Fastpotify
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#spotify#music#app#more#https#don#client#using#code#doesn
Discussion (539 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I find the Android app particularly bad, just a couple of examples:
- Under a playlist you get a list of suggested songs, the UI element looks like a "regular song", but unlike every other "song" element the user has been trained to recognize, the "swipe right to queue" does not apply to these elements. For some reason.
- When you don't have connectivity, e.g. you walk into a Faraday cage, then the search tries to reach the internet and won't show you results before it either: 1) does so, 2) times out. Which means you can't browse your local library before some websocket times out. Just show me the local results first?
Gross over-simplification. For anyone curious they have videos out there, though they are 10+ years old now so may no longer be accurate, but in 2019-era this was still a thing (company I worked for did it too).[1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvfz4HGtoPc
This is why all the sections of Amazon.com are barely coherent. AWS does this too but it’s more naturally split and text works better than stateful rich media.
This has been a thing / issue since 2025. It's pretty clear the video team probably put that in to bump video interactions, then the whole team got put on something else and now this problem is blackholed. The most bizarre to me is: even Spotify's top managers must use their own product when they helicopter to home, right? So they would see this too.
Where is a Jobsian anger for user experience when it is needed. Although in that respect even Apple is in the gutter these days.
Case in point, I make a daily playlist for running and that UX is frequently changing and often for the worse, but I deal with it because it's a habit that costs me a few seconds maybe a minute per day. The cost of switching to a new thing just feels daunting so I stay.
I also am guilty of enjoying the wrapped summaries at the end of the year :)
The product is more than the tech stack
Really takes shipping your org chart to another level
Is there any music streaming service with fast native cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows, Android) clients? Because I'd switch. Feel like Spotify's recommendations have taken a nosedive lately, so that wouldn't hold me back too much.
i use apple music. love it way more than spotify. i originally got it because their descriptions of albums and their playlists are done by actual music nerds. i use the website on linux since it’s my daily/work driver and their app on my phone and macbook when i use it. the apple music app was fine on windows before i switched to linux entirely. definitely leagues better than itunes was.
have the family plan and i never hear complaints from the family members who use it on android.
i hated how spotify would just remove tracks after id spend time making a playlist and suddenly it would just be gone, like not greyed out, just gone. so irritating.
in terms recommendations, apple is a definitely far better than spotify, but it’s still nothing compared to music store nerds, college radio, or friends. recommendation algorithms from every platform are trash and just can’t compete with other people, at all. go to your local record store, look through the employee recommendations or just talk to them, most of them are working in a music store because they love music (its not for the money lol) and then buy the vinyl, you’ll thank yourself later.
It's way better now, and the recommendations are pretty good. The app is still crap though (although granted significantly better than Spotify!). Theres some bonkers UX decisions and the mix of Apple Music and iTunes store is piss poor. It's just got some illogical crap going on where depending on where in the interface you right click a song or artist it changes what options you'll get.
[0]: https://cider.sh
Spotify doesn’t completely agree with that.
‘Spotify is a digital music, podcast, and video service that gives you access to millions of songs and other content from creators all over the world.’
I left in the middle of their ‘we do Podcasts’ bs, where they were pushing Joe Rogan hard.
Yuck.
https://support.spotify.com/nz/article/what-is-spotify/
That's crazy, I just checked on mine (macOS), it's only ~300MiB, about as much as Apple Mail which is native.
Still a bit much for what I need it for, but tolerable.
1. If you have no connectivity, the app will frequently get stuck in the offline state, playing the spinner indefinitely, even after connectivity has returned. I had similar issues on Spotify, but Amazon Music is so much worse. 2. I had Amazon Music eat my entire cellular plan's data monthly allowance in a day, after it seemingly got stuck in a loop trying to download the same podcast again and again. The podcast is unplayable when it gets in this state, even on perfect Wi-Fi, it just never starts playback. This has happened twice now (incidentally on the same podcast, but different episodes), even after deleting and reinstalling the app entirely.
The second bug is a deal breaker, so I've gone back to Spotify.
Concurrent to this streaming evaluation, I inherited a Sonos system and by the gods is that app pitiful! You would think the premium sound solution that is supposed to "just work" would prioritize UI.
I only went to Spotify because my kids wanted it. The integration for Spotify is still very good, compared to Amazon Music.
best value for money if you use youtube is youtube music app that you get from youtube premium.
I use youtube music, but I am looking for alternatives (but not spotify for various reasons).
I listen to music mainly in the car or maybe as background when I'm cooking or doing other chores. I am not someone who has earbuds in all day or who does focused listening or spends time making playlists or seeking out new artists in my favorite genres. So the playlist management, discovery, etc. features and whether they work well are not really relevant to me. I care that its main functions are easy to use and work, and YouTube music does that.
I search for the album I want to listen to and then listen to it. Sometimes I search for an artist and then locate the album in their discography and listen to it.
The ‘Jam’ function is fun when you have a group of people listening to music together.
