24
votes
How do you listen to music?
Primarily I use spotify premium since I am a student and get the sweet sweet $5 discount. I also tend to by vinyl records of albums that I have been listening to a lot so that I can help the musician/band. It's pretty nice because most vinyl comes with a digital download, so I can have a pretty high quality version on my computer. What clients do you use to stream music? Do you buy music? What do you think is the best way of obtaining music that is not pirating?
Spotify. I don't see any reason to use anything different. It's just so damn convenient. The $7 a month or whatever for premium is completely worth it.
I really like Spotify premium, especially the song/artist/album radio feature. Discovering new music is way easy with it.
I wish I could just subscribe to Spotify and be done with music collecting. But as things are, with my love of music that is both relatively obscure and foreign, Spotify has an extremely lackluster collection.
Beyond that, I would prefer to have higher quality music than the standard streaming MP3. One of the songs I like features a Chinese string instrument (the name escapes me) that has high frequency harmonics that usually get garbled when they are compressed.
That is exactly what I think since I forked over the money. I also use the app streaming on my phone more than I though I ever would.
My only issue with spotify is that you can't have a very large library of albums. It has a tiny 10000 song limit.
MPD+MPC on linux or Eleven from lineageos on android with music I downloaded... Legally... Yes... I should buy spotify
I discover new music over Apple Music, and do all my mobile listening over this service.
When listening at home on my desktop, though, I have most of my Apple Music library in FLAC format. With how much I've spent on my DAC/Amp and headphones, the massive size is worth it. I'll be honest, though. With well over 10k songs, most aren't all that legally obtained.
Downloads, I usually keep about a dozen or so albums in a temporary folder on my laptop, and then I have an external hard-drive that I export everything to for storage.
I do the same. Question: do you know how to "sync" folders in windows (10), so that I can send things I download on my laptop (and add to the collection) so that they're synced to the portable drive, so the contents of the folders is identical, without copying everything already existing over? I've searched for an answer without much luck.
I'm not entirely sure what you're asking? Are you trying to have the music on your hard drive and in MusicBee both appear in the same playlist, or so that when you download your music, it automatically is put in both folders?
Folder on backup drive has the "Master" copy of all of my music, divided by album into folders. Same folder is on my laptop, but it gets additions when I add an album, or several. I might only sync back to the Master on the backup drive every few months, so there are a lot of changes to the copy on the laptop. I want to plug in the Master backup, and then sync the two folders so that only the new albums are synced to the Master, making it identical to the laptop version, without attempting to copy everything over again. Make sense?
What I do is divide my music by artist (rather than by album, which can get tedious), and I have an album in my temporary folder that's also all sorted by artist. So when I drag and drop all those albums to sync with my master, it adds all the artists I don't have, and merges folders for all the ones that I do.
I've read that several times, but I get stuck at "my temporary folder." Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean by that. I do get the part where the "by artist" organization makes it easier to sync, but what if I add an album (on the laptop) to an artist I already have a folder for on the master folder? It tries to copy all the albums within.
I just organize by album because MusicBee does the rest. I think it'll handle master artist folders with albums contained in them, but I'm not sure if all the folders being named currently as artist - album would trip it up.
I have a folder on my laptop marked "temporary" for anything that hasn't been moved to the one on my hard drive yet.
Ah. Smart. Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest.
Thanks.
I download and keep a digital collection which I access using MusicBee.
I used to stream, but nothing beats the convenience of having everything you care about already right in front of you. It's no more effort or time to download a record I care about than it is to stream it, and then I have it for as long as I care to. I throw in the occasional physical purchase as well, which I'd like to do more in the future.
MusicBee is so amazing, and yet it seems like very few people I talk to know anything about, or have ever even heard of it. If you have a collection of music on a PC, you need to at least try it. I have a pretty large collection on a portable drive, duplicated across several PCs. Almost all of it high bit rate mp3s and FLAC files. Always FLAC when I can find it.
I use MusicBee, and I'm really enjoying it. My only complaint is that when I try to use the autotag feature it seems to change the length of the songs, like for example I used it to tag Homework by Daft Punk. It's one of those albums where each song leads into the next one, but for some reason after I used the tag by album thing some of the songs cut off a bit early.
Sorry, I don't tag anything so I can't really help there. There's a ton of help out there about MB though, so I'd look around.
Their forum is here: https://getmusicbee.com/forum/
Musicbee!!! Definitely one of the best music players on Windows. I tried Foobar for a while but just was overwhelmed with how configurable it was, and I didn't really care for its out-of-the-box experience.
Must agree - I've picked up streaming recently, but fear the day I choose to stop and lose all the music because I never actually purchased it ...
Google Play Music exclusively. I would switch to Spotify but since you also get YouTube
RedPremium, it's pretty invaluable given how often I'm on Youtube.Foobar2k with all my files. and youtube if I don't have the song in my library.
Most of my music is ripped from CDs into FLAC. Metadata is added via MusicBrainz Picard. Then the metadata is cataloged into a coherent library and played with Foobar2000.
