Ok, we've put that in the title now, along with the project name. (Submitted title was "Open source Spotify client that doesn't require Premium nor uses Electron")
What I really want is a converter from Spotify abomination to standard podcasts which I can read from any podcast client.
Last I checked the podcasts are DRM encumbered. So you’d have to spin up a client pretending to be chrome and use the Wivedine extension to decrypt every mp3 frame. No hacking required. But Life is too short. So instead I refuse to listen to fake podcasts on Spotify.
Me too. Spotify may have successfully killed the "open medium" promise of the words "podcast" and "podcasting" as part of their embrace/extend/extinguish strategy, but there are many great podcasting clients that continue to support opencasting, and very few shows exclusive to closed audio platforms like Spotify.
Huh? Does Spotify have any exclusive podcasts worth bothering with? Because I haven't seen the death of open podcasts since every podcast is still on Apple Podcasts.
Spotify pretty much backtracked on paying huge sums for exclusivity about a year ago, and the list of Spotify-exclusive podcasts has definitely gotten a whole lot smaller since then.
I've seen a few German productions. There is a worthwhile podcast about the wirecard debacle produced by a big German news outlet that was exclusive to Spotify.
Agreed. "We'd have APIs if y'all didn't use them" is a really bad take.
Part of the reason why API access is desirable is because it forms an effective safeguard against some forms of company abuse. To argue that we can only have API access if nobody uses it for adversarial interoperability or to build 3rd-party clients or to bypass systems -- we might as well argue against API access entirely if that's going to be our position. The point of API access is to be able to use it.
The entire VC model in this area of tech is to be unprofitable to undercut traditional mediums so that other companies can't compete with them, and then to raise prices once better systems have been driven out because with investor funding Spotify can last for a longer time than its competitors within an unprofitable market.
And during that process, Spotify wants to be treated as if they are profitable. They don't want consumers to be looking at them like they're a fly-by-night business whose entire existence depends on raising prices in the future once consumers have no alternatives to switch to. They don't want podcasting partners to be looking at every business deal as a temporary arrangement that will only last until Spotify feels comfortable trying to pull the rug out beneath them. If we're going to start acting like businesses are charity cases when indie developers do anything they dislike, then we should stop acting like these "charities" are sustainable businesses at all.
Spotify doesn't run ads saying, "hey, we can't make money and we're hoping that goodwill and investor greed is enough to keep this engine running for one more year until its safe to start charging you what we actually need to survive."
It's reasonable for developers and consumers to treat businesses with substantial market control as if they are businesses and not charities. That treatment is consistent with how Spotify advertises and portrays itself and with the decisions that the company makes about the market. It's not an accident that Spotify is in this position, it's a conscious choice in service of pursuing a long-term strategy of market domination. It's also not a healthy choice for the market overall, so Spotify choosing to put itself into this position is not a moral obligation for consumers or developers to treat them with some kind of special consideration. If anything, we should be more harsh to companies who try to decrease competition by creating an artificially unstainable market and starving out sustainable businesses and funding models.
For all intents and purposes Spotify is a billion dollar company making moves to lock down open ecosystems like podcasting that are consistent with a billion dollar company. If it's also a poorly managed billion dollar company that's lying to consumers about the actual cost of delivering music, then that's their problem -- it's not something we need to feel guilty about.
> The entire VC model in this area of tech is to be unprofitable to undercut traditional mediums so that other companies can't compete with them, and then to raise prices once better systems have been driven out
Sometimes but not always. The best example is Uber/Lyft: taxis sucked before ride shares, they continued to suck after being "disrupted" by ride shares. Both in terms of price and quality of the service.
Briefly, Uber and Lyft were less expensive than traditional cabs, but now I'm back to spending the same $40 to go to the airport that I did a decade ago. The difference being that the cabbie can't have their machine magically "stop accepting cards" once you arrive.
Though to be fair, the taxi industry had been terrible for decades, and are the exception
Uber is an interesting example. I think there are genuine improvements that came out of what they did, most notably the idea of having a unified app that you could go to just to request rides that felt usable and that could do things like tell you how close your driver was and that would allow you to pay online.
