How do you listen to your favorite obscure music that never made it onto any streaming platforms?
One of my very favorite musicians of all time has apparently decided to not put any of his music on any streaming service other than one album from one side project that made it onto Apple music. I've even posted on his Facebook (a site I basically never use) and gotten likes from some of his best friends but he never uploaded anything :(
I'm tempted to just put his music on Spotify, possibly with fake names in case he doesn't want the attention lol
I'll be going to my parents' house this weekend and I'm hoping to grab my old CDs so I can at least rip his music...if I can find a CD drive! Hopefully I can grab my Sufjan Stevens Illinois vinyl for a friend who listens to vinyls but has never heard of him. as an aside, I have no idea how it's possible to be such a hipster that you still listen to vinyl but also don't know who Sufjan Stevens is, but I digress
So how do you do it? I just want the music to be on Spotify 😢
This seems like a self-evident answer to me. Own the music. And transfer it to your phone or whatever device it is you listen to your music in.
USB CD drives are still pretty easy to find and are extremely cheap. And it’s not terribly difficult to capture music from analogue sources as long as you can play them to begin with - It’s just a bit time consuming, is all.
Do not upload an artist’s music to any public service without their express (preferably written) permission. It’s not only a dick move, it’s illegal.
You still didn't answer how you listen to it. Yeah, I can play it off my phone. Just seems awfully annoying to listen to everything on Spotify and then have to remember just a handful of songs saved in some folder.
You can load local songs into Spotify. That's how I do it for music that isn't on a streaming platform.
https://support.spotify.com/us/article/local-files/
I have copies on my phone and on my computer. Yes, it's inconvenient, but you can still listen to them alongside the other songs you want to listen to from your streaming platform.
I have an Iphone, I use Itunes to put all my music on there.
I don’t use Spotify, for the reasons you mentioned. Its not a hosting service, you cant just upload music you own there, and Ive heard of them removing music sometimes.
Best solution is to stop using it.
I have used an iPod 5th gen with Rockbox custom firmware and loaded all my music onto it. Using an entirely seperate device to listen to music may seem cumbersome but I assure you I have found it to be anything but!
I find having to reach for my phone and pulling it out while having my earphone cable attached to it to be extremely annoying. I prefer to just set the iPod and forget it. I'm aware that Bluetooth headphones would solve this gripe for me, but I am not a fan of them. I don't like how they sound, or how short their lifespans are.
As a person who likes to conserve his phone storage but also likes to locally own his music the iPod is very much convenient for me.
There's tons of apps you can choose to listen to them with, but I'd probably use whatever is default on your phone, or at least whatever works with the voice assistant. It's nice to be able to just say "Siri, Play System of a Down" and it starts playing.
If you want it all to be one app I'm sure there's something out there that will let you combine Spotify with your private music library, but I wouldn't know because I have a very poor opinion of those services. If you were using an iPhone, The Apple Music app actually is the default media library program, so they've already got an integrated solution for you.
If I were you I'd just own the music I like listening to. But I don't think you'd like that solution.
The mp3 (DAP) player scene is back and with a vengeance. I bought CDs that I ripped ages ago and Bandcamp helps me stay up to date with Flacs and MP3 files from modern artist.
As another poster said: just own the music. Don't rely on streaming for everything.
I've been thinking of getting a modern mp3 player. Any recommendations?
I recently got a hifi walker 2. It's decent although my major issue with it is there isn't an option to just play an album without it repeating the album after it's played through.
Oh yeah. I just bought a Hiby M300 and I love it. What are your needs for an mp3 player unit?
Flac, SD card, BT, and linux support (I run arch btw). I don't care about playlists, just full albums. Besides that, not much else.
I'd certainly check out reviews for the Hiby player then. Find an Android app that does everything you'd like, and combine it with a $175 player with BT 1.5, physical buttons, good digital audio processing and a decent (more than most) battery life
There are peer-to-peer filesharing networks such as Soulseek
http://www.slsknet.org/news/
Strong community of users digitizing music that never will make into the walled gardens of streaming services.
Great to see they are still around! I wonder why they were never forced to close like Napster.
This is exactly why I never got into using streaming services. I want control over my collection.
Way back in like 2006 I found a service that would let you make a playlist out of various music files hosted on various websites. It was like a search engine specifically for music files.
The site got taken down and I was crushed, id spent hours perfectly curating my playlists.
Never again.
We might have had the same experience. My aging brain has forgotten the name of the website, but I also had a few cool playlists. Some of those songs were only linked from that site, and I have now lost them (probably) forever. :/
There was definitely more than one and iirc they all got taken down around the same time. One was radio something, no idea on the other. I can still see my playlist in my head but its gone forever :(
I run a NAS server out of my house and use the Plexamp app for iOS to access my Plex library. I don't save any of it to my actual phone outside of a handful of albums/playlists downloaded for when I don't have good signal (e.g. driving through the mountains). FWIW, I have Spotify and still download certain music to my server that I can stream through Spotify like albums from my absolute favorite artists. Just in case Spotify ever fails, I at least have the core stuff I care about most on top of all the stuff that has never been accessible on streaming services.
+1 for local NAS and Plexamp.
I use the local download feature to bring my music on airplanes and out of service. Came in handy during a recent internet outage, and the tunes never needed to stop.
I visited my mother and delivered her my old laptop, and showed her how to rip CD's with just a few clicks so she could downsize her old physical media collection. It took very little time, and plex immediately recognizes them with album-art, etc.
Curating my own playlists is becoming a lost art, and while the initial setup took some work, I love it.
+1!
