Spotify contains watermarks, the DRM is known to be simple and got circumvented many years ago already when Spotify was relatively new. A dev even responded: 'we know, please don't abuse.' Watermark is why the sound is worse than a direct rip in OGG Vorbis of the same quality.
With regards to Netflix I run Windows under Proxmox with a Netflix PWA, and I surely can make a screenshot of my NoVNC connection. Though I am pretty sure Netflix isn't 4k / Widevine L1.
It's based on librespot[1] which has been there for a while. Spotify used to official support "libspotify" to download .ogg files, but that was very early stuff that got deprecated in favor of platform specific APIs.
> You can't even take a screenshot of a Netflix show, thanks to DRM; but you can download Spotify tracks?
There's also a lot of tools to rip movies from Amazon Prime or YouTube to MP3 sites. It will never be possible to take down all of them, especially if they are not located in the US.
I would have thought it's easy to distinguish when you download a 250MB video in 10 seconds without opening the YouTube client, so I'm always surprised those clients work.
Heh, that's not what I would call "clever" though ; ) You can add delays artificially, you can add random, but seemingly human pauses (people sometimes pause playback) etc. I am surprised as well though, that tools still work without having to go to these lengths. perhaps because devs on the other side of the thing know, that they would only trigger a more sophisticated tool to be created.
Some use headless Chromium/Chrome like Puppeteer or other to mimic usage directly. At that point only pattern detection would work i.e. downloading too many files one person could consume or other fingerprinting.
> You can't even take a screenshot of a Netflix show, thanks to DRM;
The windows snipping tool (which got renamed to "Snip & Sketch" at some point) takes screenshots just fine even when Netflix is running in full-screen mode.
off-topic:
Under Windows 11 MS renamed "Snip & Sketch" to "Snipping Tool" and replaced to original snipping tool with it.
Feels like the gave up to overcome muscle memory. At least i continued using the og snipping tool under windows 10 because in german the new tool was named "Ausschneiden und Skizzieren" and that didn't map to me searching for "sni" and pressing enter.
Try Win+Shift+S for instant click/drag screenshot to clipboard. I haven't opened the snip tool GUI since I found out. It also has GUI buttons for window/freeform/fullscreen if you ever need that.
In Windows 11 there's also a setting to make the "Print Screen"-key work in the same way as Win + Shift + S. The setting is called "Use the Print screen button to open screen snipping".
That's probably because you are running Netflix in Google Chrom. The streams are 720P (1280x720) and hava a lower level of DRM.
Only Microsoft Edge and natives apps are providing the highest definition available.
You can see the stats by pressing CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-D while Netflix is active.
Netflix doesn't supply Linux with 1080p streams, for exactly this reason. Any platform that doesn't encrypt the video path so screen recording isn't possible is limited to 720p.
I wouldn't say it was lost because of streaming. People don't pirate music like they used to because there is a convenient alternative. I still pirate because I like to have an actual library that doesn't change when licenses do, my I have nobody in my circles who still does the same.
Also because the discovery and social features are an actual value add for most users. Spotify wrapped may have done as much for its popularity as the music itself.
which also records the music (meaning you need to wait for the entire length of the playlist for it to finish) and cuts it into songs. It doesn't require you to provide any credentials (and it should in principle work with other streaming services as well, but I haven't tried).
It is probably not the smoothest user experience, given that nobody except me has ever used it, but I've successfully recorded thousands of albums with it so far.
When Spotify plays the audio, there's small, generally inaudible MP3 artifacts in the output. When you record that audio and re-encode it to a new MP3 file, these artifacts get re-encoded again, as part of the track, plus new artifacts get added.
It's the same as re-encoding a photo to JPEG repeatedly. Every time you save (esp if the quality settings are a little bit different each time, or if a different encoder is used) you get a few more artifacts.
At high enough quality settings though, you can do this many times before the result is noticeable. So I bet the quality from re-encoding a Spotify song once is inaudible to most people, just like you can brighten a JPEG and save it without suddenly seeing lots of rectangles everywhere.
