I choose to blame platforms for vile intents rather than users for ignorance. I don't see awareness of politics of technology as obligatory for all authors (even less for users), but creators of those platforms know damn well what they are doing.

I'm going to need a free (ads ok) option that I can try a little bit before I switch the whole family plan over. I tried downloading tidal and another one a little while back, and they didn't last for long. One I couldn't test without a subscription. I don't remember the problem with another. I'm strictly in the convenience camp with this one folks. I just want to press play, I don't have time to think about music otherwise.

Qobuz released Qobuz connect back in May

Amazon’s Prime Music? Most people have prime anyway, I think that comes with the ad version. Less than Spotify to switch to add free.

If you still have access to any .edu email addresses, you can get student rates for Apple Music, and probably others.

If you're on Android you won't need a family plan, just get ReVanced and patch YT Music so it's ad-free and plays in the background.

Fediverse has quite alot of indie musicians. Check out LABR http://labr.online/ or the indie beat https://theindiebeat.fm/ and try some new music and support creatives directly.

What pisses me off is that I can't have a family plaln associated with my main Google Workspace account. Because it's a Workspace account. So if I want to have a family plan for YouTube Music I need to have it associated with a gmail account not my workspace account. That's such bullshit, if you ask me!

You mean replacing a bunch of people with AI didn’t work?

Third one in a little over two years. They say it's to keep up with inflation as if they're a retail store operating on razor thin margins and people accept that. Meanwhile, they're donating to fascist political parties and shafting artists by leveraging loopholes to pay out fewer royalties.

That's definitely a nice feature for sure but getting Jellyfin to even recognize the album/songs means they all need to be properly labeled and filed correctly and that some database somewhere needs to have that album's metadata available which can be real hit or miss. SoulSeek seems to be decent for labeling and allows you to choose who you're downloading from but its still a clunky mess at the end of the day.

I'm all for self hosting as much as possible but for me personally its just much more convenient to use a streaming service for music, and these days I find myself listening to podcasts the most which aren't going to be available on the high seas (nor would I bother if they were because I'm not going to listen to them again).

Never will. All the tech bros can stomp and wine. But it will never replace real people with real skills. It’s fucking stupid that these business majors can dictate stupid decisions.

Spotify is still a thing?! Who knew… so many better options out there… hoping they crumble between artists leaving and no one wanting to deal with the drama and prices… they are about to be the “new vine” of pitfall and demise! Bye bye bye! Let the company burn!!

What better options are there? I'm old so don't know

I have Apple Music because I am a student so, I pay way less than most but it downloads all my songs and playlists and can use it without data. But I also have the iHeartradio app which has my fave radio station plus so many podcasts.

But there is Apple Music, Tidal, iHeartradio, Soundcloud, Amazon Music, SiriusFM, qobuz, there are many.

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I'm pretty sure it can, but I don't actually know what subscription services or how it works to get podcasts downloaded. Spotify has been pretty easy. I guess it's time to look into this stuff. I have been doing this stuff legit for a while, but I guess I could get back on the high seas too if I have to. I just wanted to make sure the people making content were getting paid, but I think Spotify is bad for that too. So tired of good services getting slowly worse.

IMO it makes more sense to rip and download music than movies. Music is small files that you listen to dozens or hundreds of times, whereas movies are large files that you might only watch once or twice.

labeling and tagging each track, and sorting them into a properly named folder structure

You need to do the same thing for movies and TV shows though.

Lidarr will do this for you, mostly automated.

To rip CDs, I use abcde ("a better CD encoder") on Linux. It automatically tags the tracks based on CDDB or Musicbrainz data.

There's probably a basic app that'll move it to the right directory structure, but I find Lidarr pretty easy to use. I copy the album across to my server, then in Lidarr I add the relevant album then click the button to manually import it, and point it to the right folder. Lidarr will automatically sort it into the right directory structure. I have it configured to use the structure that Plex wants - folders per artist, then folders per album inside those.

That's assuming it has data on Musicbrainz. For MP3/FLAC files from albums that aren't on Musicbrainz, it's a bit trickier. I sometimes use kid3 (KDE audio tagger) as it can pull from other sources like Discogs and Amazon.

They do not want you offline.

I hate that it hangs loading for so lomg before admitting defeat and showing the offline listings.

if you don't mind downloading the music then Nictoine+, it's a GUI for soulseek. essentially Napster/Limewire. Anything you can get on spotify you can pretty much get there.

Keep in mind, like Napster, it takes time to find things you want. If you have your own server or hell even a cloud server with unlimited bandwidth and a good chunk of space you can put your music on there that way you can just stream it to whatever device you use to listen to music. Essentially a media server.

Nicotine+/soulseek. won't copy your spotify lists but you can manually download everything. will take time obviously as you'll have to search for everything.