Hello! I was looking for alternatives for Spotify to listen to music and create and share playlists with friends, and found a huge amount of players, both local and streaming, but none of them offered a reliable way to share playlists with friends. So here me out: what if there were a federated, self hostable platform where you can create an account, that provides an API that all the million music app can integrate easily in order to synchronize and share them also with people that uses other apps? Do you think it would work? I believe that if something like this would widespread, huge music companies like Spotify and Youtube wouldn’t implement such a thing, but that perhaps would be also a way to “disincentivize” people from using those services!

“Hi friends Me on musicapp1 and Fred on musicapp2 created this cool playlist, hear it out!!”

“Sorry I pay 12$/month for Spotify, I cannot see it”

  • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
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    4 months ago

    I made a quick and dirty (emphasis on dirty) app to do that. You upload your own music and m3u playlists and get a link to share with your friends. The master controls what’s played and that is synchronised to everyone. We used it to control music for our remote D&D sessions.

    https://github.com/bjoern-tantau/share-your-music

    The code and interface are really ugly. And I cannot provide support because I’m disabled. But it can serve as a proof of concept.

    • tubbadu@lemmy.kde.socialOP
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      4 months ago

      Yeah something similar to this, with API to access it from any music player app! The features that would make it really appealing (imo) would be:

      • share playlists with friends using different music players
      • cooperative playlists: give edit permission to other users (chosen by you), so that you can create playlists with your friends
      • search playlist: search “rock music” and get all public playlists that matches your search, perhaps even with tags
  • beefmayonnaise@feddit.org
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    4 months ago

    A federated platform seems to be a big overkill for this use case. Sorry, but that sounds a bit like the time where everyone tried to solve everything with blockchains. You could simply export and import playlist with a file that can be shared. Companys simply don’t want it to be that easy to switch to other services because its a huge selling point that you got all your playlists in their system. Additionally I don’t think that it would be that easy to identify songs between systems because I don’t think that there is a unique identifier like the ISBN for books.

    • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 months ago

      Also, one big problem with this is copyright

      It could work as a music sales service too though. Have software that matches the tracks in the playlist to tracks in your library, maybe with a confirmation / manual match dialogue, and a link to the equivalent of iTunes to buy any missing tracks.

      Give the option to buy albums too, so if someone sends you a playlist with a new Billie Eyelash single, for example, it could also recommend the album it’s from.

      For those of us with large libraries, we just match the songs, but it’s got the potential to make money for the artists too. I believe that Discogs and MusicPicard? can match tracks to albums, and link to artists stores, so at least part of the sales side exists already :)

      • Alex@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        Can those handle the meta data for the track name, artist and release date. Assuming you want a portable playlist that can then find the track on the recipients preferred platform (streaming provider or self hosting). Given that a lot of tagging is trash maybe also included an audio fingerprint for validation?

  • dontblink@feddit.it
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    4 months ago

    Having a federated music platform would be great both for people and for artists!

  • Showroom7561@lemmy.ca
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    4 months ago

    I’m self-hosting Navidrome, which does sync playlists. However, Android clients generally suck, so I’m using Symfonium (paid app) to access my NAS music files.

    If you can put up with the currently available Navidrome clients, then that’s a FOSS (and self-hosted) solution to consider.

    • Tenebris Nox@feddit.uk
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      4 months ago

      Can you export playlists from Navidrome? I’m running it and can’t see a way of doing that. (The workaround I’m using is building playlists in Synology Audio Station and then setting up Navidrome to import them. If you know a better way of doing this I’d be interested.)

      • Showroom7561@lemmy.ca
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        4 months ago

        Can you export playlists from Navidrome?

        This button saves an m3u file.

        Because I use symfonium on Android, playlists sync between my device to Navidrome.