On the other hand, I think it's become clear that Uber's pricing wasn't sustainable, and part of the reason why Uber was less expensive was because it wasn't sustainable and rides-on-demand might just be something that is naturally expensive because it's expensive, not because taxis were all exploiting the market.
I don't want to say that the taxi industry shouldn't have been "disrupted", everything I've heard about how taxis operated makes it feel like that industry was a poorly run cartel. But I sort of feel like there must have been a better way to disrupt it than what Uber did, and the winner-takes-all approach that Uber took probably introduced some harms as well. Having a decent app that allows you to know in advance what you'll pay, to be able to pay online -- those are value propositions that in theory should have been enough to make Uber competitive even without shoveling VC money into a furnace and saying, "we'll figure out the profit part once we own the market."
But I can't know for sure what would have happened.
It feels like when the VC model does yield improvements we end up getting those improvements in a batch lump during the "nice" phase of the company. And then we end up back at square one where there are a few taxi services that increasingly care less and less about doing a good job. I'd prefer a system where businesses compete on quality as much as they can without ignoring pricing realities, because who knows -- maybe there were other taxi services that might have done an even better job than Uber or who might have had improvements that Uber might have been forced to copy, but they couldn't operate or compete because unlike Uber they didn't have a bunch of rich investors throwing money at them covering for all of their losses.
The honeymoon period with VC companies is nice and sometimes occasionally we get permanent improvements out of it, but overall it's necessarily temporary, and it masks the fact that Uber probably would have needed to compete a lot harder and would have needed to make their experience even better if they weren't able to charge so little for rides for so long.
That's not the fault, nor responsibility, of developers and API access.
API access (interop) is a digital human right. If companies can't be profitable without restricting that then that's a deficiency upon them and their gormless VCs
I'm with it on this idea, but comparing it to a "human right" will not lead to the desired response in non-tech people, who will write off the idea as taking the Internet too seriously if phrased that way. A human right carries a much heavier, more fundamental connotation than just a right on its own
Even if you consider it a human right, might be better to brand it differently to get wider traction
Respectfully, I'm not trying to win people over or proselytize. This is what I believe strongly and I'm not trying to make it digestible. It is what it is.
On the other hand, why would you choose to use spotify API for a start? Spotify doesn't have nearly the quantity of available music that Youtube has.
So many times when I try to find some music on my partner's spotify account it is just not there, and I give up and we listen to it via newpipe or freetube.
I would find it pointless to make music playlist on Youtube. Stuff gets taken down too easily, skits are prevalent, and theres so many accounts that just rip off music from other people. If it can't be on Spotify, I'm better off finding it on Soundcloud.
Huh my experience is the total opposite. I try to download my Spotify playlists from YouTube Music because its easier but half the stuff isn't there or incorrect versions etc.
To be fair it would be more HN worthy if they managed to reverse engineer the DRM of Spotify to create a custom client without the Spotify library (which only works for Premium users)
Would be far less worthy if, by the time we get to the README, we only get to see a take down notice from Github. Instigated by Spotify for breach of not sure what.
One of their terms of use is regarding using their API data alongside competitor services. This project fundamentally breaks that. I think it's on borrowed time.
> Would be far less worthy if, by the time we get to the README, we only get to see a take down notice from Github. Instigated by Spotify for breach of not sure what.
Circumventing DRM, no matter how trivial, is a violation of the DMCA.
> Would be far less worthy if, by the time we get to the README, we only get to see a take down notice from Github. Instigated by Spotify for breach of not sure what.
was what violation would cause Github specifically to take it down, not whether it could ever find a host. The parent brought up Github, not I.
I picked Github simply because Spotube happen to have been pushed there.
And because Github is by far the most popular platform to host projects that gets discovered.
And because they've taken down many projects in the past, blocking broadwide access not just from jurisdictions where not sure what non ethical law makes not certain what illegal.
Yeah, no shade to you from me. I think my mention of a US law triggered some HNers' (justified) fears of US-centrism, and I was just explaining why I thought it was not unduly US-centric to respond to a comment about a company headquartered in the US with a remark that referenced the DMCA.
Your sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39073132 mentioned a similar thing. The reference to Github and what could cause a takedown there was the parent's, not mine.
