Ask HN: How to go back to listening to MP3s?

[muratsu]

I have been a paying Spotify customer for many years now. Thanks to the yearly wrapped event, I am reminded how my use pattern is listening to a limited amount of tracks on repeat.

I'm curious if any of you has made the switch back to listening to mp3s? If you did, which apps are you using?

[Bender]

I'm curious if any of you has made the switch back to listening to mp3s?

I never stopped. If there is something I like listening to then I must have local copies of it or it does not exist as far as I am concerned. The internet is too fragile to depend on. Companies come and go. Songs get censored, altered or cancelled based on societal identity politics. The internet and power distribution could vanish in one gamma ray burst. Nobody will believe it can happen until it does.

App: I put the songs on MP3 players connected to a tiny mixer and my 1990's sound system. I keep several MP3 players in metal containers and boxes to shield them when not in use.

[kakonako]

I've settled over the years on using syncthing to keep copies on my machine and phone. After testing quite a few android players I settled on Oto Music. I'm currently back in the Mac world and use Cog. I still like to use cmus in the terminal.

For acquiring music, the bulk I get from bandcamp. I usually try hard to get my music legally, but sometimes it isn't possible, ripping from YouTube, searching torrent sites, using russian search sites which still seem to index the blogs that stored downloadable links to music like we had about 10 years ago...

[lostmsu]

That's my setup as well with a hacked version of Retro Music https://github.com/RetroMusicPlayer/RetroMusicPlayer to show lyrics on supported Bluetooth receivers and Android Auto.

[freefaler]

Yes, synchthing is godsend + also there are several music streaming docker based servers you can pair with an app on your phone and stream only the things you like (or download them) without moving the whole collection on the device.

[tim-tday]

Dug out my old iPod. Put it in a Bose sound dock. The biggest problem is fighting Apple’s repeated dark patterns forcing people to join their music subscription.

They also repeatedly offload my music off my phone. It’s super irritating. The FTC should investigate them for the practice. Making my music inaccessible after I repeatedly tell them not to in order to force me to subscribe to listen to the music I already own should be illegal.

[Retr0id]

The main challenge for me is recommendations. 99% of the value I get from Spotify is the auto-generated playlists and "song radio" feature. It's easy enough to fill a NAS with flacs but I don't know how to replicate "the algorithm" in a self-hosted setup.

[poisonborz]

I wish there were some self-hosted setup that would replicate this based on either tags, bpm matching, or other similarity indicators snooped from online sites like lastfm.

[eastbound]

What drives me away from Spotify is recommendations: Starting with my preferred, it drifts into unknown artists; Suggested playlists are unfortunately for people my age (New! Last album from Pink Floyd! probably because I’m 45). And it’s not so hard to map the world’s music, the list of genres is manageable by a human who’s experienced in music, what people will like is also predictable by a human with experience. If my friends can do it, why can’t Spotify?

[alecco]

Weird, for me Spotify's algorithm is garbage.

But the related artist list is good for discovery.

[gethly]

I never switched away. I still have my music that I collected since elementary school. Many songs would be impossible to find nowadays. There is no reason to go strictly one way. The good news is that you can start building your collection whenever you want.

[stevekemp]

Same. I spent several long evenings, back in the day, ripping all my CDs into MP3s and they've been copied from computer to computer ever since, and the collection has grown too of course since then.

I have weeks worth of music and I either "select all: random play", or choose an artist and listen to all their works.

For the past week I've been listening to Depeche Mode on repeat. Maybe next week I'll switch to Prince, Madonna, Hendrix, Prodigy, or Rammstein. It all depends on my mood, I guess.

Now that buying used DVDs costs no more than €1/film I've been buying a lot of physical media from charity shops. I've not bought more audio-CDs, but now and again it crosses my mind. If I stuck to used purchases again I think I'd be looking at €1/disk which is pretty reasonable.

[skydhash]

I have spotify (The duo plan is cheap where I’m at and my SO wanted to use it work). But I do maintain my own collection, mostly because Spotify UI is pure garbage.

My collection is store on an old mac mini (with debian). It’s directly linked to an home theater setup via optical. I have MPD on it that I control with Rigelian on my phone. But I often just ssh and use MoC to play music.

I also have gonic (subsonic server) that uses the same library. I use Amperfy to play music from my phone. I could use navidrome, but I don’t like web players.

As for the management, it’s all manual. I’ve tried beets but the overhead wasn’t worth it. I have several collections which have different filesystem organization schemes.