Reminds me of those good ol' days of what.cd interviews ;)
A bad transcode means that during the transcode process, the file has either been converted to a lossy format more than once, or the file has been converted from lossy to lossless. Bad transcodes are prohibited on What.CD.[0]
To my point of view, sharing this is irresponsible, modifying librespot to download song on your computer is fairly easy and is a good learning exercise to learn Rust. But by sharing this work publicly, you increase chances that librespot will be blacklisted by Spotify and that accounts using it will be terminated. It's a shame, because there is many alternatives to the bad Spotify UI that rely on librespot that will also become blacklisted. There are legitimate uses of librespot and its use should be restricted to those, for the best of users and developers that spent a lot of time making librespot great.
That is true, maybe I should delete the HN listing.
I actually would like to know how to modify librespot to do so, since I am not a developer or know any Rust at all. Thus this project seems useful to me.
Pedant here. Copyright violation is not theft. Piracy describes another act entirely, too.
The bible gives a green light to share words and song publicly, and to duplicate freely for the masses what is in arbitrarily short supply.
Even our modern, applicable laws do not mention theft, so you ought try to avoid strawmanning in the future and look up which millenium the DMCA was written for.
This is the exact kind of thing I was anticipating.
Regardless of terminology, you’re breaking rules set by someone else and doing something because you feel entitled to do it. Even if the original file doesn’t change you’re taking possession of something you don’t have the right to possess.
Go nuts. It doesn’t fundamentally matter at all. But don’t try to loophole your way out of a situation that is very clear.
That's interesting, because nowhere in Spotify's TOS are the words "theft" or "piracy" mentioned. And even if it was, I don't think basing morals or definitions of words on a single company's terms of service is a good idea. Sure, the TOS probably specifies somewhere that you're not allowed to rip music from their software, but whether doing so is theft has nothing to do with Spotify.
But fundamentally you and I both know that Spotify has made rules that say you can’t write a script to download all the songs as MP3s or OGGs or whatever.
If you want to break those rules, go nuts. But don’t hide behind terminology. You’re taking something somebody else doesn’t want you to have because you feel like you’re entitled to it.
You'd be correct if you didn't word it as "taking". Nothing is being taken from anyone, and this might seem like semantics to you but it's an important point when piracy is being discussed. When piracy happens, the net result is that there's more of it in the world, which is contradictory to theft.
If you think that's immoral or should be illegal, it's a separate discussion. The point here is that for that discussion to be had the distinction needs to be made.
You are taking possession of something you don’t have rights from the original owner to possess. This is true even when the original thing remains unchanged.
Again, I’m not interested in debating the definition of theft/piracy/copying/whatever. It’s a very tired argument made by people who want to validate their decisions and actions.
Just say, “I don’t care. I’ve talked myself into thinking there’s no issue with me doing this so I’m going to do it.” The lengths people will go to argue the semantics of this shows me how clear the issue really is.
I'm not surprised you're not interested in debating the definition of theft and piracy, considering that doing so would invalidate the inflammatory comment you made originally. It's very easy to keep the moral high ground when you refuse to engage with a subject in good faith while strawmanning every argument proposed, and that is something I'm not interested in engaging with.
"Streaming" is a transfer of data to the user's computer. The user is simply choosing to manually manage the data already being transferred. This is legal.
Haha - yeah, I'm (obviously) getting a pasting for it because this is after all HN, but I spotted it and it was a slight WTH moment, and I thought worthy of comment (somewhat justified given it's sparked a bit of discussion). I don't have an axe to grind with OP, and I don't tend to be Spotify's biggest fan (even though I'm also a premium subscriber because of the library they offer), but it simply struck me as quite an odd disconnect.
Also, how can they tell that it is librespot, and how can they block it? Isn't it basically simulating being one of the official Spotify clients? I really do not want them to get banned or blocked
This user agent could just be set to the official client's user agent and nobody would see a thing, this is a free text field basically.
