Ask HN: How to go back to listening to MP3s? I have been a paying Spotify customer for many years now. Thanks to the yearly wrapped event, I am reminded how my use pattern is listening to a limited amount of tracks on repeat. I'm curious if any of you has made the switch back to listening to mp3s? If you did, which apps are you using? |
The two best places to buy music in my opinion are qobuz and bandcamp.
https://github.com/ravachol/kew
I encourage you to go check out my app.
My collection is like 20k pieces (curated with time, some still whole albums, some 1 song only). a) put all that on a usb stick. inserted in car's audio. random-all. 2 years already.. b) Alternatively, keep same on the phone, for not-in-car entertainment - bicycle, office, you name it. c) at home - kodi and other media players, over the network shares. Sometimes manual pick, sometimes random.
btw.. car's builtin as well as aftermarket radios (2023-2025) cannot take/index more than 5000 pieces / mp3s. Some even lower, like 3000. So.. i had to bundle above pieces back into whole/half-albums (anyone remember LP-sides? there)
For recommendations I went back to asking friends + smaller online communities
For day-to-day I use a non-android hardware music DAC (Lotoo PAW 6000) which allows me to stream bluetooth to it.
I can playback songs from my iPhone or use the inbuilt SD card slot.
It's nice having a device not connected to the internet.
In the past I used jellyfin.
The kids are gen z and love CDs now, and ripping them is easy enough.
Puddletag for file metadata modification
Inbuilt "song change" plugin for logging / metadata collection
Conky for Visualization
The little players also have discrete "stop" and "volume" buttons or rockers, which means I can pause or adjust volume without having to see the player. Much better than hauling a phone out and spend time navigating menus.
Nobody ever says a word to me, unless I have the earbuds in; then complete strangers will walk up and start talking. Pause the player, remove an earbud, ask them to repeat what they said; they get angry. The usual.
I never stopped. If there is something I like listening to then I must have local copies of it or it does not exist as far as I am concerned. The internet is too fragile to depend on. Companies come and go. Songs get censored, altered or cancelled based on societal identity politics. The internet and power distribution could vanish in one gamma ray burst. Nobody will believe it can happen until it does.
App: I put the songs on MP3 players connected to a tiny mixer and my 1990's sound system. I keep several MP3 players in metal containers and boxes to shield them when not in use.
For acquiring music, the bulk I get from bandcamp. I usually try hard to get my music legally, but sometimes it isn't possible, ripping from YouTube, searching torrent sites, using russian search sites which still seem to index the blogs that stored downloadable links to music like we had about 10 years ago...
They also repeatedly offload my music off my phone. It’s super irritating. The FTC should investigate them for the practice. Making my music inaccessible after I repeatedly tell them not to in order to force me to subscribe to listen to the music I already own should be illegal.
I suppose you could do it often, or maybe even script it (e.g., with Keyboard Maestro on Mac) to get something a little more dynamic. But it's not something that just matches songs on the fly server side.
I have weeks worth of music and I either "select all: random play", or choose an artist and listen to all their works.
For the past week I've been listening to Depeche Mode on repeat. Maybe next week I'll switch to Prince, Madonna, Hendrix, Prodigy, or Rammstein. It all depends on my mood, I guess.
Now that buying used DVDs costs no more than €1/film I've been buying a lot of physical media from charity shops. I've not bought more audio-CDs, but now and again it crosses my mind. If I stuck to used purchases again I think I'd be looking at €1/disk which is pretty reasonable.
My collection is store on an old mac mini (with debian). It’s directly linked to an home theater setup via optical. I have MPD on it that I control with Rigelian on my phone. But I often just ssh and use MoC to play music.
I also have gonic (subsonic server) that uses the same library. I use Amperfy to play music from my phone. I could use navidrome, but I don’t like web players.
As for the management, it’s all manual. I’ve tried beets but the overhead wasn’t worth it. I have several collections which have different filesystem organization schemes.
Apple has always sold 256KB AAC and most of their songs they sell are now lossless ALAC. Yes it’s open source and Apple provides open source implementations to convert to other lossless formats.
This is how I get most of my music, then I copy the songs to my NAS to play on Linux.
Less convenient for sure, and you have to take the backups[0] yourself.
