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So Spotify was launched in 2011 here, and for the longest time it was pretty hard to use where I live. The culprits? Mobile carriers and their bullshit fees, not to mention the very small data limits each carrier would give you. Also trying to pay for Spotify was pretty difficult at first, especially if you didn’t have a credit card on you (taking in mind how distrusted credit and debit cards were back then). And yet, Spotify adoption was pretty fast, because the promise of unlimited music for a small fee is a good deal compared to spending the time pirating everything by hand, or buying every single song individually. On the surface, it was a big upgrade to the music listening experience.

And yet, I never bought into it. I tried out that one week Spotify deal and after a single day, I pretty much cancelled the trial. Spotify didn’t work the way I wanted it to. I wanted to have music available whenever the fuck I wanted, without having to worry if there is any hotspots around (or deal with very expensive data plans). And Spotify failed on that front miserably. And while downloaded songs can work, they are only playable inside the same app, and not anywhere else.

So instead of Spotify I decided to keeping my music locally. On my phone, on my computer, downloaded files, tagging them in the way I most prefer. Completing LRC files so Musicolet can display those properly. After a while I figured out more ways to get music without dealing with YouTube-DL. The moment I found those [redacted] music ripping tools, and tools like Soulseek, I realized I have hit the fucking motherload. Every single song I ever wanted, in the most highest quality I ever wanted. And tools like Picard and LRCGET allow me to get the proper tags and lyrics for each song.

Meanwhile Spotify has turned greedy and disgusting. They pay so fucking little for the artists that post on the platform, meanwhile they rake in billions on revenue. Streaming in general was a fucking mistake. We should have never traded in our ownership of media and art that we consume for convenience. Because now, the convenience is now over, and the bullshit has just started. We see price hikes on every single service each year. Ads creeping into once ad-free streaming plans. And the content quality is now hitting the fucking toilet. And this won’t stop. They’re making so much money out of this. It is to be expected really.

How I get music

When it comes to music, I tend to use a number of services, websites, and other tools that work by ripping music from [redacted] music streaming services. If you are wondering where to get them, a certain Megathread™ is probably your friend. Sometimes I do buy music from Bandcamp, but that is more often than not the exception, not the rule. There is also Soulseek. Soulseek is a peer to peer sharing network and app that you can use to pretty much share files around. I remember I used it one time to download Squid Game when that was relevant back then. It is a pretty nifty tool, and it is a good way to find more rarer music that you may not find easily. If you are wondering what app to use, I think Nicotine+ is a good option.

Keeping your music organized

When it comes to tools, my favorites are Picard and LRCGET. Picard is a song tag editor, which can also fetch tags based off song recordings (i think they call it AcoustID). Unlike other music tagging programs, Picard is very accurate, and I don’t think I have ever seen a song that got the wrong tags.

LRCGET on the other hand is a LRC file mass downloader. LRC files are text files that store formatted text, that a compatible music player can read and show synced lyrics. They are pretty universal. LRCGET is both a LRC downloader and editor, so you can pretty much both find lyrics and edit and upload them to LRCLIB. I should mention that both tools work on both Windows and Linux.

The music players I use

Music players are pretty important, since it is the medium where you’ll interact with the music. The options I use at this time are pretty much a result of trial and error, trying to find the best one that I can.

On PC, I been using Musicbee for a very long time now, ever since Groove Music started to die (yes, I was one of the few that used Groove Music). I really love Musicbee, since it is a very customizable player, has themes, plugins, Last.fm support, and a number of other features that I really like. I like that it has support for multiple playlists, I like how I can make it look like a music player out of 2006 if I so desired. Musicbee is a very good player, and while it does take a bit to get used to, at the end you are left with a good music player.

On Android the situation is different. I have a long history of trying differnent music players. I used to be a hardcore user of Phonograph because it looked awesome. I really like the classic Material Design (the Android Lollypop look) and I only really stopped using it when I started having issues with deleting some songs. Blackplayer was another cool idea, but the music player itself is unfinished and feels like ass to actually use. There was also Retro Player but that too feels kinda form over function sadly. Eventually I found Musicolet.

I fucking love Musicolet. I really love the multiple playlists, the customizable play count playlists, the everything. It is probably one of the best music players you can possibly use on Android, and it is so good I decided to fork over a couple dollars to get extra features.

Unfortunately on Linux, I haven’t really found a good music player yet, but there are multiple that do come close. One of these is called Strawberry, which is a fork of Clementine, which itself was a fork of Amarok. Strawberry is good, don’t get me wrong, but it lacks plugins, skins and other cool stuff that i would like to have.

Anyways a TLDR: choose the music player you want. I use Musicolet on Android, and on Windows I use Musicbee. On Linux, I just go with Strawberry and deal with the lost features.

Tangent 1: how to blog?

I been seeing a lot of other blogs in an attempt to reduce my social media consumption. And during that process, I found a bunch of other blogs about various things. I read these other blogs and think to myself that they feel so smooth and natural compared to my very fucking crappy writing. And I am like “how do you write better”? Who knows.