If I were still running a Linux box, swap out fb2k with Amarok.
I like the convenience Spotify and Deezer offer, but I also try my best to buy music directly from the artist. Bandcamp is great at compensating artists, so I try to buy music from there if it's offered.
Also, I've been trying to build a CD collection (apparently they're old-school now!) so I buy a physical copy whenever I can. It's just cool to have a shelf of CDs, with the art and inserts and everything! There's just something so satisfying from buying it, unpackaging it, then dimming the lights, putting the disc in your machine and just listening to it from start to finish. It's so much less twitchy than streaming services, and I love that.
Of course, that means there's more overhead for maintenance, so I've been looking for an app that'd help me unify my local music with a streaming service.
Does bandcamp have a listening app? I would imagine a lot of local artists are on there.
Yes, it does.
I believe both the free and premium versions of Google Play Music allows you to upload your own local media and stream them from anywhere as long as you're logged in.
Combination of spotify and cmus on my computer, and just the stock iOS music app on my phone. I buy albums and merch from artists I like (provided they're alive and aren't already incredibly rich), otherwise I don't pay for music. I'd like to get into vinyl someday too.
It's a cool medium. I typically buy it for both the tactile listening and the cool covers. It's also a nice way to take me away from the computer considering I spend too much time on the internet.
Yeah, the only reason I haven't started is my living arrangements are currently very chaotic and I don't want more stuff to haul around every two to three months. Maybe once I give up and start living in a van.
I personally use spotify for listening to music on electronic devices, other than that I like to use vinyl.
Framing vinyl looks so damn good as well. Makes me look like a record label haha
Um, Spotify, 137.7 gb of mp3s, and dusty stacks of CDs. (Used cmus but couldn't be bothered to learn the hotkeys so turned to Quod Libet.) Both Spotify and mp3s are needed because of commencing linkfest.
All links Spotify or Youtube; I guess this serves as a test of whether too many links puts this comment in moderation jail.
While Spotify has plenty of obscure stuff, like Skulls in the Stars by the Japanese idol group Necronomidol, and filk (sf&f fan folk) by Vixy & Tony, Tom Smith (Rich Fantasy Lives and Dervish) and more to the tune of Apollo, and 8-bit covers of U Can't Touch This and Lady Gaga, and lyrically unsubtle Eurovision wannabes and classics of cultural criticsm and the best Swedish pop (youtube b/c video) (fite me Abba fanboys), and the Conet Project (recordings of numbers stations) and H. P. Lovecraft readings and (at least once upon time) a choose-your-own-adventure story ("search for track called xxx if you want to do yyy."), it usually doesn't have the obscure stuff you want, like the Ranma 1/2 anime's adjacent cover of the trad. children's song Mori no Kuma-san (Mr. Bear of the Forest) by the Kuno siblings, and when my autocorrect just now corrected "Kuno" to "Oh no" that was prophetic; or Tom Smith's Destroyer of Worlds or Leslie Fish's Hope Eyrie (or Helen All Alone! sadface) or Mercedes Lackey's Signy Mallory. Like the lottery, Spotify always has a thing but rarely the thing.
Generally speaking Spotify has only not good western covers of anime music, at least if you're not in Japan. For Koi no Mikuru Densetsu, my favourite purposefully awful theme song for a skeevy amateur superhero show inside a screwy professional anime show, admittedly a narrow category, here performed live by the voice actor as her character, totally crushing her talent, um, for that Spotify has just insufficiently confusing instrumental versions. (But one for Spotify: the English version of A Cruel Angel's Thesis by AmaLee, which is just like the original in being glorious incomprehensible word salad.)
(Also, Spotify has a few recordings of Florence Foster Jenkins (1868--1944), the first search hit for "worst opera singer".)
But what I really like is heavy metal, and that Spotify is good for: Mongolian heavy, Finnish Britney Spears-covering heavy, Swedish "My Sharona" a la heavy, and German a cappella heavy covering Finnish symphonic power heavy about Tolkien, Eddings and Dragonlance. Unless if you want some NWOBHM their-only-song rarities like War of the Ring by Arc (youtube), and of course you should because 1980s British Heavy Metal is, by definition, the best music there is, was or will ever be; humanity's expression of the transcendent and the sublime peaked in Bruce Dickinson's leather pants.
(I'd say "that's just my opinion" but the Ebony Horned Ones will take my heavy metal fan card away if I spake that accurs'd oath.)
I use Spotify on my phone, and have the family plan so my wife, father, and brother can also use it. If I find myself listening to a particular band/album often, I buy it on CD -- and rip it because Spotify doesn't support OpenBSD. :)
I download it, then listen with cmus on my laptop and VLC on my phone. Not many Android music players support Opus-encoded libraries with over 5000 tracks.
I'd like to get into vinyl, but as a poor college student with no living space, I can't justify the table.
