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bayindirh
dang
Ok, we've put that in the title now, along with the project name. (Submitted title was "Open source Spotify client that doesn't require Premium nor uses Electron")
jackjeff
I see.
What I really want is a converter from Spotify abomination to standard podcasts which I can read from any podcast client.
Last I checked the podcasts are DRM encumbered. So you’d have to spin up a client pretending to be chrome and use the Wivedine extension to decrypt every mp3 frame. No hacking required. But Life is too short. So instead I refuse to listen to fake podcasts on Spotify.
CharlesW
Me too. Spotify may have successfully killed the "open medium" promise of the words "podcast" and "podcasting" as part of their embrace/extend/extinguish strategy, but there are many great podcasting clients that continue to support opencasting, and very few shows exclusive to closed audio platforms like Spotify.
Spivak
Huh? Does Spotify have any exclusive podcasts worth bothering with? Because I haven't seen the death of open podcasts since every podcast is still on Apple Podcasts.
hackernewds
Watch Spotify revoke their public API key or reduce access to the public API because of this
smashah
Let's stop developer (victim) blaming for soulless billion dollar companies restricting API access.
danShumway
Agreed. "We'd have APIs if y'all didn't use them" is a really bad take.
Part of the reason why API access is desirable is because it forms an effective safeguard against some forms of company abuse. To argue that we can only have API access if nobody uses it for adversarial interoperability or to build 3rd-party clients or to bypass systems -- we might as well argue against API access entirely if that's going to be our position. The point of API access is to be able to use it.
eptcyka
Billion dollar company that still isn’t profitable.
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bayindirh
This is something between the app developer and Spotify. I'm neither.
BTW, If you need an API key for public API access, you may need to enroll yourself to use that API. I don't ship public API keys with my apps.
prmoustache
On the other hand, why would you choose to use spotify API for a start? Spotify doesn't have nearly the quantity of available music that Youtube has.
So many times when I try to find some music on my partner's spotify account it is just not there, and I give up and we listen to it via newpipe or freetube.
Larrikin
I would find it pointless to make music playlist on Youtube. Stuff gets taken down too easily, skits are prevalent, and theres so many accounts that just rip off music from other people. If it can't be on Spotify, I'm better off finding it on Soundcloud.
stemlord
It should be Discogs. Discogs is by far the largest publicly-accessible music database on the web.
iamacyborg
That was my experience when I used to use last.fm for radio as well.
Connecting via YouTube offered significantly more music than via Spotify, albeit some big artists restricted it.
wkat4242
Huh my experience is the total opposite. I try to download my Spotify playlists from YouTube Music because its easier but half the stuff isn't there or incorrect versions etc.
nunez
Okay, THAT is Hacker News worthy.
denysvitali
To be fair it would be more HN worthy if they managed to reverse engineer the DRM of Spotify to create a custom client without the Spotify library (which only works for Premium users)
yellow_lead
There are bypass methods here for almost all platforms: https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/14rszaw/v3_the_ulti...
hirako2000
Would be far less worthy if, by the time we get to the README, we only get to see a take down notice from Github. Instigated by Spotify for breach of not sure what.
dartharva
There do exist cracked Spotify "mod" apks in the high seas that do it. They are perhaps too illegal to get featured on HN.
hackernewds
anything related to free for paid content is HN worthy /s
erk__
This was the trick used by bots on Discord that played music (before they pretty much all got disallowed)
It would simply get the title from the Spotify API and then look it up on YouTube to play.
At some point I actually had set up a rather awful hack where I had a Discord bot that could play webradio and then pointed it towards my own Mopidy server which used the Spotify plugin to have a webpage such that multiple people could add songs and such. It was a great hack though I did not use it for long.
anotheryou
oh ok...
I'd have tried it, but I pay for good audio quality so I won't :)
thaumasiotes
Is there a difference in audio quality between Spotify and YouTube?
anotheryou
yes, I think so. And youtube is mixed quality, especially for older uploads.
Newer youtubes are "opus (251)", which I think is 128kbps 48KHz Opus (WebM standard).
