Funkwhale – Decentralized, self-hosted music server(funkwhale.audio) |
Funkwhale – Decentralized, self-hosted music server(funkwhale.audio) |
> Gracefully accepting constructive feedback.
> Showing empathy and kindness towards other community members.
Yada yada, seemingly inclusive and tolerant then goes on to add a catch all list where every possible action can be deemed unacceptable, getting you expelled everywhere and "identification of the participant as a harasser to other members or the general public."
Anti meritocracy is a cover for the most intolerant.
> Anti meritocracy is a cover for the most intolerant.
Having a written set of guidelines that define the behavior expected seems like...I dunno, a good idea?
Unfortunately life drove me away from the project, especially now that I work remote and barely leave my home, but every now and then I feel like contributing again just because of how nice everyone is.
We know[1] that a more diverse group creates better group outcomes than a non-diverse group where specific individuals may have better performance. Even from a wholly selfish perspective for the people running a project, prizing diversity of qualified individuals over a pure meritocracy is the right play.
From a "making the world a better place" perspective where some altruism is shown, it also helps to acknowledge that not everyone has all the same advantages and tailwinds so that it is fundamentally more difficult for them to have had all the same opportunities and advantages, and providing those opportunities and advantages to them gives them that chance to even the playing field. The amount of unconscious bias built in to humans also means it is difficult for us to be effective judges of ability for those that are not like us. You don't have to be racist/exist/homophobic/transphobic/etc. to have built in biases - you just have to be human. They're difficult to overcome without explicitly stating goals around it.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,44&as_vis=...
And, yes, I believe the world would be a better place if we followed these rules with many projects regardless of the field.
Btw, there are some interesting facts about the history of the word, "meritocracy": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy#....
Such as creating a platform for people to listen to music for free by sharing it with others without paying the artist?
It says that sexual harassment is bad and that racism is bad, and using jokes to "ironically" do things like that is also bad.
Except musicians apparently
>We're sorry but funkwhale.audio doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue.
Am I just misinterpreting it or do people supporting it just not thought more deeply about what it is they're supporting?
Really? All social change is good for the field of software development? Utter nonsense. This product itself is, if anything, a rejection of the social change towards centralized ad-supported streaming services.
> We understand that working in our field is a privilege, not a right.
I don't have a right to work as a software developer? Last I checked, I lived in a free country where I can do what I want. This is some authoritarian language, implying that people should be ejected from the industry if they don't play according to one person's set of rules.
Rather than storing it locally, it’s just online... or am I missing something here?
EDIT: Never mind. It's another "pipe curl into bash" type of app, since nobody knows how to package software any more.
According to https://docs.funkwhale.audio/installation/ , the curl|bash is only one of the ways to install it. They also provide an ansible role, install instructions on Debian and Arch without the curl|bash, an AUR package, a NixOS package, a Yunohost package, and a Docker image
I love coming here, lots of interesting articles, but the most fun is reading the twisted english as people convince themselves digital theft is somehow not to be equated to physical theft.
We are are a curated Funkwhale music server promoting libre audio - usually released under Creative Commons licenses and through netlabels.
So this should answer your question. It's legal because it's not illegal.
I've been meaning to deploy this at my home server, but then with Covid and WFH my need to have it available outside has been reduced dramatically.
First of all, what do you mean by "this"?
You mention Napster and Limewire. These are things. Things cannot be illegal. Actions can be illegal.
A certain action is illegal if there is a paragraph in the applicable jurisdiction that forbids it.
It might be illegal to manufacture, own, fake, destroy or distribute a thing. But a thing on its own cannot be illegal. What would that even mean.
So who did what, which jurisdiction is applicable and which paragraph forbids it?
Though the RIAA might see it differently, as they have with other open-source software in the past (ref the recent DMCA takedown requests of youtube-dl GitHub repositories). They might argue the software is designed for copyright infringement and as such should be blocked.
Do you honestly thing the two are in any way equivalent? If I steal a physical item from you, you no longer have that item. If I download a copyrighted item that I never would have purchased, and you are entitled to royalties from then you lose nothing. If I download 100 items and I otherwise would have bought 5% of them, then you lose 5% of it.
Note also that libraries work similarly. I have checked out many hundreds of books out from the public library and read them. That also cost authors money, but we do not equate that to stealing. I have bought 100s of used CDs. I saved a lot of money and the record companies and artists collected no money for that either.