One time an employee even stated in the support forum that the ability to disable songs on the Discover Weekly playlist was purposely removed! Yet it was back within a year.
Spotify as a service is also pretty shitty. Their catalog has constant churn from whenever they change licensing deals, but they make no effort to point old playlist references to the exact same song under a different database id. It's infuriating, because it means that playlists rot, and often within a year! Every time I look at my saved songs, more are just missing. They colluded with rightsholders to rip off artists even more, and they have been purposely colluding with a company (run by a friend) making "AI Music" to swamp the service with so they can manipulate the royalty pool to pay out even less money to real artists.
I don't switch because the whole "Play songs" feature works just fine, I like the discovery features when they are semi-functional (I even use the AI DJ garbage sometimes, and it works well!), and the alternatives are Youtube (Which I hate but will probably switch to if Google ever succeeds at banning ad blockers from Youtube), and Apple, who's entire theory of business is hostile to me and I don't own any iDevices.
Any recommendations anyone has for music discovery I'm all ears. I recently moved away from a town that had a 10/10 radio station and I'm really feeling the TOP-40-only pain.
1. family plan that I run. my parents and siblings all use it.
2. social. Sharing playlists matters to me, and everyone else uses spotify. This is also important in my romantic pursuits.
3. It has 10+ years of my listening history; the recommendations are decent, and my playlists go that far back.
4. whatever UI issues it has (and I can name a few off the top of my head), I don't find it difficult to use at all, and I'm used to its quirks.
music is tough business to negotiate all the contracts and figure out a business model
So my only path/answer to this was to cancel it. They poisoned the well so efficiently that I will never trust another streaming service again for my lifetime. I hate rewarding bad business practices, businesses pushing their ideologies towards me. No thanks.
Apple’s boomer surprise when they discovered we don’t all like U2 was hilarious.
The black and neon is truly a not-good choice for a UI. Nevertheless, they persist.
Apple Music has a much better UX. Things like “play next” when you want to play that song next but not clear your other queued up songs are little treats that Spotify took years to catch up to. Many of the other bugs—which people document for them!—go untouched for literally years.
It’s fascinating to me how companies like this ignore easy wins for their users. Have a couple engineers burn down all of those and you’ll win fans (or at least not create enemies.) Take the wins!
If I remember correctly, it has a plus on the side to add it to the playlist. Clearly different I guess (and why would you want to listen to a song before adding it to the playlist amirite?). I also love the way you have to refresh a list to get 3 new songs instead of just getting a scrolling list where you can go back.
let a whole ecosystem of music streaming apps take off that cater to different niches of listeners.
each app would be able to differentiation themselves with their UI but also features like recommendations/playlists/etc. And spotify wouldn't see them as competitors because they'd still be getting their cut because they all go through their API.
I get that not all edge cases (eg swipe gestures) are bullet proof but that doesn't make it terrible software.
The last time I used it, I uninstalled once I realized that my kids could watch Logan Paul YouTube videos through the Spotify app. These masquerade as podcasts, but like a Trojan horse they are just vods of YouTube content. And at the time there was literally no way to disable this. No way to either turn off podcasts or specific content through parental controls or otherwise.
I just wanted to give my kids a way to listen to music while reading. I have since switched to our local community radio station.
Both desktop and iOS ones are very good. As much as a hate Electron, Spotify is a pretty good example of good use of E.
I left Spotify about a year ago and have tried Tidal, Deezer, Qobuz, and Youtube Music. They all have equally worse UI/UX. The Tidal and Deezer apps on Windows were absolute dogshit and would constantly bug out, randomly stop playing, freeze, take ages to load, etc. YTM's UI is awful, and it does not use your liked/saved songs and albums for its recommendations if your Youtube history is turned off, which isn't explained anywhere that I could find. Just absolutely baffling product design decisions all over the place.
I'm blown away by how much all the big music streaming apps suck. Music player UIs were a solved problem 20 years ago.
More and more now I'm using Bandcamp, Subvert, local music enthusiast Discord servers, and even Reddit to discover new music. It's a giant pain in the ass, but it's still less unpleasant than the apps.
I do have a more pared down selection of mp3s loaded on my device in case of emergency, but I use it less and less now.
Until you want to play back a playlist in random order over airplay or bluetooth, then the decade old bug with thousands of replies on their forum confirming it surfaces, and it only loops the first 100 songs in the playlist.
The number of bugs in their service that have existed since inception is insane. It's a buggy mess, and the UI & UX is comically poor. Not to mention the resource usage, as someone else pointed out below its incredibly insane that they think it's ok for it to be such a massive resource hog.
There's a ton of these inconsistencies. For example, the new releases albums where songs become available over time also do not have it. It's infuriating how inconsistent the UI is sometimes.
Not so long ago they also had two versions of the "swipe right to queue" UI, one with long swipe (the current one), and one with a much shorter one. I preferred the shorter (with the hard break) one because it is much clearer when a song actually gets added to the queue. What often happens when you're adding multiple songs to the queue, if you only swipe a little bit, it is unclear if it was enough to add it to the queue. With one song this isn't a problem because a message with "added to queue" is shown, but for multiple songs, the messages are shown on top of each other.