Then it would be more of an exercise of finding clients behaving in an odd way that's not mapping to an official client. That's way harder to detect though.
Trying to pretend to be an official client was a game I never wanted to play. There's so many tiny differences in the way I've implemented the protocol it would be trivial for Spotify to notice this if they wanted to. It then becomes an whack a mole game between them and us.
Spotify is fully aware of librespot and has tolerated it so far. If they change their minds are try to block it it would be the end of the road for librespot. This is why, despite repeated requests from users, librespot has never supported free accounts nor downloading files in order to avoid pissing Spotify off. I always knew it would be trivial for anyone to implement this using the librespot source code, but it makes me a bit sad someone actually did it.
(That being said, I personally don't contribute or use librespot anymore, so really I don't care)
I wonder if this is somewhere it would make sense to use a non-free license which restricts how people use the code or what modifications they are allowed to redistribute. It wouldn’t stop anyone motivated from breaking the rules by themselves but it makes things like Oggify less likely to be distributed and so would mean librespot might be more likely to survive long-term.
This is the curse of open source - once you put the code out there, there's nothing you can do about it.
Currently dealing with this with a project of mine, it's hard to see people take and "abuse it", but there's nothing you can do really - licenses don't stop anyone.
Sorry these were meant as two separate points. People have asked repeatedly to use librespot on free accounts, and (other) people have asked to have librespot download files. I've pushed back on both, and Oggify does the later only.
can't you just use soundflower with some scripting to capture the audio directly at the uncompressed audio card level? There is NO way for spotify to block that.
Neat, but I seriously hope that it doesn’t become popular enough to force Spotify to combat client reimplementations such as librespot, which this is based on.
Also Mopidy, which lets you use Spotify from any MPD client.
I suspect that secretly there are some people at Spotify who are sympathetic to open source and/or use Linux, and have convinced the business people and bean counters that not being openly hostile to free software is good business.
I have mixed feeling about Spotify in general, but it's still not as "closed" of a platform as it could be, and I'm at least a little bit happy about that.
They don’t download every time you play them. They are cached. You can also download them in the app so they stay local and never redownload. You just can’t get them out of the app.
except for some reason on my phone my "downloaded" albums seem to remove themselves if I haven't listed to them in a while.
Discovered this on a recent flight. Airline didn't offer in-flight wifi. Tried to listed to an album which I'd downloaded but taken out of my regular rotation, and it just wasn't there.
Your audio collection, which obviously has millions of artists so you can literally listen to anything in the world as soon as you feel like it, with zero seconds of waiting time, and also you can get recommendations of new things to listen to, yeah
I'm tired of people who pretend they don't understand the advantages of a solution. Spotify has revolutionized the way I listen to music and discover new stuff. And I used to have a decent lossless collection I listened to on a FLAC supporting Cowon player. But it's so much better now.
Agreed. A few years back I lost my entire collection, due to a hardware malfunction and a slightly careless backup policy. But even though it was full of potentially great music I had never heard yet, I tended to stick with the familiar.
Since I'm on Spotify, the amount of new music I'm discovering is almost overwhelming. It's hard to keep up with my check playlist, I keep finding interesting new artists through song radio. It's also excellent for finding music in languages I do not speak or can even read. Trying to Google in Cyrillic was a pita.
> So it takes the same space, without being equally useful?
Can you elaborate "equally useful"? The only problem I could see is that you can't play them anywhere but in the app. So what? If you were to copy them around (and most likely share with other people for free) you are violating their ToS (and other legal aspects) anyway.
> No way I'm ever giving up my local lossless audio collection.
Good news: You don't have to. Streaming services are called "streaming" services for a reason. You are apparently not the target audience and that's completely fine.
In addition, DJ pools often contain music and extended club mix friendly edits of songs.
Radio tracks that might start off with just vocals might have a "extended club mix" which has a clean 16/32/48 bars of instrumentals before the vocal kicks in. The same for the outro.