I also object to the concept that a creator has any moral right to monopolize their creations. There is no such moral right. The US provides for granting such a monopoly for a limited time in order to encourage people to create things. This has somehow morphed into the belief that someone creating something intangible has an indefinite monopoly on its use.
Such policy is actively harmful to the arts to the point of being detrimental to creators! Disney's Sleeping Beauty was a delightful film, if not a box office hit, but it would never had happened if the copyright laws (that Disney lobbied for!) we have today existed then, because Tchaikovsky's ballet would still have been under copyright.
The thinking is along the lines of, look at this car and look at this mp3, they're so different. But obviously they share important similarities, those being that both needed ingenious human thought plus plenty of physical objects for them to come into existence. True, how they are sold is another question. How they are received. How are they shared. How they function. What is their purpose?
Let's swap funkwhale to carwhale - yes, I can, because one day in the future, we will be able to push a button and have an exact copy of any car just by pointing a scanner at it. Suppose you worked on that car, all your life, in the hope others could enjoy it, and love it the way you have. And if you got it right, might be compensated for your time and efforts.
But no, this is not in the future because everything should be free. Everything? Or just the mp3s? Just digital? Who's going to make that music? Or that car? Or perform your heart op?
Most people, sadly here, are not respectful of creativity and its worth, I feel its more important than that car. And throughout history culture has been the most important aspect of any society; its strength and survival depend on it.
The project explicitly mentions many examples of sharing through federation and it seems to me they’re explicitly advocating for illegal sharing of music.
Now, I certainly have plenty of issues with copyright and I tend to lean more towards “piracy isn’t a huge deal since we all want convenient (not free) access to media.” However, this project seems to be positioning themselves as a free music sharing service. I can’t imagine this ends well for them.
Some may mention other means of sharing music such as Plex or Jellyfin. I think Plex etc are flirting with the edge a bit with their sharing features. However, their sharing features are meant to selectively share with say family members in your household. Funkwhale is positioning the hoster to share with anyone on the internet. Don’t be surprised to get a DMCA notice if you open up a music library to the whole internet.
It’s too bad because there definitely is a space for someone to create a really nice self-hosted music library. Plex and Plexamp work ok but still leave a lot to be desired in terms of discovery.
They're explicitly against that in their docs:
>If you are uploading content purchased from other platforms or stores, you should upload it in a private library
>As a rule of thumb, only use public and local libraries for content for which you own the copyright or for content you know you can share with a wider audience.
They also noted that they have made changes to funkwhale out of copyright concerns:
>Managing the library at instance was cumbersome and dangerous: sharing an instance library over federation would quickly pose copyright issues, as well as opening public instances. It also made it impossible to only share a subset of the music.
It really isn't, though. If you steal my car, I won't have a car. If you copy my car, I'll have a car.
To claim that the two are equivalent is pretty indefensible, in my opinion.
The deal is, work is rewarded, not stealing work, or did I miss a meeting?
DRM is not Licensing, but a mechanism to enforce a license.
I think OP is implying that the sharing provided in funkwhale is likely violating the typical license terms of any purchased music, therefore is preventing a musician from making money from streaming services which have appropriately licensed the music for streaming.
Buying a license doesn't mean that you own the work, just that you have the right to play it in specific circumstances (most of which nobody pays attention to anyway). I'm sure we've all played a song on a loud speaker for others to hear, but again that's against typical license terms.
I do think, however that your comment might have been better-received if delivered with less snark.
> The result of [social] categorization processes may be that work groups function more smoothly when they are homogeneous than when they are more diverse … This analysis is corroborated by findings of, for instance, higher group cohesion (e.g., O'Reilly et al. 1989), lower turnover (e.g., Wagner et al. 1984), and higher performance (e.g., Murnighan & Conlon 1991) in more homogeneous groups …
> In contrast to the social categorization (and similarity/attraction) perspective, the information/decision-making perspective emphasizes the positive effects of work group diversity. The starting point for this perspective is the notion that diverse groups are likely to possess a broader range of task-relevant knowledge, skills, and abilities, and members with different opinions and perspectives … Corroborating this analysis, some studies find an association of diversity with higher performance and innovation (e.g., Bantel & Jackson 1989).
> In their simplest form (a main effect of diversity), neither analysis is supported. Evidence for the positive effects as well as for the negative effects of diversity is highly inconsistent (Bowers et al. 2000, Webber & Donahue 2001, Williams & O'Reilly 1998) and raises the question of whether, and how, the perspectives on the positive and the negative effects of diversity can be reconciled and integrated.
The case for workplace diversity needs to be argued on social justice principles, because there isn’t enough evidence for the economic efficiency argument.
