Monday grooving, to push those blues away...

#Music #Bandcamp #Auxio ##GrapheneOS #MondayMood

After about 15 years of using streaming services I eventually got fed up recently. For me the point of streaming services is to have access to vast amounts of music and, more importantly, discover new stuff I like. However niche music is often not to be found or even actively removed from the library, and #Spotify's recommendations (affects all services really, I've tried almost all over the years I think) are so utterly useless, for the last years I've basically paid 11€ a month for listening to the same ~50 songs or so over and over again. Spotify subjectively is especially shit in that regard: maybe it's just me but it seems no matter the size of the playlist, if you turn on shuffle it just plays ~20 tracks of it in a loop.

Anyway, so I went back to #pirating music and I gotta say I'm having a blast! I find that I enjoy and appreciate music more again, I listen to full albums as they were meant to, and most importantly:

The pirates out there offering their collection for download give way better recommendations than any streaming platform's crap algorithm. When someone's got some niche album I'm looking for I now always check the rest of their collection, it's fun looking around and usually I find something awesome I didn't know yet. It's like browsing your friends' CD rack and burning/ripping the ones you like back in the 90s/00s.

Speaking of the 00s – WTF, #Soulseek is still alive and kicking?! I was absolutely convinced it died 20 years ago along with Napster, Limewire and what they were all called back then.

Anyways, I got myself a pretty nice setup now:

* #Mullvad VPN 'cause I don't wanna get mail
* nicotine+ as Soulseek client
* #MPD and #rmpc for listening on my PC
* #syncthing to sync my collection to my phone
* #Auxio for listening on Android

Currently I'm also playing around with #blissify, a CLI tool that analyses your library, generates playlists based on similarity/mood and directly sends them to the MPD queue. Not sure about the results yet but I don't have a very huge/diverse collection so not sure what to expect anyway.

Well, hooray for #piracy!