There is a place for both. I have most of my favorite albums in FLAC for listening on my home receiver with decent speakers. But I'm not even going to bother with buying every album/song I want to listen to in the car, on mobile, in the office etc. Spotify is great for that. 10-15 euro/month and I have access to a huge collection of songs in good enough quality that syncs playlist across all my devices.
to play devil's advocate, what happens when your lossless audio files (which take up a fair amount of space) no longer all fit on your mobile device? Do you have software to rotate them out? What about when you want to listen to a song that isn't local anymore? Sounds like you need to invent streaming with caching
I have jellyfin[0] installed on my home server, then use finamp[1] on my iphone to listen on the go via streaming and usually download just the playlists to the device, which eventually get rotated.
Plus they can track the plays and pay the artist (even if it's pennies). If you just rip them there's no way for Spotify to track plays and pay the artists
I used a different piece of software to do this for DJing (Sidify) and my account got locked. I was given a warning and my account was unlocked the next day, but, Spotify can detect this
I don’t know if they still support it, but their premium service used to have an open API that included streaming the audio to your program, which you could write as a wav then convert to your format of choice. This was over 5 years ago at least. And I have to assume (storing/converting) it was against the T&Cs then too, rather than the intention of streaming.
I've seen a lot of Spotify downloaders using librespot and similar. An interesting exception is Soggfy, which just hooks and dumps the ogg files from the Spotify client.
Artists already get paid peanuts from listens on Spotify. It's a shame to see projects like this sucking more revenue away from them. If you really want a quality digital recording, they are generally available for purchase and without violating Spotify's ToS.
It is different because even in offline-mode Spotify keeps track of the number of times the song has been played in order to pay the artist the correct amount.
I'd be surprised if Spotify doesn't track plays even when you've downloaded music for offline listening. Also, using official features of the app doesn't violate their ToS.
If you're paying for a streaming service, then yes. If you want to pay to download the songs, then do that. Most artists have avenues where you can do so. You seem to think that if users are paying for a streaming service that explicitly disallows making copies, those users should still be entitled to make copies.
Why is this discussion full of comments which sound like RIAA sponsored shills? The RIAA will be creaming in their pants when they read comments like yours.
People should feel entitled to do whatever they can get away with. Why, you ask? Well read on..
The record labels are extremely greedy, and Spotify et. al. are merely a thin proxy wrapper in front of them. Oh yeah, and Spotify barely pays the artists anything at all. So if you "pay" for Spotify, the degree to which you're providing support to the musicians you love so much is questionable. At least with Deezer, they allocate more of the revenue to actually go back to the artists.
Back to the point, Spotify and Deezer aren't looking out for me or you. Downloading is an appealing alternative to hoping songs don't disappear when licenses change for no discernable reason.
Life is short, I advocate for individuals to do what they want when it doesn't measurably harm anyone else. Going into the grave knowing I committed few or no music license violations is such a low value goal, how do people not realize this?
Nowadays there isn't a shortage of music, at all. Especially not due to folks downloading songs, in fact this makes the artists even more popular. They should be grateful for getting popular enough to warrant any form of piracy. Lots of music creators would love to have this "problem".
A lot of people think there's a shortage of good music and the pipeline for musicians (people who actually learn to play instruments and master composition) is dwindling.
Honest question: How does this relate to "illegally" downloading songs vs perpetually streaming them?
I have enormous respect for professional Craftsman musicians, but I don't know if they make a real dent in the numbers when compared to the trendy Biebs and Gagas.
One of the biggest problems facing new artists is local live music is dying. I'm talking about music at bars and clubs. It's not completely dead, but it's not what it once was. Now people are happy, or maybe even happier, to have a DJ. Unfortunately the best way to improve your musical skills is to play with other musicians in a live setting - and there's less opportunity for that. There's simply fewer musicians able to even get started.