- Spotify at least used to be ogg vorbis and claims to be "320kbit/s [mp3] equivalent"
I think the 128kps Opus is still considered quite lossy¹ and 320kpbit/s mp3s I know I can hear the difference to wav on some tracks in a blind test, but generally don't find them better or worse.
¹ from some google test:
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tills13
Not really suggesting Spotify pays their artists well but surely YouTube is worse, right?
judge2020
Supposedly "between $0.001 and $0.003" from [0], but then this site[1] claims:
> Plays on YouTube Music will gain on average $0.008.
Although neither have sources. I imagine YouTube Premium plays match or beat Spotify on average.
Of course, for anything, if you block ads AND refuse to pay for the premium subscription, the artist makes $0 from your listening. Hopefully you can support them off-platform via merch or even purchasing their albums (e.g. iTunes which provides DRM-free versions), but then you're still not paying for the platform if you continue to use one with an ad blocker.
0: https://www.lalal.ai/blog/music-streaming-payouts-2023/
1: https://routenote.com/blog/how-much-music-streaming-services... Although this doesn't take into account
NJRBailey
My colleague has his music on both Spotify and YouTube Music, and he has said in the past that one YouTube listen is worth 2x as much as one Spotify listen.
jpalawaga
is that true? presumably youtube still has to pay the artist for reproducing/streaming the song, even if you didn't watch an ad. I'm suspicious that the licensing agreement YouTube says "we'll pay you for the right to stream your music, unless if they use an ad blocker, then too bad."
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monsieurbanana
For something that puts "not using electron" so prominently I didn't expect it using flutter. I admit I don't really have much experience with it, I thought it was like react-native (but better?), still far from truly native apps.
Im here to being told I'm wrong. I would love to, specially since we can transpile clojure to dart
rubymamis
Yep. This app uses 230mb of RAM on my machine compared to Spotify that uses 208mb. But it's definitely more performant than my hideously slow Electron Spotify client. I'm really done with Electron. I hope this shaming of Electron apps continue because I can't stand this degradation of software. The only Electron app of recent that had good performance is Notion Calendar (used to be Cron). Although, Notion itself is painfully slow. This is why I'm building a Notion alternative in Qt C++ and QML[1].
[1] https://www.get-plume.com/
EDIT: Is the app down? It doesn't load the "Browse" content for me.
chaxor
Yeah, electron is so over.
Now tbe modern tech stack is to build a bash+python app in an env, add a touch of R, some js, and bundle it into docker container, then make that docker container into wasm with container2wasm, and give that out as the executable.
It's wonderful honestly. You can get just about anything working with stitching together stuff, and then serve your 10GB executable to anyone :).
So MuCh BeTtEr ThIs MoDeRn WaY!
dv35z
Serious question: What's the feasibility of local web apps in containers, which appear to the user to be a "regular" app. E.g. Django + SQLite, running in a Docker container, and run by a Mac app shortcut. How would you recommend setting up and running that stack? Better ideas?
jhatemyjob
Coming from AppKit/UIKit I tried to learn Qt and it was just awful. I hated how tightly coupled with C++ it was. Everything was based around subclassing and overriding methods, there was no way to just have a dumb UIView and set its frame and add a bunch of subviews to it. There was also no clean way to expose a C ABI to use a scripting language (with an FFI) to configure the UI easily
All of the Qt apps I know about (Ripcord, Dolphin) are fast but the aesthetics of the UI was just terrible. So I gave up on learning Qt. But this thing you made, Plume, actually looks good. If there isn't a monstrosity of hacks and boilerplate underneath this UI I might give Qt another shot. Otherwise I think I might just build my own thing from scratch on top of OpenGL or something....
jwells89
I know what you mean. Would love to just have AppKit/UIKit with some platform integrations (e.g. correct widget themes) on other platforms. Closest that exists to that is GNUStep, but it’s stuck on an old version of Objective-C (no Swift) and targets something like OS X 10.6 with API compatibility.
