but it seems low to me.
id say it’s quite good, storage and distribution can get expensive
It’s certainly lower than the 20-30% game distribution platforms take.
I can pretty much guarantee the server & staff costs are more than 1% of sticker price, especially since BC includes streaming services.
I have also moved fully to navidrome. It’s slightly less convenient, but it’s worth it to deplarform
My issue is discovery. I’ll take a look at what they’ve done here, but ive never been able to implement a reliable discovery process into my workflow. I still use local music, but my wife is not going to switch until I get at least some reliable and effective discovery built.
Communities, friends, family and media are your discovery algorithm! Get involved in things. It makes your music acquisitions meaningful and makes the experience of discovering and listening to music so much better.
I scrobble all my navidrome activity to listenbrainz, which gives a weekly playlist of recommendations. You might have to wait a few weeks before it can establish your tastes depending on how much music you play.
But I need to get those recommendations to automatically populate into playlist in my music app so its all in one place. Thats the challenge. Providing a close to as good service as Spotify.
This post from the self-hosted community is probably what you’re looking for, then
This is the way
If you’re fortunate enough to live near a well-funded library, you can peruse their new arrivals section for CDs. That’s how I discover new artists
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Is there a “torrenting for absolute tech illiterate morons” guide out there?
i personally use a provider for that. i just download torrents to their cloud and get it at maximum speed from there. so I don’t have to worry about p2p risks or being online a lot. I’m with premiumize, but there are others I guess.
The absolute basics:
- Install qbittorrent
- Install a VPN and run it so that all your Internet traffic goes down it
- Open a Web browser and search for top torrent sites 2025. There are articles with lists of the big ones.
- Go to a torrent site and search for what you want.
- Download the .torrent file and open it in qbittorrent OR copy the magnet link and paste that into qbit torrent. Either will start your download.
Always use the VPN when searching and downloading.
There are lots of steps to make it more convenient - things like using a Virutal machine so the vpn and torrent do their thing while you do whatever else you want on your PC, or setting up a docker Servarr stack to make things more convenient, or setting up a Raspberry pi / other device as a servarr stack. But for the basics all you need is a torrent client, a VPN and a Web browser.
All the extra advanced stuff is just quality of life, like being able to leave it downloading securely 24hours a day or organising your downloads better.
Edit: I know that torrent clients are a well-established paradigm—and that people are resilient to change—which is probably why you downvoted me. But Debrid services are some serious game changers, so needless to say I’m disappointed in you for just blindly downvoting without even giving them a try. You have no idea what you’re missing out on. 😔
If you’re going to pay money to pirate, you might as well skip the VPN and qbittorrent and just get a Debrid service instead. This gets you direct downloads to any torrent at gigabit speeds, without having to wait for seeds. Debrid takes the torrent client completely out of the picture.
All you do is copy and paste the magnet link into the Debrid site, and then directly download the torrent from your browser. It’s cheaper and much faster than a VPN + torrent client. And safer too because your ISP doesn’t see you sharing any illegal content (seeding the files is how they get you) nor using a VPN, so you can still pirate in places where VPNs are illegal. They just see you downloading large files from the internet. And since you’re not distributing anything (seeding), you’re staying within the law in most jurisdictions.
The threatening letters from my ISP stopped completely after I ditched qbittorrent and switched to Debrid. More people need to know about this. It’s so much better than putting up with torrent clients, dealing with DNS/IP leaks, and waiting for seeds. Just copy/paste and download.
Downvotes are for your attitude on privacy.
VPNs are not a tool for piracy, they are a tool for privacy. Everyone should have a VPN like Mullvad/Proton or use Tor/I2P if they don’t want their private Internet searches uploaded to the US government to be scanned and scrutinized at will, and possibly sold and publicized, even criminalized. That goes for non Americans too.
Debrid is not a private solution. Privacy is expensive and inconvenient. Your ISP is the least of your worries. You absolutely should be paying for Debrid anonymously and using a VPN in front if you’re doing anything illegal, so then what’s the point? Downloading copyrighted material is illegal as well.
Not blaming you though, Debrid is being very, very disingenuous in its marketing.
https://real-debrid.com/privacy
“We may be required to disclose Users personal data in order to protect our legal rights or where disclosure of Users personal data’s are required of us by the judicial authorities only when legal procedures are followed.”
They probably get legal disclosure requests daily. You are surely on an NSA shortlist of some kind.
All that, plus the fact that if you’re gonna pirate, private trackers are better and safer. And in that case you need to seed. And besides, if everyone switches to debrid and nobody seeds anymore, who are you going to leech from?
Start out simple and stick with a basic BitTorrent client. Figure out where you want to download from and get a torrent client configured. I use an ISP that frowns upon piracy so here’s a quick overview:
- Look for public torrent sites. I’m out of this game so I don’t have any suggestions.
- Research private torrent trackers. I don’t think I can provide any help with this, but there are other corners of Lemmy who can.
- Find a VPN. Everyone has thoughts on this and Proton VPN is the one I’m currently using.
- Pick a torrent client. I’d recommend qBittorrent myself.
- Configure your VPN to include your BT traffic.
If/when you want to try Lidarr, you’ll be much better off knowing the basics of BitTorrent because *arr software is confusing in its own regard. Lidarr is just a tool to organize your music library folders and also automatically queue downloads. It is not a requirement to enjoy downloading music.
Usenet and soulseek are other alternatives.
For music, soulseek is a great resource too
I simply just installed Metrolist on my phone.
100 % piracy robbing musicians, but more importantly, robbing Google while circumventing Spotify altogether.