[raw_anon_1111]

People are making a things way too hard. The old way still works. Manage your music using the native app on Macs or iTunes for Windows, sync with iPhone. Music you buy from Apple has been DRM free since 2009.

[knaik94]

I have had a bad experience using the modern iTunes/native music app. It's clear that Apple has moved away from local first features.

[journal]

you can't bring mp3 to hell

[dijit]

Yes, its a bit hidden away now- has worsening UX over time and it will prompt you to buy Apple Music’s subscription service: but you can still buy songs via iTunes on iPhone.

This is how I get most of my music, then I copy the songs to my NAS to play on Linux.

Less convenient for sure, and you have to take the backups[0] yourself.

[0]: https://blog.dijit.sh/importance-of-self-hosted-backups/

[JohnFen]

I never switched away from listening to my own music collection, so my experience may not be useful to you. Here's the setup I have. I run Kodi as my music server at home, with a NAS that contains all of my music. My collection is quite large and continues to grow. I get most of my new music on CDs (usually purchased at the merch table at live performances) or through Bandcamp these days, although I'm open to any source that allows me to have unencumbered lossless recordings.

This allows me to use Kodi's native front end when I'm listening on my home sound system, to use a web front end to play on any web-connected computer, and to stream from my server to my smartphone when I'm out and about. It's the best of all worlds. I have all the convenience of a streaming service, but I actually own the music and it will never become suddenly unavailable or replaced by inferior versions, and I don't have a fixed recurring cost just to enjoy music. Plus, a ton of great music is simply not available on any commercial streaming platform and this eliminates that issue.

I don't tend to use MP3s, though. I go with FLAC instead. Kodi will transcode the FLACs to other formats if needed.

[lostmsu]

Kodi server? Are you sure?

[regenschutz]

I (somewhat) recently switched from using MP3s to using streaming services. Personally, my music taste (and the amount of tracks that I listen to) is way more varied now than it was before, but I suppose that depends both on how you use streaming services and how you use local MP3s.

Back when I still used exclusively MP3s, I used Music on Console Player [0] on my personal computer and Snae Player [1] on my school's chromebook, since we were only allowed to use web apps on our Chromebooks. On my phone I found VLC [2] to be the best app since it has so many features. I can highly recommend both programs.

I still have all three installed and use them whenever I don't have internet. Although I haven't updated my local music library in a while, so I am reminded of my old music tastes whenever I open either of them.

[0]: https://github.com/jonsafari/mocp

[1]: https://snaeplayer.com/

[2]: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-android.html

[jzellis]

I switched to Qobuz a couple of weeks ago and I think I'm gonna cancel my Spotify subscription soon. It's got a better catalogue for the slightly obscure stuff I like and they pay artists much better.

Aside from that, I've got my entire music collection backed up on multiple drives (mostly by accident) and I bought an iPod Classic last year, upgraded the battery and storage, and I've got it all on there too, and it'll play for like a month straight on one battery charge now. Standby was six months easily.

I'm actually gonna turn a Pi Zero into a touchscreen Winamp clone by using Audacious or another app that uses Winamp skins. The main benefit of this is that I can connect it to my Bluetooth home speakers and use it.

My current Samsung doesn't have an SD card, but for my old phone, I just copied all my music to a 128GB micro SD and played it using BlackPlayer.

I'm thinking of getting a newer, cheaper music device because retrofitting Bluetooth into an iPod Classic is a bit of a bitch.

[mikewarot]

I've got quite a few of my MP3s that I ripped from my CDs now on my smartphone. For a few of the ones that I missed before.... the purge, you can usually find them on YouTube or elsewhere.

I used to use WinAmp, but these days I just us VLC to play them.

I miss the good old days when you could use Napster to find music, then go to Best Buy and get the CD to keep forever.

[ssl-3]

I bought a lot of music in the Napster days.

It was great to be able to search for some things, spot someone with similar interests, and then browse the other stuff that they had to offer. I discovered a ton of good stuff this way.

It was usually a low-bitrate MP3 (or, far worse: An mp3 that someone callously "improved" by running it through BladeEnc at 192Kbps), and it would normally download at a rate far slower than realtime. This left a lot to be desired, but it was plenty good-enough for finding new-to-me music that would probably never have any airplay.

And then I'd gather up some dollars and head over to the local music shop. If it was on the shelf, I'd buy it. (And if it wasn't, they'd cheerfully order it -- usually it'd be there in a few days, but sometimes it was a month or two if it was from overseas.)

