I’m going insane. I cannot for the life of me find a suitable way to listen to music privately. I’m on iOS, and I don’t know whether to just stick to Apple Music or give up on music in general (I tried, TRIED to go local, but all the apps are shitty). Any way to listen to music and not have your data compromised? Should I just stick to Apple Music and hope that laws change (maybe something like EU’s DMA?)
Edit: Hey all! First of all, thank you so much for all the recommendations! I’ve discovered so many great apps and tools I didn’t even know existed (and it has also brought my hopes up for privacy in general). Even though it’s still not perfect, I’ve been using foobar2000 on iOS, downloading music I find (I’m still using Apple Music for discovery, but will probably stop when my subscription ends this month). For desktop I’m using HyperPipe, which although a little buggy at times is so awesome! One thing I do miss about this system is the lack of lyrics. Apple Music has such a beautiful UI when it comes with lyrics, but you can’t have it all when it comes to privacy it seems. Thanks for the amazing discussion! I’m so far loving Lemmy ;)
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I’ll be honest, the only way to listen to music privately is to download it. (And using an opensource music player)
There are Github repositories with CLI programs to download complete Spotify playlists with Youtube and also download their metadata.
there are also CDs and vinyl 🤷
something brilliant I’ve found with modern vinyl is a lot of them come with a download card so you can get lossless files.
now if they would just fucking advertise which ones that would be great.
Whoa, you can store music on CDs? That’ll save me a lot of bandwidth!
This. There was music before the internet.
I wrote a few scripts to automate this entire process for me:
Any opensource music players for iOS you recommend? I found Flacbox which seems alright (a little buggy but you can’t win them all, can you?)
I just use the Music app. With the privacy protections turned up and Apple Music disabled. All it does is ply my aac files without sending data back to Apple.
I’m not sure that’s totally true. The iOS ecosystem is very intertwined. It’s possible that the Music app isn’t sending data to Apple, but it is likely sharing it with whatever Apple calls the launcher, which likely shares it with Apple (or shares it with Siri or another app, which shares it with Apple).
Yeah. Buy it directly from the artist then throw it all into a self hosted service like plex or jellyfin.
Yup. Buy CDs, vinyl or digital from Bandcamp or from the artist direct and then host it on Plex.
I’ve thought about trying jellyfin but Plexamp is just so nice that I don’t think I could leave it.
There is finamp Im told but yeah plexamp is goated
If you only need music streaming, then a service like Navidrome may be better.
There’s also navidrome, if you only want to stream music.
Do people not just download music anymore?
I’m 26, and don’t know anyone, myself included, who purchases and downloads music to any significant degree. Essentially everyone I know just uses streaming platforms.
Sounds terrible for privacy.
Respectfully, I think you may be drastically overestimating how much average people care about that.
Well, considering the community this discussion is in…
And, respectfully, the average person doesn’t seem to give much of a fuck about anything other their own base desires most of the time.
Sure. But the question you asked was “Do people not just download music anymore?”, and the answer to that question, which you seemed unaware of, is “Not really, no”.
Do enjoy your highly refined and elevated desires, O noble one.
How to undermine one’s own comment with a gratuitous insult.
Part of my job is traveling by air, so I got a $30ish sandisc mp3 player with a 200+gb sd card. I have a bunch of music and sometimes podcasts on there. Saves my phone battery, has zero ads, and as a bonus it has fm radio for surfing the stations below as they fade in and out every minute or so.
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He didn’t say anything about purchasing…
to be fair, to buy albums off sites like bandcamp, cutting out greedy multinational media conglomerates and give the money to the ppl actually working on it (yeah, i know, fees, welcome to distribution) and getting basically every (losslees/hr) codec in return for “name your price”-conditions makes it questionable to pirate some indie album to save like three bucks.
Wow, they got your generation good. I’m over here listening to flac files and mp3s I ripped in 2003.
This is always surprising to me. I can understand streaming video due to their high file sizes, but audio (even FLACs) is a lot smaller in general. The only reason I use spotify sometimes is to discover new stuff.
I have my music library that I listen to, to which I add songs by getting them from youtube (it’s good enough for my cheap on the go earphones). Sometimes I tune into radio stations that offer nonstop music (like stubru tijdloze).
I use a jellyfin server plus finamp for ios plus totally legal downloaded music that was 100% legally obtained.
+1 for Jellyfin with Finamp (or Fintunes). Also what I use and it’s fabulous.
I still buy CDs. And back then up to play in my truck. And rip them.
I still think OWNING media is a good idea. No privacy issues at all.
Most of the stuff I listen to isn’t mainstream and the band are on Bandcamp. It’s great being able to buy the FLAC version right away.
https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/bandcamp-fridays-update
it’s worth noting that the first friday of each month they usually forgo their cut so more money goes to the artists.
Always this, never let physical copies die. They can’t revoke shit legally bought and personally archived
Vinyl has gotten so big at this point (and is also extremely profitable relative to streaming), that it’s not in any danger at all.