But there's no evidence it's factually correct.
And Bandcamp's model is based on selling tracks and albums with free previews, which is entirely different to free listening.
Where can I donate some money?
https://funkwhale.audio/support-us/
(not affiliated with funkwhale, just found the link from their site)
Note that there are a few projects like this one, for example Subsonic or Mopidy.
(Funkywhale certainly looks nice though!)
Is there some reason servers like this require a special client? Can't you just provide URLs to m3u8s which in turn have URLs to mp3s? Is it just that there isn't an agreed-upon protocol for listing directories? Or maybe auth concerns?
Considering all these features that needs to be supported it makes sense IMO that it's a specific protocol.
I still heavily use Spotify. Yet I hate knowing some tracks are not playable (permission/copyright issue perhaps?).
Time to re-organize my MP3 collection, then.
Playlists: Discover Weekly tends to result in ~3-5 (new to me) musicians/week that I hadn't heard of that I would actually listen to. That's a pretty high ratio IMO.
Release Radar tends to result in ~1 (new to me)/week. Granted, it's supposedly mostly ones I listen to, but still has several I've never heard of.
Daily Mix 1-6 are a mixed bag and sometimes result in something new, but mostly just things I like (and may have forgotten about too).
* Freeform radio stations (preferably with live playlists): WMFO, WFMU are my favorites. Even people who are immersed in music can't help to hear something new every hour. For me, it's a constant wave of new-to-me music. Many free form radio stations are also layering tracks, interviews, noise, and other audio treats that make for unique experiences that may never (or should never, haha) happen again. Just under free form radio there are countless excellent LPFM and college stations around the country - Hollow Earth Radio, nearly every college radio station from Boston to Milford PA.
* I also use Bandcamp for getting deeper into a genre or trying out new ones. They write up articles that profile maybe a dozen artists that represent the boundaries of a style - whether you read them through or just listen, it's an amazing value. Easily on the level of what the New York Times does for classical music. Bandcamp is obviously growing like a weird and wonderful weed the last year - I would really like them to add a few more features for building random playlists within a few criteria.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/05/arts/music/five-minutes-c...
Then it became trendy to provide discovery based on what other people who listen similar things like. Not so amazing ever since. Not _bad_... just not great. I haven't found any (even GPM) that do a good job at pulling together suggestions that fit into my eclectic listening habits.
I go through phases where I deep dive into genre's. Each Daily Mix ends up representing one of the genre's I've been listening to lately pulling in music that I like and other songs that I may like.
That being said, that may be due to the fact that I deep dive into genres that don't have that much of a cross over, e.g. Japanese Hip-Hop & Lo-fi beats, R&B, 90's indie rock, etc. Still, the Daily Mixes are a great way to listen to music I like separated by genre.
Last.fm's discovery feature is pretty neat too. I don't use it as much as Spotify's because I don't listen to music on Last.fm but I think the key feature of Last.fm over other music discovery tools is that it has a profile for many artists.
Spotify, Apple Music, etc. are limited by what music is on their platform. If an artist isn't on Spotify, then they won't have a profile. Last.fm isn't limited that way so you can find even more artists, including artists that may be more underground or niche.
My best experience has been talking with people or listening to artist interviews on influences.
Strongly agree that music discovery is, in some sense, generally 'broken' across most platforms and not very good. I have been deeply dissatisfied with just about every system. I found Google Play music to be okay.
My best luck these days is what I would call a "brute force" search through record labels, last.fm similar artists, bandcamp pages for genres, sputnik listings for particular genres, etc.
It's very hit or miss, but I feel like it leads to me to my occasional lightning strikes, which are what I really want. These discoveries are quite different from the guesses put forward my recommendation engines, which seem to smooth out the interesting edges and signatures of personality and gradually draws toward a lowest common denominator, with no lightning strikes.
It depends on what you mean by "work".
Discovery capabilities have certainly gotten vastly better. 10+ years ago, the only decent one was the now (effectively) defunct Last.fm. These days, they're all pretty good. Spotify, pandora, google music, and now youtube music will do a good job of giving you recommendations based strictly on what you've been cue-ing up.
But the recommendations from these services are the equivalent of going into a record store and getting advice from a dim-witted and disinterested employee. You'll get all the obvious stuff, maybe things you forgot about, and if you happen to like popular stuff the recommendations will work OK. But you won't get challenging, provocative recommendations that expand your taste. You'll get cloying recommendations that try to cater to your taste like it was a static attribute. Oh, yeah, and there's "the surveillance capitalism thing" which happens to be the centerpiece of all these services. Is that a problem? Yes.