Does navidrome support Chromecast? I’ve had a hard time finding a self hosted music solution that will actual cast. I do have a public facing domain name with certs that, as far as I can tell, is working correctly.
It depends on the client app you use. Some support it, some don’t.
I guess I can be proud of not getting into Spotify at the first place. Instead of discovering new music, I discover older ones which I find more reliable since new music industry mostly suck. Oh, also Bandcamp is fine for discovering indie.
There is so much music today. To say new music sucks is wild
That’s my nostalgia talking but what I hear in public is bad, I mean in malls, stores, shops etc. maybe they have a bad taste though. By the way I said the industry sucks not the music. Because of the industry, they’re much shorter now (thanks to Spotify I guess), I hardly find a 45 minutes album with whole great tracks.
If you’re just looking at the popular stuff it’s going to be shit. My library is filled with artists with just couple thousands of listens per month and it’s the shit (to me).
Nowadays everyone can make music and it’ll mean more stuff to filter through but there’ll be more gems to discover.
Are they popular because people actually like them, I wonder. Because some of them are really really bad, they’re far from being art.
But yes, every age has their own gems to discover.
Walmart music will always be dull and milquetoast; its meant to be consumed by the nonexistant “perfectly normal” person. You gotta dig for that gnarly hipster shit you’re into, but I guarantee its out there somewhere
I don’t think gnarly hipsters would listen what I listen. Maybe I don’t hear what I like in the outside world because they can be really old, it’s rare if I hear one on the wild.
If you really want to kick this up a notch, install Soularr and slskd and let it just churn on your library and drip music into your folder. No solution for the spotify discovery algorithm, at least not a good one. But this stack is solid.
I thought Lidarr is for music. Sonarr is for series.
Downloading music illegally avoids giving money to the bad companies but the artists still need to get paid. They can’t work for free. They deserve our money. So please share music, but also support the artists. Through bandcamp for example.
What I meant was Soularr. Sorry there are just too many of these apps with similar names. Soularr is a python script that runs in docker and it checks Lidarr (I believe) and then sends that info back to slskd. It was checking my artist list in my navidrome dir and then checking slskd and downloading absolutely everything I didn’t have by that artist. It ran for a few months, but I was kind of a novice at self hosting and a lot of duplicate files were created because I didn’t have the volumes mapped properly in docker. Then I wrote a script that accidentaly created an infinite loop that started copying all the files one level deeper then would repeat . I stopped it after like 4 iterations. Long story short I have four copies of a bunch of files and I got lost with Beets and plan to start over from scratch with the original source library.
Wow that’s sick! Would love to fix that next to all the other automated download systems I have, but I now have money and I want to support the artists. Maybe still a good idea for the impossible to get music which isn’t sold anywhere. Like tekno. Thanks! I’ll look into soularr. I know soulseek, but last time I tried it, it fucked up my internet connection settings somehow. Really weird. I wanted to try it again, after not using it for… 15 years now? But yeah, all internet access was blocked when I opened slsk. Also the music I have to share is old. And back then the quality was poor. I have a 2TB music collection but I think 3/4 of it is poor quality mp3’s.
Instead of slskd I recommend using nicotine+. I found slskd worked fine, but was a pain to set up. I found a Nicotine docker that works just like the app inside a web UI. Much less of a learning curb for someone who’s not familiar with servers.
Interesting. Thanks for that. I started this project a few months ago then got sidetracked and am about to get back into it.
Have they fixed the issues with Lidarr yet?
As far as I can tell, no. I haven’t been able to search or import releases since about April.
You’ll have to be more specific. :) I think it works well for organizing a music library unless there are issues with this feature that I’m unaware of. Using it to queue downloads was painful for me, so I resort to less automated ways to acquire music files.
Simply put, the *arr software concept works well for downloading movies and TV shows (Radarr and Sonarr). Music just seems to be a little more difficult and I have lots of issues with Lidarr finding music out on Usenet and trackers. I hope that’s user error on my part.
I think the issue they are referring to is that Lidarr’s API or interface with the MusicBrainz database has been broken for a few months now, which means it’s impossible to search or add new artists/releases to your Lidarr library.
And as far as I can tell, it’s still down. I have been unable to use Lidarr for anything since about April, except for finding releases that I had already added to my local database.
Yikes that’s a major issue that I coincidentally bypassed by not using Lidarr for the past few months myself.
Yeah, Lidarr is easily the weakest of the *arrs in my experience. As a newbie to setting up that stack, it was definitely nice to have a similar interface and functionality between the apps, but the last few months have me ready to look for something different for music.
I’ve been using Soulseek but I often have issues with the metadata not loading properly into Plex.
So, no. They did not fix it.
It’s getting there. They’ve been taking a progressive improvement route. Searches sometimes work, mbid searches more so. They are building a cache/index of some sort, so it’s taking time for that to populate, and it’ll have a higher success rate as the progresses.
It is laziness on my part. I want to tell the Google home to play music.
I should just get a Bluetooth speaker and do this, shouldn’t I
You need the software, but there’s nothing about that request that should require access to the Internet.
I have a LLM chatbot that controls my Home Assistant and Kodi players. It’s all done locally and the response time is under a second.
On my PC(Arch, btw) I have a global hotkey so I can hold the key to record a message and when I let go of the key it uses a local model to do speech to text and sends the result to the chatbot.
I could probably use a wake word but I’d need to mic up my house and I’d rather not do that. A bluetooth lapel mic and a single button Bluetooth “keyboard” about the size of a key switch (using an ESP32C3 microcontroller) give me the same functionality.
I wish I was the kind of person who would do this.
