this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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Dropbox, Spotify, and a VPN are worth it: fight me.
Sure, Spotify doesn't pay artists enough and I miss having Neil Young available for streaming, but what are the other options that work well in the car? I'm not going to go back to using discs or plugging in MP3 players to the aux port, and I don't mind paying the bands directly for merch/albums if I'm really a fan. Considering I mostly listen to vinyl at home, I'm not paying Spotify for music; I'm paying Spotify for the convenience of being able to not listen to terrestrial radio and to be able to listen to what I like in the car or at work without the need for Youtube.
And my personal Dropbox account that I also use for work is well worth 15$/mo for 2TB of storage. It's saved me so much grief to be able to back up phone photos, access my work files from any computer, keep records of my personal documents, etc., and the software is both more cost effective and better designed than Google Drive or OneDrive. PDF's of my RPG books/characters/maps? Dropbox. Grocery list text file? Dropbox. Place to stash tabs/sheet music that is easily kept organized without the need for a physical copy? Dropbox. Phone number of that parent who saw my partner's car get tagged in the parking lot at school? Wait, I think I have her phone number in an spreadsheet from when I coached her daughter in tee-ball...gimme a sec...yep, it's in my Dropbox. In a side note, Dropbox may have turned me into a digital hoarder.
But the rest of this subscription-based garbage can get bent.
I recently switched from Spotify to Deezer. They offer high fidelity audio streaming which is a very noticable difference. Also, they're a bit cheaper, and you can easily move all your songs/saved playlists to Deezer
You need to be a certain kind of person to perceive audio quality difference. One, you need to be able to detect the difference. Two, you need to be able to appreciate the difference. And Three, which everyone seems to ignore, you need to have bought a sufficiently expensive device that can make the difference.
In short, if you have an $18 desktop speaker, get the FLAC outta here.
Not really. It's noticeable over Bluetooth as well, if your device supports codecs with a high enough bitrate. Obviously Bluetooth is still lossy, but listening experience is way better. The headphones I'm wearing now use aptxHD, with a bitrate of 576kbps. Spotify only offers AAC, with a bitrate of 256kbps.
As far as who can appreciate the difference, I guess? But you don't need to be a concert pianist to appreciate audio. That said, I play many instruments, so maybe I'm biased.
Do a blind test between 256kbps and 576kbps. I dare you.
I'm not going to argue conjecture. I have over $10,000 in audio equipment and like I already said I play many instruments, so you're not even picking someone good to make generalizations about. Bluetooth codecs are always going to be subpar, but they're probably how most people listen to streaming services most of the time. Anything that is streaming from a PC except Bluetooth is a notable difference.
I just checked the headphones I'm wearing again, they're actually using aptx lossless with a bitrate of 1200kbps. The point is that Deezer offers the same services for less money and higher quality audio streaming.
Apparently, when Spotify does roll out hifi, it will probably be a higher paid tier. Until then, for me, Deezer is the far superior service.
That's a good tip; I hadn't heard of that one yet. Is their library as comprehensive as Spotify?
It's almost identical.
I transferred about 10,000 songs and about 30 weren't found
Deezer should spread out their services to more countries.
Plex +arrs takes care of all my music streaming wants
Plex tanked right as I was watching a movie last week. It's an alternative, but not reliable.
What about Jellyfin?
If it's your Plex that tanked, sounds like a you problem.
I run both it and Jellyfin on the same machine and have no issues with either.
It was Plex on a TV. And it wasn't my TV. So it's not consistent.
Spotify is the only subscription I have. Don't listen to music a lot, but it's cheap and easy. For VPN, I rolled my own on a Digital Ocean VPS.
that sounds like a subscription with extra steps lol
I pay for Nord. But that's because I game and value it.
Pandora is cheaper than Spotify and arguably better at picking new and random content based on your input. But it won't play specific songs that you request like Spotify does. And Pandora works via Bluetooth, car apps, etc.
I used Pandora a ton a decade ago when there weren't really any mainstream streaming services to compete with. But as someone who listens to albums and makes my own playlists, Pandora won't cut it for me. I'm enough of a music snob that when I say I want to listen to The Stones, I want to listen to Let It Bleed front to back.