The best "discovery algorithm" is still HUMAN BEINGS.
If your cool friends aren't available, then the next best thing is a mag like pitchfork (https://pitchfork.com/), xlr8r (https://xlr8r.com/) or in-depth reviews like Anthony Fantano's channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/theneedledrop).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17933574 - a short but somewhat good thread from 2018
Any FOSS service with this set of features?
But it looks like this supports the same Subsonic protocol, which is pretty great. It's cool to not only take inspiration from predecessors but to also support and build on the same ecosystem.
If you think you won't miss accessing your tracks by directory, navidrome (written in go) has a smaller footprint and is quite actively developed (but the web UI is rather awkward)
But does it work? My airsonic install consistently fails to play the next track at my work computer using the browser client.
But I could see myself setting this up on a newer Pi and plugging in my 1.5TB external into it to share out all my music with my family. Right now I've got a Samba share on my Windows HTPC for my internal network, but something the rest of the family can use would be sweet.
These days, I have been very pleased with https://radioparadise.com. It is an eclectic mix with a couple of different channels. This station offers familiar tunes mixed with new ones. It is a nice gem that I love to tell other music lovers about.
Note: I am in no way affiliated with Radio Paradise. Just a listener/fanboy.
Notes:
- Gonic doesn't support many routes. The *sonic protocol supports special routes for Podcasts/Audiobooks/Radio Stations for eg. [0] details missing routes
- It heavily uses `folder.jpg` as the album art. Doesn't work well always. I used sacad[1], but it wasn't perfect.
- Not all players will work perfectly with Gonic. I use play:Sub and it had some issues with album names being blank because Gonic used `name` field in album info while keeping title blank (I think). This is now fixed mostly, but I still have a few blank albums that I need to investigate
- I liked the transcoding options on the server side. You can set it per-client and that client will forever get MP3 for eg.
- It doesn't do artist art. Not sure why
I haven't faced any breaking-issues other than the blank album names so far (and that was fixed).
Thus far I've been using mStream https://mstream.io/ with decent success. You can federate collections with your friends. My tries with NFS or SSHFS doesn't work reliably on windows/mobile hosts, especially across the (mobile) internet.
I know there is at least a few other projects in this space, some mentioned in the comments (Ampache.)
My vision for music (and other things) sharing is your personal library is on your personal private server, and you can give access to whoever you want individually. Now your streaming source is your library and your friends library--and if a friend likes one of your tracks they can "save" it to their library and give access to their friends.
I've been trying to build this for status updates (like a Facebook alternative) as a simple private blog+rss[1] that's easy to self-host (raspberry PI or AWS) but I can see a world where everyone has their own server enabling an amazing multitude of distributed usage--music sharing, personal restaurant recomendations, the ability to post and share things with only your friends without a mega-corp in between is a future I would get really excited about.
wonder how long will this get taken down like popcorn time?
https://github.com/benkaiser/stretto
Planning on removing the Google auth dependency it uses right now for syncing and song searching.
With that said, it appears there is the ability to share music socially - which seems like p2p sharing.
Which is fine as there is plenty of music that is allowed to be shared free.
Scary thought, being able to purchase music these days rather than a streaming service lease, I know...
From the top of their landing page.
Every DSP (Digital Service Provider) is required to register with the Mechanical Licensing collective, and the administrative fee is $5,000 per year if you fall under the threshold number of streams. If you pass that, then it's $60,000 to unlimited...
Of course you'll have to file monthly reports and pay the royalties due under the blanket license as well.
Some comments here are making assumptions about the motivations/ethical principles of the developers, but how about reading directly what they say?
It turns out that they've been thinking quite a lot about this problem: https://agate.blue/blog/2018/05/11/funkwhale-content-monetiz...
> If a community member engages in .... up to and including expulsion from all Funkwhale spaces
Luckily indeed there's the radio feature.
Every group I like pick "Radio" and with in 2 to 4 songs it's playing completely unrelated stuff.
The rest has all been crap too. "discover weekly" has never once suggested a single thing I'm interested in ever.
No one is saying ban the word meritocracy, but people are saying that if you're arguing for one, you've missed the point.
But for a while, the UK actually didn't do that. New universities were created, "grammar schools" were mostly replaced, new hiring practices adopted, and the stranglehold of the establishment was broken a little bit, for a little while.
That was because as ridiculous as the original idea might have been, good people with good intentions started to believe in "meritocracy", and used the idea to make changes.