Nowadays, like many, I don't buy a ton of music. I still have MP3s, and I've got quite a selection of CDs...and I do enjoy having them and occasionally listening to them. But usually, it's just Spotify for me and has been for over a decade now.

[backtogeek]

Yep and I have kept it really basic and simple, I just store them in a folder in /home/$user/music and let jukebox scan and catalogue and I keep a subset on my phone, really that simple.... And you know what, it feels great, but then again, I am old enough to fondly remember just listening to a Walkman and being blown away.

[hagbard_c]

I never switched to streaming services of any kind nor to any other subscription scams. I have a large catalogue of music and access to loads of internet radio stations to discover new music - Radio Paradise being one of my go-to spots for such - and see no need to get entangled in yet another contract for things which did not need such before the push to eternal payments. Just install your own streaming service - I'm still running Airsonic because it works and I mostly use the Subsonic API so the somewhat clunky web interface doesn't bother me - and point it at your collection and ditch whatever paid subscription service you use. Keep regular backups and store them somewhere safe so your collection can survive the inevitable demise of whatever storage medium you keep it on. Done, no more "expert" advise needed.

[justarandomname]

I listen to FLAC's mostly (high quality, loseless audio files - CD quality or better) most of my collection has come from ripping CDs I owned or checked out from the library or albums bought on bandcamp, quobuz, and ototoy.

I use Rhythmbox to listen to files on my PC (Linux) - I think they have/had a Windows port at some point. VLC works too but is more cumbersome for large libraries on desktop IMHO. But VLC is actually pretty good on Mobile (iOS/Andriod.) besides the pain of syncing files over to iOS.

I splurged on a dedicated DAP (Digital Audio Player) last year that I'm mostly happy with: a HiBY R1 (my two complaints are: 1. for whatever reason it refuses to pair to my car's bluetooth, no issues pairing to numerous other devices. 2. It doesn't remember what you were last playing when it shuts off.)

[bestouff]

Someone with 300TB of free storage and a "chaotic" alignment could download a particular archive containing the whole Spotify shebang. And then run a Jellyfin instance around this archive. That would work quite well.

Of course I wouldn't approve of such a procedure.

[lousken]

is the torrent already out? asking for a friend

[nxtbl]

I only stopped to collect FLACs instead, whenever available.

When Spotify came, I tried it, made playlists etc. One of them had 1000+ techno tracks in it, from 90's mostly. After a while, half of them had disappeared due to licencing expirations etc.

That was the lesson to not trust external services or rely on always-on data for streaming - I can stream it all myself from my own mp3/flac files when required.

Mostly using MOC (Music on console) to play locally, and on all mobile devices I have my collection on a sd card or in internal tb memory for the one that does not have a sd card slot anymore. Music folder player full version by Zorillasoft for Android devices - works well, as I keep the collection neatly organized and foldered.

[toomuchtodo]

Jellyfin

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=jellyfin

[mindcrime]

I never stopped listening to mp3's, at least not altogether. I do spend quite a bit of time listening to music these days using Youtube / YT music, but I do still listen to my local collection at times. And I buy mp3 albums from Amazon every once in a while.

For listening I've mostly used xmms over the years, but recently I've been using Audacious[2] mostly.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMMS

[2]: https://audacious-media-player.org/

[crtasm]

Jellyfin + https://github.com/jeffvli/feishin on desktop and https://github.com/jmshrv/finamp on mobile

also https://audacious-media-player.org/ on desktop to drop files in directly

[keernan]

I have my own huge collection of my favorite music but, as it turns out, my carefully curated Pandora channel matches my music tastes so faithfully that it keeps introducing me to new music that I just love.

And it almost never plays a song that causes me to hit next. Of course, it took a long time to get the channel tuned just right - but now I play music for 5+ hours without interruption of nothing but music I love.

[wildpeaks]

I never stopped, Bandcamp sells DRM-free files (especially on "Bandcamp Fridays" once a month when more of the money goes to the artist, unlike Spotify and other streaming services), and VLC works on both desktop and mobile.

https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/bandcamp-fridays

[cageface]

You could give my app a try:

https://www.plastaq.com/minimoon

[ofalkaed]

I use cmus on my laptop and vanilla music player on my phone, I like things to be simple. I have never used a streaming service but I did just decide to go back to listening to the radio and ordered myself a radio good enough to pick up shortwave and am stations from around the world, should be here tomorrow and I am looking forward to it.