Outside of the that the next closest I’ve tinkered with is GTK, but since version 3 it kinda gave up on looking right running under anything but GTK/Qt-based desktops. It’s easy to make idiomatic bindings for which is nice though.
rubymamis
I feel ya! I thought the same, until I discovered the world of combining Qt C++ and QML. QML is extremely easy to learn (I studied all the basics in one day using this Udemy course[1] (not affiliated, just love his work). BTW, he has many free awesome YouTube videos for Qt C++. Creating an aesthetically pleasing app in any framework takes a lot of effort (it's mostly about being focused on what necessary and then creating a lot of white space around it, haha). It's so easy to create beautiful, fluid UI with QML. I've created a short video that demonstrate what I'm working on currently[2] - a Kanban view inside my block editor (kinda buggy now, still WIP). Hopefully, this does inspire you that it's possible.
And it's actually pretty easy to write the C++ code. I don't really use custom sub-classing much. I use Qt's QtObject which allows me to create C++ object that work beautifully with QML. Bryan's course doesn't delve deeper as that, I had to do a lot of searching to figure it out. I hope to open source some of Plume's components to inspire others to do the same. Another point regarding aesthetics, it really takes effort, but Qt can be extended using community libraries. For example, if you want your app to look native on macOS and Windows with a sexy frameless border with a transparent window, then you could use the awesome qwindowkit[3]. Another example, I wanted to position the window buttons on macOS (the traffic light buttons) differently, but couldn't figure it out, and obviously this can't be done using Qt alone, so I looked at Electron's source code and saw how they do it there in Objective-C and incorporated it in my app (ChatGPT-4 wasn't very helpful at that). Now I really want to have these buttons' fill color transparent like Things 3 does, so I'm looking at how to achieve that haha. I already got some ideas. If you need any further help, let me know![4][5].
EDIT: A cool feature of combining Qt C++ with QML is that you get the performance of a compiled language like C++ with the reactivity, ease-of-use, fluid and easy animations (and more) of QML. You can see on Plume's website that it's 4x faster than the fastest comparable native app on macOS.
[1] https://www.udemy.com/course/qml-for-beginners/
[2] https://www.loom.com/share/b40009316f6b420b9ece15a1f99e987c
[3] https://github.com/stdware/qwindowkit
[4] https://twitter.com/mamistvalove
[5] ruby AT mamistvalove DOT gmail
icy
Plume looks so sick. Looking forward to it. A Vim-like modal editing mode would be so cool, I think.
rubymamis
Thanks! I heard many requests for this, so I'll consider it, but if I do get to that it will be at a later stage.
prg318
To respond to your edit, yes - it seems like the app is down - nothing seems to load at all on the Browse tab or anywhere else...
olah_1
Plume looks nice! How does the sync work? Local first rocks, but I do want some redundancy as well. Are there plans for multiplayer or sharing?
rubymamis
Thanks! One of the next features we'll on work will be support for arbitrary folders (basically all notes will be plaintext inside folders, currently they are all plaintexts but inside a local database), so you could sync your notes with any cloud provider (e.g., Dropbox). We'll also provide our own built-in sync option. There are plans for sharing notes, but not quite for real-time collaboration, if that's what you mean by "multiplayer". There are plans for collaboration in the future, but not real-time - I just don't think real-time collaboration is good for text-based formats.
_kwef
Weird, it takes up ~150MB while having a 500+ song playlist loaded.
denysvitali
Flutter, from experience, works really well on Android. Unfortunately the same cannot be said about the web (see for example [1]).
I think that if these performance issues were to be solved, Flutter would see a bigger adoption. In any case IMHO Flutter >>>>> Electron
lxgr
Flutter on the web is absurd: At least when I last checked, it's been rendering UI widgets into an HTML canvas by default, using its own low-level drawing library.
That sounds about as good of an idea as the old Java desktop GUI framework that used to (poorly) imitate native UI elements of Windows and macOS: Everything always looked three major versions behind and felt extremely janky.
denysvitali
I wouldn't care less if it worked in a performant way - in the end Flutter apps are using their own design (Material 2 / 3) - so rendering them in a Canvas is OK-ish.
The problem is that, on the web, the performance is extremely poor, so Flutter is still not worth being used there (IMHO).
jwells89
Last I knew it had significant performance issues on iOS (framerate drops/stutters), which dampens its cross platform appeal somewhat and is part of why I’ve heard of apps using Flutter for the Android port of their app, but nowhere else.
stolsvik
How old is that info? We’re using it, and it is buttery smooth on both phone platforms.
devjab
I’m sort of surprised it’s considered a good thing. Some of my favourite programs use electron, like visual studio code. I haven’t used Spotify though, so maybe that is one of the many electron apps that suck?