If you can wait until the end of the month you might find black friday offers from some providers. They usually get discussed in places like https://www.lowendtalk.com/ (I'm not sure how quickly such short term offers are reflected on the above server search sites, if at all). Again, do research on the hosts you chose lest you buy a lemon.
YouTube, no. They take down videos with copyrighted material.
In the Betamax case, the Supreme Court said that it would not be fair to use copyrighted works in a way which “if it should become widespread … would adversely affect the potential market for the copyrighted work.” Time-shifting was not considered to adversely affect the market for commercial TV. But surely a tool like Funkwhale, “if it should become widespread,” would adversely affect the music streaming industry?
Who would they sue, how would they monitor the usage and how would they enforce anything?
With torrents and big sites it's easy to show who is distributing what and the distribution can be done by anyone.
This is a decentralized tool that can have its access controlled. The only you could get sued is if you have a really shitty friend who goes to court and brings evidence showing you distributed too many songs.
It’s true that enforcement is a practical challenge. However, the developers of the Funkwhale software are probably not as decentralised as the operators of Funkwhale pods. Copyright holders could potentially get future development shut down on the basis that the service implicitly authorises or encourages copyright infringement, as they are trying to do to youtube-dl. The details depend on where the developers live, but this strategy has worked for some tools like Napster, KaZaA, and some BitTorrent trackers, while failing for BitTorrent clients. Which side of the line will Funkwhale fall on?
However, creative outputs are qualitatively (and legally) distinct from physical outputs and to pretend otherwise is only going to be a hindrance in properly creating a system to nurture cultural output.
Let's start with the car example. I can buy a car, modify it and resell it. I can buy a cassette, modify it and resell it. Legally I can't buy a digital download, remix it and resell it. There's already a difference here.
If I come up with an improvement to someone else's car design, am I allowed to print up one for myself on carwhale? Am I allowed to sell the new design? Am I allowed to describe my changes to someone else? Where do we draw the line? 100 years after the first car is printed from car-whale, does the estate of the person who designed the base model that the cars we are now printing hardly resembles still get royalties because the design before the design before ... the design before happened to use their car as a quickstart convenience?
With physical objects it's clear. The person who built the car gets paid once and we don't have to debate 100 years later over ship-of-theseus questions. With creative outputs its far less clear.
Just because we agree that it is a Good Thing for creators to be rewarded for their work doesn't mean that copying their work is equivalent with theft. It's its own unique thing and coming up with a framework to handle it correctly is quite challenging and to just say "digital theft is still theft" is a way to ignore those challenges rather than trying to meet those challenges.
I don't feel we're pulling in opposite directions. You make points I agree with. I definitely want to understand more.
Time limits, profits limits, distribution caps, all important and debatable facets.
All I ask is you really try to put yourself, and only you can do it, in the shoes of a someone who's very existence depends on what you are casually, or strongly, or passionately, advocating. Are you the person to decide what 'product' is more valuable, either in recompense or admiration?
As far as this:
> All I ask is you really try to put yourself, and only you can do it, in the shoes of a someone who's very existence depends on what you are casually, or strongly, or passionately, advocating. Are you the person to decide what 'product' is more valuable, either in recompense or admiration?
I think that all individuals have a responsibility to decide what is and isn't more valuable and align their actions accordingly. The fact that an action causes harm to someone else does not make it necessarily immoral though. I can afford to buy every book I want to read. Nevertheless, I still frequent my local public library. This causes quantifiable harm to authors, yet few would call it immoral.
I could probably come up with a dozen reasons why it's a good thing to frequent the library (libraries are awesome, and making them a ghetto of people too poor to afford to buy books would be to their detriment), but the simple fact is I don't want to spend $8 on a book I'm probably going to only read once when I can get it for free.
This is a selfish action with quantifiable harm that most people do not consider immoral. I can come up with many post-facto justifications for why libraries are good and piracy is bad, but IMO the real reason why society falls this way is one is an old and revered institution, while the other is something teenagers do to get access to media because they are time-rich and money-poor.
And at the end of all of this, I'm still not going to advocate for general piracy, but I will say that it's mostly two sides each inflating or deflating the actual harm done in order to justify a position they hold that was never grounded in any sort of utilitarianism in the first place.
I had much better success with Pandora when I tried it, but it still wasn't exactly deep cuts.
So you are aware people sell things they make, to live? and they hope not to sell to just one person who's paying $1 to put it online for 100,000 people to have it not sold.
