What's a good alternative to spotify

2days

I have had Spotify for years now but I dont like the apparent data collection

What do you think the best alternative is with a decent library but less invasive than Spotify?

Quantum

2days Personally I download all my music then play it locally off my phone using Auxio. That way it's private and I get the best quality

W1zardK1ng

2days if you want a free alternative try SimpMusic, its works well but sometimes yt music break things.
Or Apple Music is a good choice for high quality music.

mmobder

2days I dont like the apparent data collection

I don't know the internals, but at least partially you can limit data collection with a help of RethinkDNS, putting the app to Isolate mode and whitelisting only what's necessary. In my case, Waze works with only about 3 domains whitelisted, while it's only 1/5 accessed.

That's in case you won't find an alternative.

What's still good, is that you will start to see what's going under the hood even with trusted/foss apps and you can block all those firebaselogging.googleapis.com from Revolut, appsflyersdk.com, time.google.com, improving.duckduckgo.com (even when it's disabled in ddg app!)

And all that is done on device (it has on-device blocklists from community like all those HaGeZi etc), without leaving it.

2days

Where do you download from?

Torrents?

Quantum

2days Not sure if it's allowed to post those types of links here, but it's websites that rip it from the streaming services. So I'd rip from sites that offer FLAC.

mrket

2days There's Soulseek (p2p network mainly for sharing music).

You can also use streamrip to download normal audio files from streaming services for offline playback (you still need a subscription for this though).

Quantum

There should be a subreddit for ripping with a link to a collection of links to sites that do different things depending on your needs

DeletedUser499

I also left Spotify, months ago. I have a catalogue of mp3's on external ssd storage, that I transfer to my phone and use on an ad hoc basis

2days

I'll look into this. I mean there are many new or non mainstream music I enjoy so it may be very hard to find some new stuff or unusual stuff

Are there any decent streaming services that are less invasive than Spotify or is it only really worth going the route you all mention?

Quantum

2days fmhy.net/audio#audio-downloading

If you scroll down you can see ripping sites

krysor

For Podcasts, AntennaPod is imho best option and it's FOSS.

For music I've used RiMusic (available on Accrescent) but the development stopped and the last time I checked it wasn't working more often than not.

What you definitely SHOULDN'T do is trying to find a way to buy the Spotify subscription in another country using a VPN, potentially using a website like Gameseal.

thure

I mostly use VLC with a local library on my phone. This way, I always have access to my music and I don't have to share my listening habits. It also makes things easier since I listen to a lot of bootlegs that aren't accessible through streaming anyway.

As for streaming alternatives, there are Tidal and Qobuz. I've tried both apps: Tidal is terrible, but Qobuz works well and is slightly more expensive. Both offer significantly better sound quality than Spotify. I don't use audiobooks, so I can't say anything about them.

For podcasts, I agree with AntennaPod. It's a great app that just works perfectly and is easy to use.

schweizer

thure Tidal is terrible, but Qobuz works well and is slightly more expensive. Both offer significantly better sound quality than Spotify.

Really? I never had the impression Spotify was bad in terms ouf sound quality. But now they have FLAC too. So there shoudn't be a difference.

Spotify is nice for Spotify connect and the jamming mode.

LeslieFH

I use Shuttle player with local files for music and Podcast Addict for podcasts. When I did the research, Tidal seemed the best for music quality and actual payments to the musicians, if you prefer streaming instead. :-)

spl4tt

I'm using tidal through roon. Works quite nicely.
spotify still has the best recommendations for my music taste tho. I hope roon will get better with time

paprikatongue

In all transparency I haven't tried them yet, but you might want to check out the Accrescent appstore. They've got a couple relevant apps like RiMusic and Auxio. Like I said, I haven't used them but I've had good luck with everything else I've downloaded from Accrescent

2days

W1zardK1ng wouldn't apple music be privacy invasive similar to spotify?

W1zardK1ng

2days its just better than spoify. You can either read both of them or ask any ai tool to compare both.

elbert

schweizer Really? I never had the impression Spotify was bad in terms ouf sound quality. But now they have FLAC too. So there shoudn't be a difference.

According to their website, Spotify offers a maximum sound quality of 24-bit/44.1kHz, whereas Qobuz claims up to 24-bit/192kHz. Whether or not that's actually noticable (especially with the sound processor of a smartphone) is another story, but at least on paper, Qobuz still has better audio quality.

thure

schweizer

I sometimes had the impression that some songs sounded less rich on Spotify. But I didn't get the news that Spotify offered lossless audio as well, so that argument isn't valid anymore.

DeletedUser495

elbert there a few human ears that can process sounds upward of 20kHz, especially older.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range
By the way media streaming is not particularly environment friendly and eats up to 80% of all internet traffic.

goskm75f

OuterTune

elbert

DeletedUser495 You're confusing two different things here: I was talking about the sample rate, while the article you linked is about the frequency of the sound wave. Just because they're both measured in Hertz they're not the same. Hertz just means "x per second" where x can be literally anything periodic (like heartbeats, CPU ticks, or oscillations of a wave). The sample rate refers to how many times per second the audio wave is captured digitally (called "sampled"). The frequency of a sound wave refers to how many times a sound wave oscillates per second (determines the pitch of the sound).

Basically, the sample rate has to be at least twice the audio frequency you want to record in order to be able to fully capture the wave (see Nyquist-Shannon theorem). Therefore 44.1 kHz and 48 kHz are two commonly used sample rates (as that's roughly twice the upper limit of human hearing mentioned by you). As far as I understand even higher sample rates are mainly useful for editing so you still have enough quality even after applying many effects (note I'm not an audio engineer so take this last part with a grain of salt).