You've gotten started, you're playing with a group of people, been playing some gigs - now what? You want to record! Get your music out there! I'm not going to go into all the details of recording but let me just say it's neither easy, nor cheap. It's gotten even more expensive these days because while the quality of the music itself may be suffering, the quality of the production is skyrocketing. This is similar to the gripe in movies where people complain the special effects are awesome but the actual story kinda sucks. But people don't want movies having crumby special effects - they want both: great special effects and a great story line. So it is with music. People want great production and great music. Well, you're going to pay to get that great production!
Maybe that's a bit of the modern music biz you don't know much about. The producers get paid up front. So do the distributors. Who pays for it? The musicians. The musicians now have their recording in hand, they've distributed their music to Amazon Music, Apple Music, Google Play, Spotify, Pandora, and a host of other lesser-known platforms. What happens? They get pirated. Most of the time they don't even break even. For most musicians, recording and distributing your music is a net financial loss. If you're lucky it may increase traffic to your live gigs.
Honestly, when you throw in the cost of gear and the years spent practicing and playing to get good enough to be presentable to the public - it's no wonder fewer and fewer people are going into music. That's our loss.
Does illegally downloading songs in and of itself cause this collapse? Probably not. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's the last straw breaking the camel's back.
I wasn't intending to suggest that Spotify is looking out for me…or for the artists. I know the pay artists get from Spotify is generally terrible. If you're not happy with Spotify, switch to Deezer or another service. But I'm generally a proponent of abiding by the terms of service of whatever service you choose to use.
There are a number of projects that do this, and some are paid.
Do they work? Yes.
Do you want to do this? Probably not.
Why not? Spotify does not have lossless / Hi-Fi audio yet and what you're getting is a lossy transcode. You would be better doing something like this with Deezer or Tidal (insert other competitors here) that offer a lossless format.
Whilst I've not done this, I would probably advise that if you are doing this that you strip the resulting file of all meta-data (everything!) and then use MusicBrainz Picard to add clean metadata back.
Same for YouTube but with Spotify you at least know what has been deleted. With YouTube such metadata is axed, too. Pathetic. A good reason for Oggify and YouTube-dl (or a fork).
The disappearing tracks is really the main problem with Spotify. I think at some point licensing to streaming services needs to be compulsory, like licensing to radio is, so that there aren't "exclusives."
I played a lot of cheap tapes back in the day. That's far worse quality than any MP3, especially if you're young and buy cheap, normal C120 tapes, and play them on a cheap device over and over.
When MP3 players were a new thing, I had one with all of 64MB flash on which I played 64 kbps music with dirt cheap earbuds. That wasn't perfect, but I still found it useful.
Today Spotify offers 320kbps, which is far superior to a lot of stuff I listened to, and my hearing certainly didn't get any better over the decades. I don't think I notice much difference above 128 kbps these days anyway.
Yeah, certainly I'll go for quality if I can have it, but less than perfect is better than nothing and I'm very far from being a crazy audiophile. Modern tech is far beyond the point where I stop caring about further improvements.
I think you are actually making the same point as the parent, given the question mark at the end of the first sentence (which I heard in a rhetorical slightly sarcastic tone)
Spotify contains a watermark as metadata. I am not sure if it can be removed cleanly but either way: the produced OGG Vorbis is of inferior quality (as is Spotify) due to watermark. If you were to redistribute the data with watermark you should use an anonymous Premium account and computer and network connection (Whonix with Tor?) which cannot be traced back to you.
Most people don't care about audio quality. Look at what they're playing music on. Shitty tinny speakers built into phones most of the time. $30 PC speakers. Earbuds. Laptop speakers. Sure, some people have actual high quality sound systems, but not enough people to matter.
Back in the day I wrote a tool to save songs from Pandora. It was basically an http proxy server, so I'm sure there were dozens of similar tools floating around. However, I never ended up listening to any of the songs I downloaded because it was never as convenient as listening to Pandora. I imagine the same thing with Spotify. Even if I had every song in existence downloaded in lossless format, I'd still use Spotify to listen to music.