And that's ok with you because you don't, or don't need to, make a living creating music.
Try thinking about this from the perspective of whatever it is you do to make a living.
Let's for one minute, expand the remit. It's not funkwhale, it's carwhale, foodwhale, healthwhale. Keep going. Keep thinking.
If all we're doing is not creating anew, but instead forging special keys that give you access to anything anyone that made the considerable effort to creative something new - then we treadwater, as a human race. And I see exactly this in so many aspects of human life already.
Not creating, not moving forward, not innovating, and only taking (in this case) other people's music AND then, here, loudly having the arrogance to declare that all music (or cars, or health, or food) should be free to buy once and you get the right to give it away.
Don't complain, like I have often read on these pages, how modern music (and cars, and food, and apps, and laptops) all look and sound the same when we have merrily sucked dry the very chances of anything new making its first steps.
You're describing a post-scarcity utopia where we can spend our creative energy where we want and not be tied down to jobs that we hate in order to pay the bills.
Yes, I would very much like that for everyone. Thank you for bringing this topic up. Let it come.
First impressions matter. curl>bash is a bad first impression.
Subsonic went closed, and the rebrand to LibreSonic had some unrest with the maintainer, so Airsonic is leading the way in the line of *Sonics.
Your experience is vastly different than mine. Youtube music seems to be recommending nothing but what's popular. Justin Bieber is being recommending to me. I've never listed to him or anything remotely related.
No good recommendations on any of the others.
Maybe you have a different definition of "good"
Good to me means "sounds similar and in the same genre as what I'm currently listening to". It does not mean "people who liked this song also liked that song"
Actually, yes, it does (and many other things too), but to be fair "good" is a highly subjective judgment which is going to be different for everyone.
I don't think, at this point in time, we have recommendation engines that can do much more than fling out recommendations based on an unknown convolution of your listening history combined with music meta-data combined with social network data and a mix of paid stuff courtesy of your surveillance capitalism purveyor.
I know it's possible to capture some characteristics from the music track itself, like bpm (perhaps usable for EDM DJ's?). The "holy grail" would be to have a system that can truly assess the nature of a piece of music based on audio and use it make "interesting" and non-obvious recommendations. We are very far from doing that in software, but humans are still very good at it.
If I'm listening to ambient music I don't suddenly want to be ambushed by something uptempo. If I'm listening to e.g. Debussy, you might be excused for suggesting something vaguely new age in a similar mood and tempo, but certainly not rock.
Another problem is that you can't just take raw overlap in tastes, because some people like "everything", and the fact their tastes overlap with mine does not mean I'll like everything else they like.
I've yet to hear a recommendation system that chooses music I want to listen to reliably enough that I can generally stand to listen to them for more than a few songs at a time without it turning into an endless annoying sequence of skipping.
Respecting genre (segues need to be gradual, if at all), respecting mood and tempo needs to come first. Then you can consider what others who likes the same songs within those constraints also likes within those constraints. Honestly if I have to choose between personalised recommendation and precise control of genre and mood/tempo, I'd take genre and mood/tempo over personalisation any day.
Another pet peeve of mine is lack of visibility into how to teach a system what I want. E.g. if I dislike or skip a song, will it get that it doesn't fit my current mood or what I want to listen to now, or will it wrongly infer I don't like the song at all?
Sometimes it feels as if the people designing these systems don't use them.
Find a couple DJs you like, download everything you can from their soundcloud or mixcloud, then give it a listen. Keeping Shazam close by is also helpful
https://github.com/sentriz/gonic/blob/master/server/scanner/...
This is a tool to satisfy the use case of sharing music with others. Sometimes such sharing will be illegal, but at other times it won't.
Should you be considered a child-molester just because I accuse you to be one?
In that case, it is in RIAA's best interest that everything is locked down and they maintain exclusive control over as many things as possible. It is also in their favour to make the public view anything related to sharing of media files as suspect. That doesn't mean this position is reasonable and valid.
Take a look at:
https://creativecommons.org/about/cclicenses/ https://www.jamendo.com/start http://ccmixter.org/
Nine Inch Nails have CC licensed albums. So "being famous" and "music that is under a CC license" is not mutually exclusive...
Truly a gem.
I was using it way back when you could use their Java Applet to upload your music. Had my entire library on it!
It was a wild ride. I am so fortunate to have been there for the time that I had.
Appreciate the love everyone's been sending in the comments. It's good to not be forgotten :)
Unfortunately we need to change the copyright system for music to require a uniform fee only if we ever want to see another groveshark.
