It seems like the FOSS community is continuing to grow, and FOSS apps keep getting better (Immich reallh blew my mind recently), which is a big win 😎 but there are still many apps I use that I would kill for an open source alternative. I am curious what you guys think? Are there any apps you’d love alternatives for?
Spotify.
An open source music streaming service where I can financially support artists but where I’m not forced to put up with annoying advertisements (even when paying membership fees!), and which allows me to use whatever app I want to play the music I listen to. It is annoying AF that I need to switch between apps to listen to music because Spotify’s shitty native app is inferior in every possible way with the single exception of offering more content.
There seems like a lot of potential for an app like this with the mixture of decentralization/encryption/verification/blockchain/etc. Easily verify artists, get the artists paid with a determined currency or by merch and donations, have it federated or decentralized so artists have more control and a company can’t take percentages… I don’t know. There has to be something there. It seems possible and almost a necessity in the future for artists to make money and corporations to not enshittify each app that is released. For example, spotify adding features to try to be like TikTok, or recently they were trying to add “educational courses” to the app
my personal favorite is the one where the band or artist hosts their own site, and then you can just buy shit from it.
I use spicetify just to get an improved shuffle function.
How does that fix the shuffling? I thought it was just a UI tweak.
I hate Spotify’s shuffling so I’m all ears
There is a plugin called shuffle+ (github)
I think no one likes the default shuffle in spotify. (“oh here is a list of 400 songs on shuffle, you probably only want to replay these 30 songs” - spotify)
Reminds me how librivox and others publish their audiobooks as podcasts. I guess artists could upload their albums like this?
I use Ymusic it is android, but shouldn’t be hard to run on Linux
For desktop there’s ncspot, which is a Spotify TUI client written in Rust. Not exactly what you were asking for, but it does work well
there’s this really cool alternative to streaming, called you buy their shit directly. Or if you like me, don’t really care, just finding a way to throw money at them, in their general direction sometimes works. Spotify actually works so little, that the only party that makes money, is the music publishers that spotify allows on their platform, the artists and spotify generally don’t make much money, or make very little money. Gotta love capitalism.
If you’re a music artist, please allow people to just give you money directly, in some way. It’ll incentivize people who don’t pay for it to send you a few dollary doos.
Wow, mind blown! I had no idea money could be used to buy things directly! /s
Seriously though, buying music from artists you already know is easy for artists that actually provide this as an option, but it doesn’t help when trying to find new artists and songs to listen to. Spotify is brilliant for discovering new content and can’t be replaced by ‘buying shit directly’.
i suppose that’s fair, but it’s not like spotify is the only service that has music on it. Personally i’ve been enjoying nabbing music that other people use in media that i consume, or just bumping across something that seems interesting on the net somewhere.
I’ve gone from liking like two albums from a certain band, to liking their entire discography, just because i’ve downloaded it. You can absolutely still find music, it just requires some effort, and it’s well placed effort i think.