I was very unimpressed by flutter when we PoC it at work, but that was years ago, so maybe it’s gotten better since.
amomchilov
VSCode couldn't support multiple windows until just recently, entirely because of a limitation from the early days of Electron.
When "multiple windows" is a feature to be announced (as if weren't trivial on any native stack), you know it's a sad state is affairs.
diggan
> VSCode couldn't support multiple windows until just recently, entirely because of a limitation from the early days of Electron.
That sounds like Microsoft deflecting blame. You've been able to do multiple windows for a very long time in Electron, I remember being able to do so in 2019 at the very least, and the book "Electron in Action" (https://www.manning.com/books/electron-in-action) even have a chapter dedicated to it, a book which was released in 2018.
badgersnake
Don’t understand all the fuss about VSCode. I’m sticking with neovim.
NekkoDroid
Spotify Desktop also doesn't exactly use Electron, but 1 layer below: CEF
diggan
Also, they've used CEF since before Electron was even a thing (before Atom even).
jimmydoe
Yes, and they are doing it better than Steam Client i think.
piva00
Spotify's desktop app has been pretty snappy for me, and it's been like that for many years across different machines.
kevincox
Flutter is pretty native as far as resource usage goes. The language does use a VM and GC but it's performant enough. There isn't native look and feel though. (They can emulate it a bit, but it isn't perfect)
fngjdflmdflg
Flutter doesn't use a VM for release builds anymore. (Still GCed obviously).
no_time
The last time I tried Flutter it was hilariously bad. The "Flutter Gallery" sample was blasting my GPU to render at max framerate without even moving the cursor.
Now with Spotube it appears it has gotten better. But I can still see:
- "off feeling" scrolling with the scrollwheel
- some kind of framepacing issue when using the scrollbar at the right hand side
- Click latency that's better than electron but still worse than anything QML/QT has to offer.
- DPI set in KDE/X11 seems to be ignored. I'm not sure about this, could be a personal preference of the developer to have things this size.
I'm using the flatpak build with a 6700XT.
gloosx
People will always complain, but in reality you can make an electron app which no one will distinguish from a native app, and you can make a native app which will lag so hard that it would feel like a browser page from 2004. People just like to put the label "electron" or "flutter" on it and base their blames on that.
Alifatisk
I tried Flutter on my previous project, it’s good, like really good. Dart has its weird parts but other than that, I enjoy it a lot.
lxgr
I've heard many good things about it from Android developers. As an iOS user, I despise it. Apps written in it feel extremely janky. How is it even possible to bring down an iPhone 15 Pro to what seems like less than 10 fps in simple UI element scrolling?
Alifatisk
Sounds like bad implementation, Flutter especially now with the Impeller engine is very smooth on Android / iOS. I don’t know about the web though.
aydarkh
I think it's skill issue
tristenharr
I was surprised when I learned Flutter actually runs as native code without needing a JavaScript bridge like so many others.
Although similar to something like React Native - Flutter does paint the screen. Personally I see it as a potential Electron replacement in the future.
From what I’ve seen Impeller is also a big help on iOS. Screen jank was pretty bad for us when Flutter was using Skia as a rendering engine, although when I last messed with Flutter (~6 months ago) Impeller felt almost production ready but iirc there were still a couple small things, not sure if they are better now.
Personally I’ve become a big fan of Flutter, especially for back-office/utility type apps. We would follow all the Material Design 3 guidelines and when it comes to time spent, if you need to develop the same app on more than 1 platform, it’s worth consideration.
I’ve found some people will say: “But it’s hard to get it to look like a native app in Flutter” but for me I’ve always seen that as more of a skill issue. You are literally painting the screen, you can get whatever pixel perfect design you want, if it can be Figma’d it can also be Fluttered and to be fair there are Cupertino widgets and you absolutely can get the best of both/many worlds if you want. Just like how on the web you can do a transform based on device width to switch between the mobile or web view, if you desire you can have different widgets show up for different platforms and give everybody a native feel. I personally still think that’s easier than writing/maintaining multiple individual apps.