What about them?
If I purchase music, it's because I want to listen to that music.
Whether that's Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Lari Basilio, Nick Johnston or anyone else, what business is it of yours (or anyone else, for that matter) how or where I listen to the music that I've purchased?
This is the first I'm hearing about Funk Whale and I fully intend to install it, as I've been looking for a decent self-hosted, streaming music server to listen to music owned by me.
It's likely that it won't meet my needs and I'll move on to something else.
I suppose that just about any music streaming server could be used to take food out of the mouths of the starving children of musicians.
Rather than assuming (as it appears you are doing) that everyone who uses a self-hosted streaming server is engaged in stealing from musicians, please let us (me, especially) know what platform you would recommend as a personal streaming server.
I'd really appreciate any suggestions. Thanks!
Absolutely not saying everyone will use it in a way that devalues creativity as a living, you rightly used the word 'seems'.
The interconnectedness of digital content ultimately stifles competition. It means less chance of you ever hearing the next Jimi Hendrix. Given there are about 7 billion people and there's only been one Jimi convinces me this is true. Of course there have been, and are, many Jimis, but you'll likely never get to appreciate them. Maybe you're ok with just Jimi and all the stuff already out there. If so, maybe music isn't so important to you.
You have the right attitude to the software. I don't want to suggest an alt here. I'm talking more broadly. I would ask you to think about this from the reverse perspective, and if it is whatever it is you do to make a living could be made once, and distributed for free to the effect you couldn't do it anymore - is the point.
Don't want to accidentally leak any copyrighted joy to your neighbors without payment!
There's a definite difference between providing atmosphere in a restaurant, and providing the content as some sort of production, or providing others with broadcast-quality copies from a single master without permission of the artist.
You are free to do whatever you like with your free time, of course.
It most certainly does in my country (and probably in most of Europe I would hasard).
The only thing you can't do is public performance and distribution but sharing it with your friends is definitely legal.
I don't talk with the attorneys who create these complex licensing rules at Amazon, iTunes, etc. I talk to musicians. None of whom have ever had a problem with listening to their music with a small group of friends or family. The problem is with a platform that allows me to fire up a server and then invite thousands or millions of people to listen to someone's music for free.
I could setup a server with my music collection and give access to my friends. That is fair-use.
> Intentionally posting or disseminating libel, slander, or other disinformation.
Let's face it. It's just a policy that allows them to expel anyone that doesn't fit their views, whatever that may be.
Without a written code of conduct, there are still values, views, and norms, usually created and run by the most disruptive members who are free to behave in any way they see fit and ostracize those who that behavior hurts.
Their "view" is that sexual harassment is not something they want on their platform.
>punishing people for jokes
Again, we're talking about sexual harassment and racism. It's important not to leave that part out.
I think that these recommendation systems, especially youtube's, are much more nuanced than you're suggesting. And I say this as someone who finds these recommendation systems lacking and of limited utility compared to discovery from reading Pitchfork, for example. They're trying to balance quite a lot of inputs and actually somehow make money from it.
Also, "genre" and "mood" of a piece of music are not easy to define, let alone measure. You're asking for a lot and I don't think what you're asking for is realistic from a piece of software.
> Also, "genre" and "mood" of a piece of music are not easy to define, let alone measure. You're asking for a lot and I don't think what you're asking for is realistic from a piece of software.
Yet I think if you asked a bunch of humans to attach labels to tracks they like, you'd find they overlap closely enough.
I base that on the fact that while many will struggle to identify niche sub-genres or discriminate between genres they don't listen to, people certainly have a relatively large shared idea about major classifications.
What is more: You'd be able to find the labels of people who usually label the same way as you.
And it doesn't need to be precise. It just needs to better.
> One difference is that blank CDs cost money.
So does internet access, electricity to run the servers, disks to store the data. Your point?
> Copyright holders could potentially get future development shut down on the basis that the service implicitly authorises or encourages copyright infringement, as they are trying to do to youtube-dl.
Bullshit. The same argument could be made against a web browser. It's not just because RIAA is making some absurd claim that is yet to be dropped in court that their claims are valid.
Also, even if the RIAA managed to block access to a central point of development, it would be at most a nuisance. Developers of whatever project gets blocked from Github need to do nothing youtube-dl
> this strategy has worked for some tools like Napster, KaZaA, and some BitTorrent trackers. while failing for BitTorrent clients.
Very easy to see how the strategy only works against corporations, not against open source projects. KaZaA got sued, but GnuTella lives on.