I run a little plex server on a raspberry pi with a big hard disk attached to it. Not that tech savvy but I followed a foolproof guide to get it running.
The feeling of having a collection is so different from streaming. The music plex helps me listen to is also really different from what I boot up on Spotify. I think I use Spotify mainly for my wife’s awesome playlists :)
I run a little home media server where I host a Navidrome instance (self-hosted music library software) and connect to it via the Symfonium app on Android. I also use Tailscale to stay connected when outside my LAN. After setting this up, I don't think I could ever go back to manually syncing files with MusicBee like I used to.
(While I do host Plex too, and could in theory use Plexamp, I have a cheap data plan so the ability to save files locally on my phone is super important to me. Paying for Plex Pass vs. paying for a one-time Symfonium download was a straightforward choice. Plus, Symfonium has more robust capabilities for auto-downloading specific albums/smart playlists/etc.)
As far as actually finding the obscure music... I'm a TM on RED (IYKYK) and actively help with archival efforts for music that is too obscure to even realistically purchase. (I like hunting down albums that literally cannot be purchased anywhere except via secondhand CDs, and making sure that music doesn't get lost to time.) If there's any music you wish you could find but that feels lost to time, feel free to PM and I'll see if I can find it. :)
Largely the same for me, though instead of Symfonium I use Tempo (available either via apk from github or via f-droid) on my phone / via android auto in the car.
I uesd to have Spotify, but got a bit frustrated when trying to find certain soundtracks I wanted to listen to, only to find them either incomplete or missing on the service. So went back to my old collection and looked into a way to make it accessible to me everywhere.
Google music gives you some storage to upload music to your personal library. Only you can access it but it syncs across devices etc.
https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9716522?hl=en
Edit: just FYI, if you want to move fully from Spotify to Google music for this (or between any music streaming service) you can use services like tunemymusic to transfer over playlists etc.
This is the killer feature for YouTube Music
I usually look it up on YouTube, and the way my brain works with music is that I just play the track until I’m done with it. If someone hasn’t uploaded a version on YouTube, then it has to be pretty out there.
You can actually listen to any music you have a file for on Spotify, just like how you would in the old days on iTunes or whatever software you’re familiar with. So you’ll just need to buy the music somehow, then upload it. The upload is only for you to use, no one else has access to it.
Use this link to see how to do it in your device.
I just buy vinyl records - alot of stuff is on spotify but I don't like spotify and it feels too superficial - there are some exceptions, like rare B-sides, out of print bands, and stuff which is copyright claimed (another problem with spotify btw). Since I have a decent turntable with a nice cartridge and it sounds really good, I could just buy records and be content. Of course, not everyone can do this.
The only catch to this is that it depends on the genre of music you listen to - you can really go crazy over what you spend on vinyl records, but some stuff is just rare due to being out of print, being no longer sold, or just being obscure in the states. This is where something like discogs comes into play.
Not perfect, and I am working to switch back to keeping a heavy local catalogue (the "old one" has about 25k tracks, perhaps more, and it's a total mess). But one of the reasons I prefer YouTube Music is because you can upload up to 20k songs to your account for private listening. I only have a few hundred there, but it works. Forever missing Google Music and its interface and capabilities, but YTM is def better than the others I've tried + allowing me to listen to all those ripped uploads on youtube from fifteen years ago and adding them to my playlists is great, I listen to a lot of underground electronica, and yt is the bastion of that archive.
I have a ton of music from bands that I, my friends, and people I knew through bands were in before Spotify was even a thing. I have the music stored on my computer and set up on Spotify via local files so that I can listen to it through Spotify.
Some of it's great stuff, some good, some...not so great, but it all reminds me of that time in my life between the ages of 16-20 when I felt like a rockstar.
I have a lot of local music, stuff from pre-streaming eras, stuff that was on plain old CD-Rs because that's what the band had access to, just a PC with a burner drive. I've long since ripped it all into the highest lossless format I could and saved them to local drives and then to backups just in case.
Spotify apparently has a "local files" option so you can add locally stored music to your playlists, not sure if it always plays off your device or gets sort of "privately uploaded" to just your library, but it shouldn't really matter from a "streaming" sort of scenario, so long as it plays in your playlist, then how it got there shouldn't matter.
This is one of the things I miss about Google Music, I had my entire local music library uploaded to their storage and in my library to listen to whenever I pleased without the need to keep the files locally on my phone (at a time when storage was at more of a premium).
I listen to most of my music from my PC, and plenty of the bands I like either have albums not on Spotify or equivalent or are entirely not on there. I prefer having my own music that I ripped myself and have the CDs or vinyls as a backup. When I want them on the go or in the car, I just transfer them across the network from my NAS.
I buy all the music on CDs ad rip them to FLAC format or directly as FLAC downloads and put them on Jellyfin that I can connect to via OpenVPN (as I have public IP address available). Server converts the music on the fly to MP3 so that I can conserve bandwidth.
I have all of my music and playlist files on a USB drive I just keep plugged into my car console. My car's from 2016; do cars still come with this functionality or do they expect everyone to just use streaming or satellite radio for everything now? I just realized I haven't any clue.
Of course it really helps that I don't use streaming services for music and I like to just own the stuff I listen to. I've gotten a fair amount of music over the years just from using "no-rush shipping" on Amazon and receiving credits for digital purchases. I download them for the USB drive in my car, or to listen on my computer at home.
I used to use a SanDisk Clip mp3 player with Rockbox installed on it, but that was before I had a phone or car that could play mp3s. (Not that I listen from my phone a lot these days; I'm still lamenting the loss of the headphone jack, but also I'm not really in a situation a lot where I'm listening to music away from my car or computer.)