For some applications, Pandora is great, but it's not what I need.
I loved and used Pandora for a long time. It was really good at recommending songs. I quit when they started playing ads in my feed despite paying for an ad free experience. These were like voice ads for concerts or similar from artists. I contacted customer support and the response was basically “we don’t think those are ads, they are ‘special messages’ from the artists so they aren’t going to stop.”
The problem is that I mostly use music streaming as background at work. Having a 30 second clip of some guy’s voice saying “Hey I’m Bobby from the Bobbles and we are excited to be touring in your area next month! Come check out our show for a Bobbling-Good-Time!” is very disruptive in the same way an ad for anything else is. They were clear that they weren’t going to stop so I walked away.
I pay for YouTube and have for years. Worth it and cheaper than cable.
$15/mo for 2 TB seems quite expensive tbh. My Nextcloud server with 1 TiB of storage costs €5 a month.
It is a little pricey, but when I tried hosting my own server, it was way too much hassle (for me). Frankly, I don't mind paying Dropbox because they make the experience so fool-proof and borderline invisible.
Dropbox runs in the background and just acts like just a local folder in your Documents folder (or wherever you put it). When you save anything there, it's automatically backed up online in real-time and added to any other computers you use that have Dropbox installed. If you have too much online for some of your devices, it will use a a "shadow file" that is just a link to the online file so it takes up zero space on your other local devices while acting just like the file is already local (in terms of being able to right-click, access properties, open it from other programs, etc.). Plus, it has built in functionality for sharing files or entire folders by giving you a quick download link with just two clicks, which is great for sharing files that are too large to send via email.
Could I get all that functionality cheaper? Almost certainly. Could I find something cheaper that is also just as user-friendly? I'm open to it, but I haven't found anything yet that is close to competitive.
Have you checked out OneDrive (Microsoft)? It's what I use for school. I don't store pictures or anything, strictly school documents and random odds and ends.
I have a OneDrive account through my work, so I've used it a bit, but it doesn't seem like it handles downloads and uploads as quickly, nor keeping the right files local intuitively the way Dropbox does.
Plus, it's almost as expensive as Dropbox per TB with a personal plan, and Microsoft doesn't need any more of my money or information.
Where do you host said server, a VPS?
Managed instance at Hetzner
I'll pay for Spotify when they start respecting my blocklist properly.
I have blocked Kanye West and he still shows up in recommended playlists somehow.
I can't speak to that as I don't use any of the recommended playlists. It's pretty easy to avoid artists you don't like if you make your own playlists or pick your own music
Yeah but then that is not very useful for discovering new music.
Fair. I just browse through the "Fans Also Listen To" sections and read a lot of independent music journalism
Apple Music pays out 2-3X more than Spotify to artists if that is something you are concerned about.
It also has an absolutely terrible algorithm for recommending music in my experience. I’ve tried Apple Music several times over the past few years as I’m heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem. My experience never changes. I put in a random artist like Green Day or Hans Zimmer or Gregory Alan Isakov and within 4-5 songs the station is playing hip hop or rap. No matter what genre I start with the stream always turns into hip hop or rap and it’s mostly nobody artists that aren’t good. I have some songs in those genres in my library but the majority are not. (Also if I’m starting a station with an orchestral film score it stands to reason I probably want to hear more film scores not rap.)
All I can say is I’m glad I haven’t had the same experience. Not huge into rap or hip-hop and have never had them come up. It seems pretty good at recommending new songs to me. Not sure if it uses my current library or my searches but I’ve been happy with it.
it also has loseless quality but the format is not flac but their own codec, so i don't know whether we can call them truly lossless.
Agreed Spotify is totally worth it. I use it a lot to go on like rabbit-hole deep dives into some artist or genre or something, I use it a lot for stuff I will listen once and never again. That would be completely impossible if I was buying individual songs or albums or whatever. Paying for a nearly infinite database of music I can peruse at will following whatever random interests I have that day, that is absolutely worth the subscription fee.
I only play music in my car that is on my phone. I can fit my entire music library on my phone.