[0]: https://blog.dijit.sh/importance-of-self-hosted-backups/
This allows me to use Kodi's native front end when I'm listening on my home sound system, to use a web front end to play on any web-connected computer, and to stream from my server to my smartphone when I'm out and about. It's the best of all worlds. I have all the convenience of a streaming service, but I actually own the music and it will never become suddenly unavailable or replaced by inferior versions, and I don't have a fixed recurring cost just to enjoy music. Plus, a ton of great music is simply not available on any commercial streaming platform and this eliminates that issue.
I don't tend to use MP3s, though. I go with FLAC instead. Kodi will transcode the FLACs to other formats if needed.
Back when I still used exclusively MP3s, I used Music on Console Player [0] on my personal computer and Snae Player [1] on my school's chromebook, since we were only allowed to use web apps on our Chromebooks. On my phone I found VLC [2] to be the best app since it has so many features. I can highly recommend both programs.
I still have all three installed and use them whenever I don't have internet. Although I haven't updated my local music library in a while, so I am reminded of my old music tastes whenever I open either of them.
Aside from that, I've got my entire music collection backed up on multiple drives (mostly by accident) and I bought an iPod Classic last year, upgraded the battery and storage, and I've got it all on there too, and it'll play for like a month straight on one battery charge now. Standby was six months easily.
I'm actually gonna turn a Pi Zero into a touchscreen Winamp clone by using Audacious or another app that uses Winamp skins. The main benefit of this is that I can connect it to my Bluetooth home speakers and use it.
My current Samsung doesn't have an SD card, but for my old phone, I just copied all my music to a 128GB micro SD and played it using BlackPlayer.
I'm thinking of getting a newer, cheaper music device because retrofitting Bluetooth into an iPod Classic is a bit of a bitch.
I used to use WinAmp, but these days I just us VLC to play them.
I miss the good old days when you could use Napster to find music, then go to Best Buy and get the CD to keep forever.
It was great to be able to search for some things, spot someone with similar interests, and then browse the other stuff that they had to offer. I discovered a ton of good stuff this way.
It was usually a low-bitrate MP3 (or, far worse: An mp3 that someone callously "improved" by running it through BladeEnc at 192Kbps), and it would normally download at a rate far slower than realtime. This left a lot to be desired, but it was plenty good-enough for finding new-to-me music that would probably never have any airplay.
And then I'd gather up some dollars and head over to the local music shop. If it was on the shelf, I'd buy it. (And if it wasn't, they'd cheerfully order it -- usually it'd be there in a few days, but sometimes it was a month or two if it was from overseas.)
Nowadays, like many, I don't buy a ton of music. I still have MP3s, and I've got quite a selection of CDs...and I do enjoy having them and occasionally listening to them. But usually, it's just Spotify for me and has been for over a decade now.
I use Rhythmbox to listen to files on my PC (Linux) - I think they have/had a Windows port at some point. VLC works too but is more cumbersome for large libraries on desktop IMHO. But VLC is actually pretty good on Mobile (iOS/Andriod.) besides the pain of syncing files over to iOS.
I splurged on a dedicated DAP (Digital Audio Player) last year that I'm mostly happy with: a HiBY R1 (my two complaints are: 1. for whatever reason it refuses to pair to my car's bluetooth, no issues pairing to numerous other devices. 2. It doesn't remember what you were last playing when it shuts off.)
Of course I wouldn't approve of such a procedure.
When Spotify came, I tried it, made playlists etc. One of them had 1000+ techno tracks in it, from 90's mostly. After a while, half of them had disappeared due to licencing expirations etc.
That was the lesson to not trust external services or rely on always-on data for streaming - I can stream it all myself from my own mp3/flac files when required.
Mostly using MOC (Music on console) to play locally, and on all mobile devices I have my collection on a sd card or in internal tb memory for the one that does not have a sd card slot anymore. Music folder player full version by Zorillasoft for Android devices - works well, as I keep the collection neatly organized and foldered.
For listening I've mostly used xmms over the years, but recently I've been using Audacious[2] mostly.
also https://audacious-media-player.org/ on desktop to drop files in directly
And it almost never plays a song that causes me to hit next. Of course, it took a long time to get the channel tuned just right - but now I play music for 5+ hours without interruption of nothing but music I love.