[progman32]

Don't overcomplicate or overthink, is my advice. You listen to a generally fixed sweet of tracks? Grab them, put them in a folder on your desktop, and open the folder in any old music player (Audacious is just fine, foobar2000 is also fine, use whatever). Optimize with things like Plex only after you notice patterns in your usage

[austin-cheney]

I wanted the WinAmp experience in my iPhone with the long playlist. I could not find anything remotely competent either as a web tool or something from the App Store. So, I wrote my own solution. It creates a static playlist as a webpage with a built in mp3 player that allows playing from my home file server.

[ravachol]

Hi, I'm the developer of kew which works for linux, macOS, Android and FreeBSD.

The two best places to buy music in my opinion are qobuz and bandcamp.

https://github.com/ravachol/kew

I encourage you to go check out my app.

[svilen_dobrev]

i never went into spotify. Too much "tunnel-hearing" and, $$money-related choice.

My collection is like 20k pieces (curated with time, some still whole albums, some 1 song only). a) put all that on a usb stick. inserted in car's audio. random-all. 2 years already.. b) Alternatively, keep same on the phone, for not-in-car entertainment - bicycle, office, you name it. c) at home - kodi and other media players, over the network shares. Sometimes manual pick, sometimes random.

btw.. car's builtin as well as aftermarket radios (2023-2025) cannot take/index more than 5000 pieces / mp3s. Some even lower, like 3000. So.. i had to bundle above pieces back into whole/half-albums (anyone remember LP-sides? there)

[yboulkaid]

If you're into selfhosting, there's a standard API (Subsonic) that has multiple compatible servers and clients. I use Gonic + Amperfy and am quite happy with it.

For recommendations I went back to asking friends + smaller online communities

[fluxusars]

I never stopped using foobar2000 on the desktop. I can recommend Evermusic on iOS for it's excellent playlist management, carplay integration and last.fm/scrobbling if you're ancient like me and still using that.

[Arn_Thor]

I self-host a music library on Plex and use Plexamp on my phone. I have liberated music I bought on iTunes, ripped my old CDs and added more from BandCamp (and for official purposes that's the extent of my library).

[doublerabbit]

An abandoned Java App called aTunes and foobar2000 on iOS.

For day-to-day I use a non-android hardware music DAC (Lotoo PAW 6000) which allows me to stream bluetooth to it.

I can playback songs from my iPhone or use the inbuilt SD card slot.

[oldsklgdfth]

In the past year I bought a Ruizu clip-on MP3 player. If I want something new I use yt-dlp and get specific songs.

It's nice having a device not connected to the internet.

In the past I used jellyfin.

[t-3]

I use an mp3 player usually, but I do have an mpd setup with my NAS serving the files and other devices (desktop, media center, laptop) acting as satellites.

[happymellon]

My current set up is Jellyfin with Symfonium. I don't mind the £5 cost of a purchase.

The kids are gen z and love CDs now, and ripping them is easy enough.

[orionblastar]

https://winamp.com/player WinAmp has made a comeback.

[GaryBluto]

I believe Amazon still offers MP3 downloads. Or you could use one of the many existing sites that offer dubious downloads.

[precompute]

Audacious + Local files

Puddletag for file metadata modification

Inbuilt "song change" plugin for logging / metadata collection

Conky for Visualization

[purplecats]

https://ytmp3.ai/

[Retr0id]

Note: If you're downloading from youtube you probably don't want mp3, since that requires an extra transcoding step. Most videos have AAC and Opus tracks available, which are both widely supported by players these days.

[devinegan]

Plex + Plexamp for my mostly FLAC private collection. CD, Bandcamp, etc. sourced

[Lapsa]

winamp - it really whips the lama's ass

[Froedlich]

I'm another who never stopped. I still use matchbox-sized MP3 players, replacing them when they die. Wifi is sparse in my area, and even cellular signals are unreliable (and expensive), so I stayed local-only.

The little players also have discrete "stop" and "volume" buttons or rockers, which means I can pause or adjust volume without having to see the player. Much better than hauling a phone out and spend time navigating menus.

Nobody ever says a word to me, unless I have the earbuds in; then complete strangers will walk up and start talking. Pause the player, remove an earbud, ask them to repeat what they said; they get angry. The usual.

[moomoo11]

Starlink

[sorbusherra]

foobar2000 at android. I have 40 gigabytes of flac/mp3 files on sd-card. It just works.