I used to be in the same boat, mostly due to Spotify's recommendation algorithm. Unfortunately they've since removed all ways of giving it feedback about what I like, and now it just recommends the same few songs over and over and over.
Might have to go back to downloading, at least playback will be more reliable.
I've noticed that the offline experience on Spotify is utterly broken and has been for a while. I remember it being quite good when I first started using it, but it just seems to have got worse to the point of being unusable. I figured it was maybe just Android but my kids who are iPhone users said the same.
We live in a rural area and use Spotify on the move a lot (on buses, car journeys, bike rides) and are often without signal so offline is essential. Maybe Spotify devs assume everyone has good 5G/Wifi and never actually test it out?
Whatever the reason, having the option to make my own offline library to work around deficiencies in the service I'm paying £16.99 a month for seems like fair use to me (yeah, I know UK law has no such concept but I can sell the idea to myself at least).
I might even dig out my old MP3 player as mentioned in other comments.
Offline? Try listening to a podcast. It has to be one of the worst pieces of software I have to interact with regularly. The second last podcast would skip back to the same timestamp every time I switched audio or exited the app. If they are going to charge money and still push adds at least give me the option to use an alternate client.
You didn't really specify how it's "utterly broken". As an anecdote, I've been listening to Spotify a lot whenever I drive or go jogging, all offline since I don't have data and it's been working well for me.
Spotify has to do something against things like this, or else they risk losing their music suppliers. Which is way worse for than losing 0.001% of their customers.
(I don't like that it is this way, but you cannot argue from an economic perspective without considering the other economic pressures on the company).
> Spotify has to do something against things like this, or else they risk losing their music suppliers.
Why should the music industry care? Their utter majority of non-live gig income is the streaming services [1], and cutting off the biggest player would be a completely dumb move. Piracy of music is all but gone anyway since Spotify, Apple Music and others made music extremely affordable for large parts of the Western populations - one might argue that Spotify and the few pirates that remain are both needed as funnels towards live gigs. One can say, the music industry, the fans and pirates are in sort of an equilibrium.
In contrast, the movie industry is in a different bind... many people who watch a pirated movie won't go to a cinema (the closest equivalent of a "live gig"), so every case of movie piracy is a direct hit towards their profits - and the movie industry largely can't make these losses up by selling merch instead, and unlike the music industry which has a lot of dedicated whale fans going to all gigs on a band's tour the movie industry can't even have that unless the movie is really good (Avatar) or culturally significant (Avengers Endgame).
It looks like this repo is a few years old. Does it still work? If not, are there other alternatives that download directly from Spotify?
I've looked for something like this on-and-off the last few years, and most viable options seem to use a Spotify reference to find the right metadata to download off another service, like Deezer.
Spotify does have a lot of tracks on there that i cannot find elsewhere (not on any trackers, not on deezer, not even on youtube for that crisp 128kbps).
But podcasts are just RSS feeds of audio files, so the client of choice should be able to take care of the download without needing to take a trip through Spotify.
Strange that your definition of what a podcast is supposed to be doesn't fit what I find at result #1 when searching for "The biggest podcast in the world".
But I know where you're coming from. It sucks that Spotify is trying to turn this into a walled garden. Hence downloading the episodes, and listening to it in a better client
The one thing I'd like all spotify like services to have is a way to export play/like history in a standard format.
I've listened, liked and disliked so many songs in so many services like pandora, rdio, grooveshark, last.fm, spotify, tidal. But all that information about me is locked and I cannot use it.
If these companies offered exporting of this data in some standard JSON format, we could develop open source apps that analyzed the history and provided recommendations.
They have the scripts to generate these exports, so they probably will give you an export. You can always claim to temporarily reside in a hotel in the EU, it's not like they can smell this isn't the case.
Do we really need to steal music from artists? Spotify and Apple Music is already cheap enough. Not to mention the convenience of not wasting my time managing illegally downloaded music. People really have time for this in 2022?