I think the biggest downside though is that search engines don’t do well with Flutter Web. It isn’t the nice easy to crawl HTML, and it’s really hard to get a flutter app indexed or to give it good SEO. There’s also silly rules that search engines have about how the content displayed to the user vs crawlers has to have the same data. (I.e. when the web-crawler asks for your page, you are supposed to give it a page with the same data you would give the user.) The best we could do to improve SEO was to make the landing page a page that in the background ran all the same queries and shoved the data into HTML tables, with a popover that said “this is a page for robots that had a button that said “Take me to ABC.com” and a check box that said “automatically redirect me next time” that we stored in a cookie. It was hacky and not a good user experience.
For now, whenever I need to do anything GUI I will use React for the web and Flutter for everything else, but it would be nice to truly be able to only use 1 framework for every platform, which to be fair I’ve used Flutter web and it isn’t all to bad if it weren’t for the issue with search-engines web-crawlers. For apps that don’t need SEO.. Flutter is a great choice. I suspect we’ll see a lot more SaaS apps building in Flutter in the next few years. I think it’s on the cusp of being mature enough to be seriously considered for production scenarios.
I’m just mostly worried about the ecosystem. Google chose Dart for flutter after the results of a lot of research that only Google scale companies can do and to be honest although it IS a lesser known language it isn’t a bad one. It’s AOT and JIT so the hot reload is amazing. It reads like “insert most language you know” here. If you know how to code nothing in Dart should be drastic or surprising. If anything I’d almost say Dart is boring, which I like boring things. I’ve experience with a handful of languages, and for me Dart ranks highly in terms of usability/ergonomics. But there’s a not unsubstantial risk that Google could decide to drop the ball and Flutter could become kind of like the Windows phone. Really great, but canned because people didn’t build enough things for it.
If I were on the Flutter team I’d be most focused on figuring out how to deal with SEO issues. (assuming impeller does indeed provide a full fix for the screen jank, I’d assume it’s gotten better in the past few months, can anyone comment as to if it’s “there” yet or not?)
fngjdflmdflg
>can anyone comment as to if it’s “there” yet or not?
It's enabled for ios by default. Android probably in two more releases if I had to guess. If you were doing a lot of custom stuff you may run into issues with Impeller on some CPU bound tasks regarding tessellation but for a regular flutter app it will almost always outperform Skia especially around previous pain points like scrolling and animation.
iamsaitam
"It is still recommended to support the creators by watching/liking/subscribing to the artists' YouTube channels or liking their tracks on Spotify (or purchasing a Spotify Premium subscription too)."
I hope musicians can pay bills with likes, since ponying up €10.99 is a huge ask.
PS: not that many musicians are able to pay bills with their spotify checks, but that's not the point.
WilTimSon
> PS: not that many musicians are able to pay bills with their spotify checks, but that's not the point.
What IS the point, though? You seem to be criticising people who don't purchase a Spotify Premium while also admitting Spotify barely pays them anything. Yes, this client gives nothing to the artist, Spotify gives next to nothing, both are bad in different ways.
If anyone genuinely wants to support musicians - buy their merch, go to their concerts, buy their albums on Bandcamp or physical media. No streaming platform pays them their dues.
iamsaitam
The point is that the musicians still deserve to get paid from streaming. Ridiculous nonsense to say that if something isn't well remunerated, might as well go the illegal route and not pay anything at all.
ang_cire
Not ridiculous at all. If you use the service that pays the artists below the value, you are endorsing that underpayment. You're literally voting with your wallet that underpaying the artists is fine.
Pirating doesn't support the artists, but it's also not weakening their expected rights for future business contracts, which supporting services like Spotify does; after all, if all these other artists are getting paid 'x' much, and all these consumers think this is what it's worth, how is anyone but Beyonce or Swift or Kanye gonna have any hope of arguing against that?
There is no way to inform Spotify that you don't endorse their business practices, except to not subscribe. Subscribing is an endorsement.
