On Monday, the company announced that free users globally will now be able to search and play any song they want or play a song shared by a friend or an artist they follow on social media.
    • ramenshaman@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      16 days ago

      Yeah. Just started my self hosting journey a few months ago, looking to replace Spotify at some point. I got a NAS with Jellyfin set up, my next step is replacing Google photos with Immich probably.

      I do appreciate Spotify will be adding lossless music soon, but they have so many other issues.

    • sircac@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      15 days ago

      Mostly for random song discovery considering my previously liked songs, I regularly download/obtain those songs I like for offline reproduction and preservation… online stuff has short lifes

  • rayf@lemmy.zipEnglish
    392·
    16 days ago

    Is this the onion? They add the basic feature of a media player where you can listen the title you clicked and not random stuff? If I understood correctly, this is not a feature, it’s just a restriction being removed

    • Australis13@fedia.io
      20·
      16 days ago

      The mobile application has always had this restriction for free users (as far as I know), but the desktop application has not.

    • sircac@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      15 days ago

      Well, on PC or tablet you always could, but on mobile it was always album random shuffle… and if you created an album of less than N songs, in mobile they added related tracks in the reproduction (radio-spotify like) so it remained not possible to control what you listen…

      EDIT: I updated the verb tenses to the fact that now you can in the mobile app chose the song to play

    • Joelk111@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      15 days ago

      No, you could tap shuffle on an album-by-album basis, or on a Playlist with like 10+ tracks or something.

    • _g_be@lemmy.worldEnglish
      20·
      16 days ago

      Nope. At some point spotify forced FREE users to shuffle play playlists. You couldn’t pick which specific song you’ll hear first. And with ads, obviously.

      • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        5·
        15 days ago

        Damn, when I joined way back when, you could pick the track you wanted you just couldn’t skip and had to hear ads. Being able to pick a track is the whole reason I moved away from Pandora.

        • _g_be@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          15 days ago

          I’ve recently moved away from Spotify and to Pandora, ironically.

          Pandora premium let’s you play whichever track you want, they are not longer exclusively stations, but their station algorithm is the reason I decided on them over other spotify alternatives

          • ThunderQueen@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            15 days ago

            I like tidal a lot. They pay their artists the highest percentage last i checked, and they have sound quality as their main selling point. The station algorithm is a little bunk though.

            I am slowly rebuilding my mp3 library after switching to streaming 15 years ago when it was the hot new thing. Hopefully i can ditch them all together soon.

    • sircac@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      15 days ago

      Currently, for free users, only PC or tablet allows to control what you listen (caveat occasional ads) but mobile constraints to a shuffle reproduction of albums, and if you dare to do a short album they spice it with additional related tracks, so you are never in control of what is likely to play…

      EDIT: well, apparently I can do that also on my mobile app, I remember in the past some glitched occasions bit it seems is real now…

  • 60d@lemmy.caEnglish
    11·
    16 days ago

    Or you’ve been using spotube and been doing this all along

  • douglasg14b@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    16 days ago

    I love product updates as part of my technology feed…

    I miss old technology feeds in the classic internet days. That actually posted and listed out cool stuff with technology

    • Jack_Burton@lemmy.caEnglish
      4·
      15 days ago

      RSS is still going strong. I’m in the process of shifting my screen time from lemmy to RSS. Just articles, no comments. Makes me realize how addicted I’ve been to comment drama, I say as I post a comment.

    • blackn1ght@feddit.ukEnglish
      3·
      15 days ago

      I know it’s cool to shit on spotify and streaming services on Lemmy, but personally I disagree. I loved Winamp and had tens of thousands of songs back in the day, downloaded on my zippy 56k dial up connection. But being able to search for and play virtually any song available instantly and share collaborative playlists, no matter where you are, is so much better.

  • tino@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    16 days ago

    Call me a hardcore Spotify fan boy: I paid for Spotify for 15 years, I loved it, I even applied to worked for them. The product was great and unmatched so as I didn’t care about the problems, so many problems. things were getting progressively more problematic but in the end, King Gizzard convinced me to quit. I don’t regret it a single minute. Fuck Spotify.

    • bigb@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      15 days ago

      I had an account day 1 when Spotify launched in my country. It was such a big deal to me, a person who spent their teens and 20s hoarding music. One service and it was most of the music I wanted. I could sideload my own music and shuffle it all together.

      I miss that little app store on the desktop client. You could join shared radio stations and vote on the next track while people wrote to each other in a chat.

    • qaz@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      15 days ago

      YouTube Music allows this, maybe they’re losing ad money to them on the people that weren’t going to get premium anyway.

  • parmesancrabs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    7·
    16 days ago

    I’ve not seen anyone recommend an alternative like Qobuz in these “fuck spotify” discussions - I think it’s a good honest alternative?

    • Clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      16 days ago

      I use Musify on Android. (From the F-Droid store) It pulls the music off of YouTube and works pretty well. Save playlists,download individual songs, it has recommendations but u didn’t know how they work.

    • HereIAm@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      16 days ago

      I was looking to try Qobuz, but they didn’t like my email domain, so skipped it.

    • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      16 days ago

      I recommend <your jellyfin instance>.

      Jokes aside, the only reason I use Spotify is for discovery and the vast catalog (primarily the JP music market).
      And I havent seen Qobuz be mentioned in any capacity by japanese artists.

      • parmesancrabs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        16 days ago

        Ah this is an interesting point. I think Qoboz are active in expanding their libraries and they do take requests on site. Do you have any JP recommendations - its not a region I’ve ever really listened to?

    • Victor@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      15 days ago

      Seen the recommendation plenty of times.

      Is it better than TIDAL? I’m interested in switching to either of those, perhaps.

      • parmesancrabs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        15 days ago

        I only used Tidal a while back during a free trial, so can’t comment too much. I think Tidal might have more wide spread functuonality adoption than Qoboz - but they do seem to be pushing out updates to meet feature parity.

        Qoboz has been great to use though. I actually find I get a wider spectrum of recommendations than Spotify. Spotify seemed to type cast my current listening habits agressively, and it would take a while to break out of that loop each time.

          • parmesancrabs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            2·
            15 days ago

            Like a caveman, I just plug in and use my phone to control it!

            At home I do use an amp thay supports direct play, there’s a few companies that support Qobuz in thay way - and self hosted options too. To make use of the fidelity.

  • lightnsfw@reddthat.comEnglish
    81·
    15 days ago

    Too late, already got sick of their shit and went back to downloading everything myself. I have to have two media player apps on my phone to account for podcasts and music but it’s still better than using spotify. Probably a better way to do that too but haven’t been bothered enough to look into it.

    • sircac@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      15 days ago

      I still let spotify to discover me things from time to time… but regularly I download/obtain those that I like, I never abandoned my offline library, I am old enough to know that nothing online perdures…