I listen to 88.5 WXPN a lot and I hear a lot of new singles from there. When the album comes out, I usually will try to listen to it on YouTube. Everyone loves Spotify, and I use the free version of it as well, but I just don't think I can justify the extra money every month for something I never seem to have a problem doing for free
I keep my music downloaded and saved in a dropbox folder across my devices (with a subset copy on my phone's SD card) so I can listen to my music on any device I own without needing to rely on the internet. I use foobar2000 as my player, as I have done for a long, long time, and I keep the executable and playlists in dropbox as well so it syncs across my devices.
I'm slightly surprised that I'm the first to say Amazon Unlimited. I'm probably also one of the few people here who use two devices on the go (used to be phone + ipod, now it's just phone + another phone for music). Amazon lets you download music to your device, which I find indispensable since I don't have mobile service on my second device.
Is amazon a streaming service or do you actually buy the files you download?
It's streaming. You can download songs without having to pay anything more than the subscription. Also, some of Amazon's music catalog is available with a normal Prime sub ("Prime Music"), but for an additional fee Unlimited gives you everything they carry afaik, or you can just sub to Unlimited without having Prime.
I listen to music on soundcloud and youtube. I love soundcloud becaues it gives freedom to the artist, but recently, i haven't been a big fan of their charts, because they seem to like hip hop and they hate any other genre of music. Maybe i'm wrong.
I tried to get into soundcloud myself and I seemed to have noticed that too, but I use the site so very little that I could be wrong too. Also, is the site still in danger of shutting down?
No, but they laid off a lot of employees.
I primarily use Spotify, just because it's super convenient. I use Bandcamp sometimes, but not as much since the mobile app is more of a marketplace over a streaming platform.
I also like to collect vinyl, as well as CDs. It's a good way to find music that might not be on any streaming services.
Finally, sometimes you just can't beat the radio. Shouts out to 88.3 FM WCBN Ann Arbor for still having freeform student radio, and to the show Progressive Underground on 101.9 FM WDET Detroit for being a fantastic source of electronic music.
I use audacious on linux and phonograph on android. I usually pirate music as spotify is not available in my country and other music streaming services (which are available) are shit.
Google Play Music. I find it and Spotify are about on par with regards to the amount of content, the usefulness of the radio / related artists and the quality of the client but GPM gives YouTube Premium and has the ability to upload your own content to stream as well. That makes it an easy choice.
I switched from Spotify to Apple Music purely so I could stream music from my Apple Watch, and honestly I'm very happy with it. Apple is much more artist- and album-focused than Spotify, which has led to me listening to full albums and discographies almost exclusively.
I'm on Apple Music for similar reasons.
However, I'm having personal issues with discovery. Most of my discovery comes from deliberate conversations with friends about music, but I find it hard to find music on my own. Despite being quite listenable, Apple Music's playlists don't inspire me to actually step into another album or explore another artist. It feels like the user flow might be too segmented—I can't just add a song from another album without interrupting my spot in a playlist. It's probably related to it being bootstrapped into iTunes. I'm still onboard because I'm in the ecosystem, and like having music on my watch.
Ah yeah I can see that. I've been trying to just listen to a new album or two every couple of weeks, which I usually find from one of Apple's discovery pages; either For You or Browse. You can always click the dots on an album or track (or I think right click on desktop? I mostly use the mobile app) and choose "Play Later", that will add those songs to the end of the current play queue. That should end in them playing after the album you're currently listening to is over!
When I was in a area that had better data, I used Spotify most of the time, mixed in with some older music that I have ripped from my CD collection, and downloaded through Amazon Music. Also have some music on google.
Now though I'm in a area with limited data, so about %95 of my music is downloaded, with limited Spotify use.
Buy it on bandcamp if available and I like the band, download with Soulseek, or just stream on youtube,
Plex to access my media server and Spotify premium to supplement when needed.
Google Play Music myself. I had my library uploaded to them before All Access came out, and ad-free Youtube sealed the deal for streaming for me as well.
Foobar2000 + a music DLNA server (subsonic) for my mobile devices.
I don't think there is one. All of the digital music vendors and streaming services are roughly equivalent and ultimately inferior to torrenting from a place like (the now defunct) what.cd.
Spotify isn't so cheap nor convenient for those of us in developing countries, so probably Youtube, Bandcamp and Soundcloud.
I started out with
mpdandyoutube-dl, plus a custom script I wrote to slice up the hour-long compilation videos into individual tracks. (Mostly for game soundtracks, which are super hard to find online.) When I switched away from Linux to Apple's ecosystem, I went with Spotify because it was cross-platform and had a great selection of music.Then, one day all I saw in the recommendations was Drake. I don't listen to rap, and I never have. Apparently, Drake had a deal with Spotify. Apparently, this deal was important enough to take over my recommendations. I cancelled spotify and now I'm on Apple Music, which doesn't have the same selection but (IMO) has a better interface on iOS and macOS. Plus, no more Drake advertisements.
On my phone? Youtube and VLC Media player. Works for me.
Bit of Spotify, bit of Deezer, bit of local, bit of Apple Music, bit of vinyl.