How do you still music from an artist? Are they no longer able to perform the song anymore after it is stolen? Isn't piracy about making copies of a file instead of theft?
Why do I want a pile of .ogg (or .mp3) files? ? Back in the day, having a huge library of files on a disk, a carefully curated collection from which to burn a mix CD to present as a gift to a romantic (or platonic) interest was worth the world. Times have changed though, and that carefully curated mix CD full of mystery - what will the next track bring? - these days it's still just as carefully curated, but it's a link to a Spotify playlist. Music hasn't (quite) fragmented the same way video has, with Netflix, Hulu, Disney, Paramount, CBS, HBO, YouTube and so on all having paid options, but having a spotify account with apps on all devices is just so much easier.
I am gonna tell you why. I got a Porsche Taycan last year with Burmester. Its audio quality is excellent, however there are limitations. I can play Spotify from my phone over bluetooth, which means reencoded lossy audio. It sounds awful. I can however play music directly from a usb memory stick, which sounds great, just as it should.
This is more a problem of Porsche, not having Spotify integrated into their PCM. It is coming on future models though. But we with a Taycan 2020-2022 model, will not get this.
So having a pile of ogg files is currently a great option.
I don't know anything about the car's sound system, but aptX is a pretty common Bluetooth audio codec for music and these days it can run up to 420kbit/s with the adaptive codec, or 576kbit/s with HD, 24 bit at 44.1-96kHZ, so it's not unreasonable to think you could hear the difference between high and low quality audio sources with that (since even high quality compressed audio tends to be less than 420kbit/s)
What has been heard cannot be unheard. Back in the day I did some ABX comparisons of various mp3 encoders. I unwillingly trained my hearing to spot encoder artifacts forever. I tested encoders more than 15 years ago. I still hear mp3 compression without trying. Bluetooth SBC codec is even worse. Wish I could turn this off but I can't.
Because music has a tendency of suddenly disappearing on Spotify. Either labels decide Spotify isn't giving them enough in return, or artists are angry at Spotify for their stinginess or because they have a podcast which they disapprove of. Look at your playlists that are over a year old. If you are like me you'll see that 10% or 20% of the tracks are unavailable now. This is the downside to streaming -- nothing is permanent.
I was thrilled when I read Spotify was coming to my country. Then the main genres I listen to (Reggae and Dancehall) have many tracks unavailable as the labels (VP Records is the worst) whitelist countries. I reverted back to local files.
- Online services are unreliable: They can go offline at any minute, go out of business, ban your for any reason (including from automated ban systems tagging you for "suspicious activity" if you login from different counties, use vpns, etc).
- Costs money forever (or need to listen to ads).
- Their catalog of music can change: Songs can be deleted at any time.
- Better performance: searching local storage is faster, skipping around is faster, better battery life by not needing to power up the 4G radio/wifi.
I was a Google play music user for the entire life of the service. Lots of playlists, play history, ratings, etc. All of that is gone now. I tried multiple different apps to convert my playlists and library to Apple Music and even the official conversion to YouTube music but they all messed up my library and filled up with songs with similar names that are completely different genres and artists. Some music didn’t carry over at all and I have a vague sense that my playlists are not complete but no idea what’s missing. And while I liked the user interface of Google play music, I hate the interface of YouTube music and I’m not a fan of the interface of Apple Music. I lost control over how I play my music. I regret jumping on the streaming music bandwagon a decade ago.
..also, songs/albums being removed from spotify. Go to settings -> show removed (unavailable?) tracks to see what you are missing. Sometimes you can search for the song and find it again in some other album, but this step is cumbersome and not always working.
Because all listeners are not the same. I for one, have two high quality listening systems (one is in the form of high end sound card, and other in the form as a proper Hi-Fi system), and am a former symphony orchestra player.
I personally appreciate the added resolution of lossless files and love to listen my favorite albums in lossless formats. When one gives the time and ear deserved by an album, the perception is very different, and the added resolution on the highs add a lot of immersion to the album in question.