Vinyl is damn expensive.
Hence it being extremely profitable.
You’re not wrong.
I don’t think you should expect any privacy on an Apple device
Im on a Jailbroken iPhone with all Apple network requests blocked with AdGuard and no Appleid.
Any way you could share the guide you used?
How to Sideload apps, How to Jailbreak, Jailbreak Megathread. AdGuard Pro .ipa. My Blocklst Lists. The lists are Very aggressive, I suggest you to maintain a Whitelist. For getting apps without an Apple ID, check out some sources, repo’s and telegram channels Here.
Awesome! Thank you!
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+1 would really like to know more
Honestly, I’d trust a vanilla iPhone over that hacked together mess you’ve got going there.
You may be right if you are not as concerned about privacy and being able to not rely on the App Store for everything. I can install any app that is not in the App Store. Ex: new encryption laws come out like in the UK and all Matrix clients are removed from the App Store. I can still download them because I don’t rely on the App Store.
Have you considered Funk Whale, the Spotify of the Fediverse?
Yarrr harrr didgeridoo
If you want something on Android, check out ViMusic. It uses YouTube Music as a back-end and can recommend stuff based on what you listen. It also supports offline playback. On desktop, you can use Hyperpipe. It also uses YouTube Music as its back-end.
If you want ultimate privacy, then download your favorite songs and use VLC or self host them and stream it from there.
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You could get Spotify and switch it to private.
I don’t really care about other knowing what music I listen to and even use the “AI" to give me songs that I might like. Most of them are not my type but there is 1 or maybe 2 every week that are good that I’d‘ve never searched for.
Exactly, what are the privacy risks of letting someone know what type of music do you like?
@ExLisper @Nikls94 Basically predicting and modifying your behavior. Here’s a paper that explains how it’s done: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S235215461730044X
The article frames behavior modification as a health advancement, but whoever can alter a habit can do so both to heal and to alter your vote or discourage you from protesting, and to make you accept unacceptable living conditions. Tell me what you listen to, and I’ll tell you who you are (and eventually I’ll make you be who I want).
This article pretty much says that listening to relaxing music can help you with stress levels. Saying that spotify can use the same mechanism to make you vote for Trump by slightly changing what songs are in your ‘daily mix’ playlist is a bit of a stretch.
Maybe getting sold tickets to a concert?
(Which I would consider a win, because I always think about that when it’s sold out)
an MP3 player like foobar2000 …?
Self-host your library? I don’t know why that seems so hard, going by your phrasing.
If you absolutely must listen to music online (I empathise, I need to do so to find new music), here’s what I do: Librewolf with Ublock Origin, Cookie Manager, Dark Reader, NoScript + music.youtube.com.
No advertisements, minimal tracking (because you will explicitly disable every other script than the one(s) required to stream music). Use a VPN and fake your user-agent/browser fingerprint for more privacy (haven’t done it since I can’t figure out how to do so for Firefox).
Cheers
Do you really need NoScript when you already have Ublock Origin installed? Kinda obsolete imo.
They have different purposes. I use both since I don’t want to run proprietary software if I can help it, but if I do have to run it it better not have any ads.
Gives me more granular control over JS, UblockOrigin doesn’t let me control individual JS elements
I’m using Qobuz. Since it is a rather small service, I just hope it is more private than the “big players” like Spotify/Apple Music. But the main benefits of Qobuz are the audio quality and the (afaik) highest payment per streamed song for artists.
Love Qobuz. It’s fucking beautiful
Beware, though… I found that the Qobuz app sends data to google-analytics.com, app-measurement.com, mixpanel.com, crashlytics.com, and graph.facebook.com, possibly others. This is all BEFORE EVEN LAUNCHING the app. I don’t consider Qobuz to be good for privacy…
Which lossless streaming service do you consider to be better for privacy? Deezer, Tidal, …?
If anyone is interested, i recently developed my own system of defining my music library declaratively in the Nix programming language and started switching to it. It creates folders as playlists and can automatically download the music from YouTube or SoundCloud. I plan to expand and improve this further.
I doubt this will work on IOS tho, sorry OP.
I download the music from YouTube (through front-end services like Piped) and play it locally through a music player.
I don’t know how it works on iPhone (I have an Android phone), but I can use NewPipe and LibreTube and Seal to download the music. If I’m on the go that is. Otherwise I download the music through ytdlp and transfer the files to my smartphone.
Apple really restrict their users to their own ecosystem.
Yt-dlp is great for getting music from YouTube music.
You even get fairly good quality if you have premium (I do through Argentina, so it costs me cents per month)
Woot? yt-dlp premium? Never heard of it. yt-dlp have always been and will always be free (donations aside) since it’s open sourced. Sounds like you pay to a scammer. Or do you mean YouTube Premium? :)
YouTube premium to access the higher bitrates through Yt-dlp ;)