Personally, I purchase my music individually on iTunes (and download and convert to mp3). Apple still takes a cut, but it's much lower than the near-100% cut that streaming services take.
keymasta
And then you can see that the bitrate is 2-20x better. I personally get bothered by anything under CD quality (44.1kHz 16-bit) so all these platforms are basically unlistenable for me.
KoftaBob
> ponying up €10.99 is a huge ask.
I guess that would depend on how much music you listen to. If you listen very occasionally, then yeah €10.99 for unlimited streaming isn't worth it. In that case, you can just buy songs individually.
If the price for individual songs is also a "big ask" for you, then you simply don't think music is worth paying for.
This isn't a "pay what you want" model where someone creates a product and asks you to pay whatever you feel is appropriate, they're creating a product and setting an explicit price for it.
westhanover
It is the musician’s job to figure out how to pay his bills not mine.
KoftaBob
and it's your job to figure out how to entertain yourself, you're not entitled to get that entertainment from music for free.
InCityDreams
Radio is free. And I change station when the ads come on.
linsomniac
Somewhat related: A month ago I migrated from Spotify to YTMusic (Youtube), and published the scripts I used to do it. People have kind of come out of the woodwork: reporting issues, starring the repo, asking questions, last night I found someone has written a GUI for it.
https://github.com/linsomniac/spotify_to_ytmusic
The biggest reason I ditched Spotify is that their shuffle play of playlists is laughably bad. I like listening to just a shuffle of my favorite music, but their player seems to "stick" on just a few of them. I ask it to shuffle a few thousand "liked" songs, during my shower every day, and I'll hear the same song 3 times in a week, for example.
There was a "bug" open in their support forum since 2017 that they replied "maybe we'll look at it eventually". It has hundreds of pages of replies. And they just laid off a significant portion of their workforce, so I figured it'd never get resolved. And for a company doing music playback, it just seems like they can't get one of the basics right.
Since going to YTMusic, I've been hearing songs from my playlists that I haven't heard in years.
mkobit
They wrote an interesting blog some time back about how "random shuffle" isn't necessarily what people want, and how their algorithm works (https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son... ). That was a decade ago, so maybe their approach has changed or that it does not perform well under certain conditions (like the one you mention). It works well for me on most playlists on the order of 10s.
linsomniac
I agree with you that it seems to work fine on playlists of less than 50 or 100 songs.
The problem seems to be that on larger playlists they will only use 50-100 of the tracks to shuffle through. Most times I'm listening to music I just want to put on a shuffle of all my favorites and listen. It's been that way since I got my first CD changer. Maybe that's a super unusual use case, but it's my primary one, and I get really tired of hearing the same songs repeatedly over a week. YMMV, my wife for example likes listening to the same songs every day.
As I mentioned above: I copied my Spotify playlists to YTMusic and am doing the same "shuffle my liked songs" and I'm literally hearing songs Spotify hasn't played for me in years. Usually the algorithm complaint in music players is that they are using random rather than shuffle, but even in that case I'd think that 2K songs over 2-3 years, I'd be hearing SOME of those songs that YTMusic is playing but Spotify is not. The cynic in me figured that they were prioritizing the songs by the ones that made them the most money, or from artists that paid for placement. But something about their shuffle is just totally off.
achairapart
Yes, it looks like there is some artificial placement. This may be driven by malice (some sort of paid or more lucrative placement, like you said), but also by stupidity (algo prioritizing songs already in the client cache, to save some egress bandwidth perhaps?).
So I started clearing the Spotify client cache more often, and it looks to me there is more diversity, at least on the auto-generated "recommended songs" playlists. But still, no hard proof of this.
throwoutway
Spotify product management has a history of not listening to customers, and thinking they know better, with lots of HN examples in threads about it
linsomniac
Another option is to use a tool that shuffles your playlist: https://spotifyshuffler.com
fermentation
I wanted to like ytmusic, but their ios client is somehow worse that spotify. Main daily gripes are toasts (stop doing toasts on ios, never do toasts) hiding ui elements I want to touch and the app forgetting my queue every day or two
nprateem
I love the fact that whatever song radio station I choose on spotify it always recommends me the same 30 songs. I'm starting to think they only have 50 songs in their whole library...
pcthrowaway
YTMusic is still a pale imitation of what Google Play Music used to be... but it's also still my main streaming service simply because most of my library transferred from GPM.
linsomniac
Agreed, I switched to Spotify when Google ditched Play Music, largely because my Google Home was terrible at using voice commands to play YTMusic "Liked Songs", I could never get it to work reliably. Then I found Spotify is just as bad at that use-case, but also worse at shuffle.