This is why we can't have nice things. Because the developer rather focus their time on developing the project instead of the arcane packaging of the various repositories, the entire project deserves to be dismissed?
Piping curl to bash is basically the same as if you download the tarball/clone the repository and running `make`, but no one bitch about that. They rather cargo-bitch about "piping curl to bash is obviously always bad and your entire project is bad if you even include curl | bash as one method of installing".
Long gone are the days where projects are judged by the quality of the project itself, and today we want to get outraged as soon as possible, at every little detail.
Of course, in the ideal world, that's not the way it should be, but such is the reality we live in.
But Rust doing it doesn't make it a good practice, and as you say yourself, it's not the way it should be. I'm just resisting the move towards an inferior standard.
EDIT: I triggered HN rate limiting with my lukewarm takes, so to the post above suggesting I'm not fun at parties: At the parties I go to, we do not talk about software packaging best practices for Linux. Thankfully.
The experienced sysadmins such as you and I can skip the paragraph and find an alternative we like.
Indeed, for many people setting up a home server might be the first time they're dealing with the terminal. So this is a "non-technical step into being technical."
Yeah, I don't like curl > bash either, but it's a distributed application that may run into many different platforms. It makes sense for them to not worry about the packaging specifics of each and let the community pick up the slack.
If all you can do is criticize an open source project that does not worship your sacred cows, the only bad impression I am left with is your project management skills.
People shouldn't use jokes as a cover for racism, sexism, etc. We know people do this. We should do things to stop it. No one is saying you can't make whatever jokes you like in private with people you know won't be offended, but they are saying that those jokes can be harmful to people they want to have in their community, and that you can't say them in that community. It's their right to do so.
People also shouldn't try to get others fired over things like people talking about dongles and forking, assuming they're actually talking about dongles and forking. If someone approaches you and makes a joke about how they want to fork you with their dongle, well, it's pretty obvious what they mean. If you overhear someone talking and hear the words fork and dongle, well, it's not so obvious and we probably shouldn't get them fired.
That being said, it sounds like the joke was at least in part actually a sexually charged joke about a "big dongle" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5398681 - though the forking seems to have not been intended to be sexually charged. This is perhaps another reason that people should consider their words - if you just made a joke about a "big dongle" and then immediately say "I'd fork his repo," there's a chance it's going to be interpreted in a sexual manner because of the context.
Making a joke about "big dongles" in public is probably not something you should do. Someone being offended doesn't automatically mean they're right, but it's also not a high bar to not make dick jokes around thousands of other people that you don't know and don't know how they'll take it.
I find this way of engaging with the problem to be profoundly misguided in two ways. One, it's a failure to correctly evaluate the relative scale of the two problems, and to consistently think and speak clearly about them in terms that reflect their relative scale.
And secondly, it mistakenly sets up the two problems as being in a relationship of interference with one another, such that talking about one is used to mean we should stop talking about the other. Instead of saying "this statement that racism is bad and sexual harassment is bad is a statement I do not support" it would be more helpful say "yes, that is a problem, I agree, we need to solve it. And meanwhile here's this other thing, but don't let this other thing detract from the importance of the first problem or imply we don't need to actively work on the first problem."
It seems like you are implying I am. When all I'm trying to do is make sure musicians get fairly paid for their work. So yeah, I'm not super concerned about playing music loud in my car as you sarcastically suggested I should be.
I am concerned about joining a music platform where something I purchased can be shared for free to millions of people with the musician getting nothing.
If there is a service that pays musicians directly and cuts out ASCAP and RIAA, then even better.
You are here talking down the tool and implying software you have not used is not legal while uncritically repeating their claims, which are more aggressive than many copyright lawyers believe is accurate.
I'm sorry if you find my flip characterization uncharitable. If you need a less off-the-cuff one, you are uncritically lending your voice to the legacy copyright cartel's continuing attempts to monopolize music distribution.
That does do several things. Promoting fairness for musicians is not one of them.
Especially when I said this, right? "If there is a service that pays musicians directly and cuts out ASCAP and RIAA, then even better."
The sad thing for me, is that even if something like that were to function, and no matter how well, people would find another reason the artists don't deserve payment.
So as it stands, organizations like that are how artists get paid at all.
And not as any hard defence of the RIAA in all aspects, but it's not like they don't do anything. They did help set the standards for effective vinyl mastering and playback...
That doesn’t seem to be the intent or reality of how Funkwhale is used. All of the public pods I saw had less than 200 members. I imagine you’d run into scaling problems with larger pods.