This was the trick used by bots on Discord that played music (before they pretty much all got disallowed)
It would simply get the title from the Spotify API and then look it up on YouTube to play.
At some point I actually had set up a rather awful hack where I had a Discord bot that could play webradio and then pointed it towards my own Mopidy server which used the Spotify plugin to have a webpage such that multiple people could add songs and such. It was a great hack though I did not use it for long.
yes, I think so. And youtube is mixed quality, especially for older uploads.
Newer youtubes are "opus (251)", which I think is 128kbps 48KHz Opus (WebM standard).
- Spotify at least used to be ogg vorbis and claims to be "320kbit/s [mp3] equivalent"
I think the 128kps Opus is still considered quite lossy¹ and 320kpbit/s mp3s I know I can hear the difference to wav on some tracks in a blind test, but generally don't find them better or worse.
I don't think that imgur link is a good example. The only opus 128 there is heavily optimized for low latency (5ms frame size). If you remove that optimization, and instead optimize for quality, opus does better than mp3 at the same bitrate.
Even disregarding which codec Youtube uses, there's also the question of what codec was uploaded(unless it's an official upload), which in many cases was probably a lossy codec in the first place. So often you're listening to some lossy codec, reencoded to another lossy codec.
CDBaby only provides one format, which is mp3. They'll accept uploads in any of four formats, of which one is also mp3.
So you'd need to answer two questions:
1. Is the file that CDBaby distributes to YouTube the same file they distribute to everyone else, or is it the same file they receive from the artist? (Note: if the answer is #1, that is likely to save CDBaby a bundle on storage!)
2. What did the artist upload to CDBaby?
And then you'd also need to answer analogous questions for the other major providers of official music on YouTube; there are tons and tons of them. CDBaby appears to be unusual in that, in addition to providing your music officially to YouTube, it will also sell it to consumers. Most of these services don't appear to offer anything but official distribution to major websites.
Some of the best recordings I've heard (NPR) are only on YouTube. This leads me to believe recording quality is orders of magnitude more important than encoding, as long as a decent bitrate and encoding scheme were used.
The quality ceiling for any recording you have is the quality ceiling of the weakest link in your audio pipeline.
This means, to be able to get a good sound from any system, you have to feed it a good signal, and that path starts with recording.
Current audio codecs are great from a psychoacoustic point of view. A good encoder can create an enjoyable file at modest bitrates (192kbps for MP3, and 128kbps for AAC IIRC), and retain most of the details.
The audible residue when you subtract a MP3 from a FLAC is not details per se, but instrument separation and perceived size of the sound stage. People generally call this snake oil, but I have the same amplifier for the last 30 years, and I can say how different qualities of audio render through the same pipeline. A good recording stored losslessly can bring the concert to your home, up to a point. MP3 re-encodings of the same record will sound flatter and smaller.
Lastly, it's not possible to completely contain the sound of a symphony orchestra in a stereo recording. That's not happening. So there's always a limit.
A reduction in soundstage/width is likely due to using "joint stereo" or "intensity stereo" encoder modes, which do things such as mid-side (M-S) conversion (which isn't itself the culprit) in order to give more bits to M (which results in better quality for sounds with high L-R correlation, like vocals) and fewer bits to S (which results in less quality for sounds with low L-R correlation, like a drum kit stereo miked).
If using plain old "stereo" mode instead, this problem doesn't occur, but you need a higher overall bitrate for correlated sounds to come through at the same quality, so it's rarely used at modest bitrates and instead tends to be reserved for only the highest bitrates.
Thus, comparing mp3@192 with mp3@320 often actually means comparing mp3@192joint with mp3@320stereo and therefore the listener will find very little if any improvement in the quality of mono-miked center-panned sounds (vocals, etc.) but a decent improvement in the quality of wide sounds (cymbals, reverb, string sections, etc.) since the 320 will have only a few more bits for "mid" but way more bits for "side" so to speak, relative to the 192.
Thanks for the technical details, I didn't know how intensity/joint modes work, however I never use them.
