this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I’ve never used the free tier on Spotify and I don’t understand how anyone can. The ads alone would make me throw off my headset in disgust. So yeah, not going to affect me, and I do enjoy reading the lyrics a lot.

That said, I am experimenting with swapping over to Apple Music because I feel Spotify has become too expensive.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The ads alone would make me throw off my headset in disgust.

For a mobile, there is a modded apk,I've never heard ads there. For a PC, web player in Firefox with uBlock Origin, there are no ads at all there. The same goes for Tidal, I've never paid for these apps.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)
  1. spotx - well, I tried, but honestly, I don't need one more app especially when everything works in the browser. Plus, I prefer portable setups and there's no portable version of spotx, so, it's pretty useless for me.
  2. It's explicitly said on the Spowlo GitHub page that they use YouTube for downloading, so, there's no way to get 320 kbps tracks or flacs. Instead, I'd recommend to try some Qobuz/Deezer-based solutions, there are quite a few of them there. Or use slavart or something like this, or good old soulseek, there's even an Android client for it.
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Does it convert them to 320kbps when I choose that quality? Because when I play those downloaded songs, it indeed shows as 320kbps.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

That's the question, because as far as I know, the highest ytmusic quality is 256 kbps. I would avoid using it

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Doesn't solve the offline mode/taking a 13 hour flight use case, unfortunately.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Well, that's very specific case to be honest. In that case you can just download whatever you want beforehand, from soulseek, for instance. Generally people make preparations in advance for such things.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Zotify works very well at downloading Spotify lists, from playlists to whole discographies. You have to sort the output a little as you'll often get multiple copies of tracks due to remastered editions, songs released as singles etc. But overall it's an incredibly easy way to download music.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I use an iPhone though and I’d prefer not to use YouTube for music, or anything, really.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Oh man, you shouldn't be using iphone in the first place, the most useless device piracy-wise.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

This isn't an issue about piracy anyway.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Most people don't pirate stuff on their phones. I use an iPhone and my hundreds of gigabytes of pirated stuff is available on my iPhone via plexamp/plex/etc.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

With xManager, the free tier comes quite close to premium. No ads, play whatever music you like. The only issues are lower sound quality & no downloads, which are really non-issues since you can just find other sources to download the music from, at flac quality

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The ads aren't even for anything. It was just really patronising ads for Spotify Premium.

Their business model is genuinely to just annoy you into paying.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It only annoyed me into stopping using their service

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You either pay or you leave. Spotify wins, in both cases

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

OR you get an adblocker

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

They were so much more expensive than Pandora when I tried them out and the free tier was too awful to want to reward them with my money, so I did pay but it went to a competitor. Their music recommendations were terrible compared to Pandora, too.

I don't use Pandora now though, they got bought by SiriusXM who I will never pay again after they made cancelation such a difficult process.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Spotify gives me ads and when I complain they tell me they're not ads and that they're offers lol. My only complaint.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I recently flipped to apple music and apart from seeing a few songs missing on albums i don’t really listen to anyway, it’s only been an improvement. the lossless audio is quite nice