I am in an intense love-hate relationship with Spotify. It makes good mixes for me, I have found a lot of great bands that way. BUT IT KEEPS REGURGITATING THE SAME SONGS IN THERE. I know about Song Radios and Artist Radios, so please don’t recommend those. Smart Shuttle doesn’t cut it, either.
The best thing would be several randomness sliders. One for randomness in bands, the other for randnomness of their songs, one for genres. Please tell me some music service has implemented something like that. I am dying over here.
Don’t read unless you remember what burning a CD was or if you want a viable answer
spoiler
A self curated mp3/opus folder with everything sorted into sub-folders, and a playlist folder that you can mess with on the fly
I’m still surprised all my music fits < 1GB by a large margin. Less than 2GB if you include full video game sound tracks.
If I ever want to add anything, I usually use ytp-dlp and download from whatever source (usually youtube). Everything autosyncs to any of my devices with syncthing, which incidentally is also useful for photos.
But tbf this doesn’t introduce you to new stuff. That I just do by random chance by watching yt videos and crap. YT Music is just as bad and will loop the same 3 songs if you let it.
I’m always shocked by how quickly a large music collection seems to get stale for me.
I dislike the way spotify seems to push certain songs, but I love that I hear stuff I’ve never heard a lot of the time.
That is not a lot of music. I had my old 80gb iPod filled to the brim with more on my computer back in the day. And those were just ordinary mp3s, not flac or lossless or anything. Nowadays I have like 10000 songs in my spotify library. I moved away from mp3s because curating and downloading that many songs is a pain and quite time consuming compared to just clicking a heart on spotify. Plus spotify is now primarily how I find new music, so ts just way easier than switching to a browser and manually downloading whatever cool song I just found, and having to fix tags or whatever. Especially since I’m usually doing something else while listening. With spotify I can save a song without even unlocking my phone. I also always listen to my whole library on shuffle and haven’t had any issues with it.
That’s the setup!
Though I prefer the mix of flac/opus.
There are scripts for yt-dlp out there that allow you to automatically download an entire artists discography (yt), which I recommend if it’s legal in your country.