I had a friend that worked on Google Play, and he said it would have been much better if the labels hadn't gotten involved, in the form of demands made...
My primary complaint with YTMusic is that there isn't a way to "shuffle play", you have to start playing a playlist and then click "shuffle" and then click "next".
CatDaaaady
Oh my! I thought this weird behavior was just something _I_ experienced on Spotify. I'm always asking myself, "didn't I just hear this song?"
linsomniac
Nope. Here is the Spotify Forum thread I was mentioning: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/All-Platforms-Op...
A couple corrections: It's from 2020, not 2017, and it "only" has 114 pages of replies rather than 200.
fireflash38
Hah! I wrote something to go the other direction (YT->Spotify) because the dating apps only work with Spotify.
upcoming-sesame
Wow this is really well made and polished, congrats for the creators for this acheivement.
One thing I notice, and that's not an issue of the app but rather that of the youtube sources is that the sound quality between songs is not consistent and overall worse than Spotify
felixbraun
Worked on an open source cloud player 10y ago: idea was to have one place to curate playlists and your music library in general -- basically an access and authentication platform where the underlying providers can change over the years without impacting your collection.
Still feel this is the right way to think about collecting and curating music going forward…
seemack
I had a similar thought a few years ago when trying to think of "useful" uses of NFTs. It could be great if I could buy music, etc and then play it on any streaming service via some sort of proof-of-right-to-play mechanism.
ang_cire
It will never happen. Why would the future platform owners, or especially separate service owners, want to let you enjoy the benefit of their hosting costs when they get nothing?
MisterKent
Imagine Spotify being able to continue streaming you music that they no longer have access to, because you "the user" still have individual rights to the music.
Thwn, you can stream your own music and Spotify's music side by side.
And, it's a double win, since they're not paying an royalty fees for a single user streaming music they already own.
Intralexical
Tomahawk?
RobotToaster
Since this is using youtube to play the music, other than being open source, what advantage does this have over just using youtube music revanced?
Faceless1230
It has access to your Spotify liked songs collection/Playlists and also all the curated Spotify Playlists
alwayslikethis
For something that uses this approach (metadata from spotify, music from yt) but with downloads, take a look at spotdl[1]. Very useful for mpd. Disclaimer: not my project, but I've had some success with it.
carlosjobim
I've been relying for years on Mediahuman's downloader: https://www.mediahuman.com/youtube-to-mp3/31/
It will download any Spotify playlist or YouTube playlist as a bunch of individual MP3s, and do it fast. You can also paste individual song links to download them. Great quality and UI.
CrypticShift
In a way, this reminds me of the (much more ambitious) system of resolvers [1] of the (now defunct) tomahawk player [0]
The idea was you just give it the metadata and it "resolves" it into any service. I really like this idea. it kind of lives on in "playlist converters" like tunemymusic or soundiiz. but it is not the same as it being built into the player itself (like spotube albeit with a different more straightforward aim here)
icar
Worth mentioning that Spotify doesn't use Electron, but CEF.
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twerkmonsta
Started downloading FLAC music after discovering how bad Spotify compression is even at the highest quality. I still subscribe to Spotify for discovery and convenience, but almost never use it.
deltaburnt
Apple Music supports lossless music and uploading your own songs, that's part of why I prefer them over Spotify. Though I'm not sure if they support lossless uploads now or not.
hackernewds
use TIDAL HIFI
e44858
Tidal's "HiFi" format was actually the lossy MQA. Seems they recently started to convert their catalog to the truly lossless FLAC: https://www.techhive.com/article/1974696/tidal-flac-preferre...
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Nifty.
Please be aware that this is not a "spotify client" per se. It gets the data from Spotify, and plays the audio from YouTube.
It's an interesting invention, and worthy of the first page, if you ask me.