I have a spotify membership, and it's convenient, yes. But it's not same as "listening to music" for me. Not close.
Also, opening your Spotify playlist and seeing some of your favorite songs missing due to license expiration is not nice. Been there, seen that.
Same for movies, but I'm not that of a movie nerd.
Collectors, DJs, artists and music enthusiasts all still have a great need for actual files. For the average user it might seem dumb, but to me, my Spotify/Apple Music/YouTube Music libraries all seem frail and there are multiple instances of songs being remastered and replaced, as well as artists changing the final versions after initial release (Kanye West comes to mind for one).
DJ's should be paying for the music they're playing. There are streaming options for them to use nowadays aswell. Take Beatport Link as an example: https://link.beatport.com/
> > DJ's should be paying for the music they're playing.
They are, separately from obtaining the material. Look up "performing rights" (which is specifically for songs; it's analogous for recordings, can't remember the exact name now).
> Also, using .mp3 as DJ is unwritten crime.
I would like to meet the person who can hear problems with well-encoded 320kbps mp3 when played in a crowded and noisy club.
One DJ, Errorhead IIRC, recorded a track from a taxis stereo in colombia, crowd goes bonkers every time he plays it. I once had a DJ spinnin vinyl bore me to death, made me sad to think about how much he spent for those records. I much rather have bangin tunes in mp3 than that. Physically there might be a difference, mp3 filtering out stuff you "can't hear". Should affect the deep bass you can only hear and feel on a clubs PA.
I discovered awesome music in the worst quality you could imagine, midi files via a cheap soundcard. Even with plastic guitars, Led Zeppelin still sounds awesome.
I have an "old" flash mp3 player that I just fill up with a pile of mp3 files for exercise. It weighs 70g, can be navigated blind in a pocket, is impervious to the ways smartphones break (falling damage) and the battery lasts a week. People might also have other motivations, such as wanting to decouple from a service that each week picks a new favorite song to make unavailable.
Well one reason is because Spotify's catalogue is constantly expanding/contracting so a song that you added to a playlist yesterday might be gone tomorrow.
I don’t even know where the DVDs I had 10 years ago are. Lost in moving I guess. And I don’t have any devices to play them on. While my data online accounts are almost all still intact with all the data I left on them.
The data maybe. The dvd wont be playable in 50 years. Not necessarily disk degradation but hardware obsolescence. You will need to keep copying every 10-20 years to supported media.
Well it's been 30 years for some of my cds and new hardware with cd support is still being created today. But maybe in another 20 years I will be too busy enjoying my flying car to care about my cds.
My use case for trying download mp3s was for DJing since Spotify no longer works with mixing software. I didn’t want to buy my entire collection per song and Beatport only offers dance/edm genres
Files are freedom. Custody of the actual data represents a fundamental level of control that you don’t get with streaming. All the other responses give examples that are underpinned by this freedom.
My niece is one year old and has a simple speaker with hard drive full of baby music, a straightforward device she can use even by herself. Music helps her calm down whenever anything mildly upsetting happens and is frankly a lifesaver whenever I babysit (absence of parents is highly upsetting). Before buying this device and filling it with baby music MP3s, my sibling used a simple Bluetooth speaker and Spotify phone app with disastrous results.
A solid point. This reminds me the old days when I carefully programmed my VHS video to record Blade Runner from a public broadcast on TV. How happy I was. "Now I will be able to watch Blade Runner whenever I want!" I even remember having purchased a more expensive VHS tape just for that, I didnt want to have no image quality issues in the future.
There are places where files are useful. Being a DJ for example. You'll show up to a gig with a flash drive, plug it into the club equipment's USB port, and do your thing. You'd ideally be compensating your fellow artists for their work by buying files off of Beatport (or wherever) anyway. Seems a bit niche.
Edit: wait, 2019? What gives? How is this not taken down?
You can't even take a screenshot of a Netflix show, thanks to DRM; but you can download Spotify tracks?