The tests I have done is all encoded by myself. I have purchased 24bit WAV of Radiohead's OK Computer Remastered. I encoded it to FLAC, and 320CBR Stereo with LAME. I still can feel the difference on soundstage, and can create a audible residue file by subtracting MP3 from FLAC version.
I agree that current iteration of encoders create very good audio, however given that your audio system can render high resolution audio, the difference is still audible.
Not every human is created equal when it comes to ear and sound processing. I have met people with sub 20Hz hearing, and people with ears so sharp, they were able to pick a single wrong note from a single instrument while watching a recording of a symphony orchestra (I played together with them).
MP3@320kbps CBR and AAC@256kbps are pretty good for normal listening, but if you have the hardware to render, lossless formats creates a richer soundstage. I have an amplifier which can render it, and I'm listening music with it for 30 years now, so I can hear the difference.
At the end of the day, if your audio pipeline can render the differential residue between MP3@320kbps and FLAC, you can hear it.
Now, you can say that "are you attentive enough to perceive such difference", I'm not listening that intently 75% of the time, but it pays off when I put some time aside to listen to my favorite album for the sake of listening it.
By far the main source of degradation in any typical analog audio path is going to be transducers (microphones, speakers, phono cartridges, tape heads) and inferior media (tape, etc.). The vast majority of modern amplifiers, and high end older amplifiers, are extremely transparent with good margins beyond typical human hearing; any issues like noise, harmonic distortion, uneven response, inadequate damping factor, etc. introduced at the amplifier would typically be masked by quirks of the speakers, and revealed only by measuring upstream of the speakers.
The problem is not the number of ears we have, but the amount of air moved by the instruments themselves and how they interact with each other.
A symphony orchestra is miced per group normally (2 for violins, 2 for trumpets, etc.), but if you're around 60 people, you can mic every instrument individually.
To reproduce the sound 1 to 1, you need to mic every instrument individually, and playback them with speakers matching the frequency response and air pressure . So you need speakers equal to the number and characteristics of instruments themselves. On top of that you need to record them ideal microphones and store them loslessly in the process.
Otherwise, you can't create the sound by recording 100 people with 20 microphones, and downmixing them to two channels. It's not possible. I played in double bass in an orchestra, listened countless orchestras, listened the recordings of our own concerts. The gap is enormous.
I genuinely have no opinion. I like to use a vintage amplifier with a couple of beefy bookshelf speakers. I run a couple of Heco Celan GT302s with an AKAI AM-2850.
It's a very well balanced system for my needs and room size. That's a pretty nifty setup for me.
In one of my previous lives I built an encoding platform for all the major record labels. Part of this involved listening to hundreds of tracks to try and optimize the encoder settings. It's not necessarily the quality of the original recording, but simply the type of audio. For instance, the absolute hardest, IMO, were "unplugged" albums, e.g. solo singer, acoustic guitar. Lossy compression would shit itself on those.
Supposedly "between $0.001 and $0.003" from [0], but then this site[1] claims:
> Plays on YouTube Music will gain on average $0.008.
Although neither have sources. I imagine YouTube Premium plays match or beat Spotify on average.
Of course, for anything, if you block ads AND refuse to pay for the premium subscription, the artist makes $0 from your listening. Hopefully you can support them off-platform via merch or even purchasing their albums (e.g. iTunes which provides DRM-free versions), but then you're still not paying for the platform if you continue to use one with an ad blocker.
My colleague has his music on both Spotify and YouTube Music, and he has said in the past that one YouTube listen is worth 2x as much as one Spotify listen.
is that true? presumably youtube still has to pay the artist for reproducing/streaming the song, even if you didn't watch an ad. I'm suspicious that the licensing agreement YouTube says "we'll pay you for the right to stream your music, unless if they use an ad blocker, then too bad."
In the countries where Youtube has an agreement of that form with music rights holding agencies like Germany's (in)famous GEMA I'd assume that to be the case.
For monetized videos, where Youtube directly pays the channel owner, I've heard a few times now that they really don't pay anything when neither ads are successfully displayed or the viewer has Premium.
Please be aware that this is not a "spotify client" per se. It gets the data from Spotify, and plays the audio from YouTube.
It's an interesting invention, and worthy of the first page, if you ask me.