.. which in turn causes my AirPods to connect to my laptop
I have to go manually hunt to connect everything correctly Every. Single. Time.
1. Impossible to purge the play queue. Had to delete every track one by one. 2. Completely broke liked songs years after the feature was launched. 3. They broke offline mode like a billion times. Just download everything again. Especially annoying back in the days when mobile data was expensive. Still does not work like half of the time. 4. Changed to a yellow typeface! I am not even kidding. 5. Included some bittorrent like file sharing in the background.
> “Ctrl+M turns it into a tiny player that wears any classic Winamp 2 skin, spectrum analyser, equalizer, and playlist included. 2000s vibes, pixel for pixel.”
Everything is said with too much intensity, and phrasing that sounds impressive but doesn’t really mean that much. Like “wears any classic Winamp 2 skin” feels so awkward, what’s “wears”? You mean it can use it?
I feel like if you can’t be bothered to write the code, at least document it yourself and write the marketing copy so I know you understand the product. Otherwise how can I trust running it on my computer? Did the LLM generate some amazing rm -rf somewhere, or another blunder that wrecks data I might care about?
Yes, the code is generated. Yes, the docs are generated. I agree LLM copy is annoying and will rewrite them myself.
But I built this for myself out of frustration with the official client, and I use it every day, so every bug I find is fixed immediately. I also care about bugs and PRs from other people, as you can see the amount that have been closed on the repo. The only reason I would stop maintaining this is if Spotify kills it.
I also wouldn't call this vibe coded either. Human directed and LLM generated is fairer. It's been an intense 5 days with tons of design decisions and testing on 3 platforms. I think we need a new vocabulary to distinguish it from "author doesn't care". I do.
> I also wouldn't call this vibe coded either.
It's vibe-coded. Get over it.
End of the day this person is solving a good problem and sharing the work. This is what we want.
I find this kinda funny. Fix the obvious part, better not look at the code.
> The Debian Project nevertheless expects that all contributions submitted to Debian, regardless of how and with which tools they were produced, satisfy the same standards of quality, correctness, maintainability, and legal compliance.
Slop text on the homepage does not scream "quality" to me.
The code is worse, somehow. Endless paragraphs of comments that say nothing: https://github.com/crmne/fastpotify/blob/d9aafbf8e0b0c4d2da3...
Remember when people used to care about making a good first impression?
https://sjsebastian.substack.com/p/thinking-through-the-mach...
I rewrite docs myself on my own projects because they read as very LLMish, there's an intermediate stage which feels slightly less bad where I ask it to remove most of the comments, especially LLM signposting ones and then "rewrite any remaining comments and docs in a dry ukgov/gds style" which makes things slighyly less worse.
Not author. LLM manager, technical producer (if we're borrowing game development language), advanced AI user; not author. Authors are those whose code was used to train LLM(s) you were using while producing this fine piece of software. I'm saying this having neither positive nor negative emotions. Just clarifying.
Does this still have that?
> But I built this for myself out of frustration with the official client
But you didn't build it. This is akin to me telling an intern to build me a widget and then claiming it was me who built it. Or a construction manager saying they built a skyscraper.
Yes, the intern and the construction crew needs guidance and management, but I can't then go to the management committee and claim ownership of the effort.
> I also wouldn't call this vibe coded either.
You didn't write any of the code or even the documentation for that matter. You guided a code generator that relied on you to guide high level decisions but then did all the implementation on it's own. That's vibe coding.
There is no point in taking pride in typing out lines of code by hand. The entire world is moving on.
Some would use the term "Agent Engineering" for what OP did.
It is also totally not what I want for docstrings in code or Powerpoint drafts, where consistency in language is critical.
Intelligence is important but it feels as if the LLM is only capable of conveying information while drenching it in vomit.
It's as if the person writing these lines didn't care about the result. One could argue that people not caring about written documentation isn't anything new, but in the past, these documentations also had little text. So they were easier to digest. Now, we get great walls of text that are hard to read. I cannot say that I like that.
Just share the prompt you used, regardless of how low quality or bad it is, rather than this word spaghetti of 100s of words saying basically nothing, such a waste.
> can you build a website to promote the app
> can you add a page showing off the winamp mode
Semi related, but i've caught myself nitpicking small things from the code of an LLM only to realize i'm putting in more work trying to convince the LLM to make the code the way i want rather than just modifying it myself lol. It's as if i'm trying to educate it in the ideal way, as if it would learn and not repeat the mistake.. but it rarely does of course.
It seems to me that interacting with LLMs has a large pile of cognitive traps for humans.
Documentation is first part people see when presented. I personally hate AI written text even though I do agentic engineering a lot as well. Any user facing documentation must be reviewed, if you snoozy by reading it - remove or rewrite.
I do not care about paragraph long comments in code, because I’m not gonna read them, but I still follow my internal guideline and cut all this verbosity to level where it readable using hooks and skills.
So basicly like you said if you care about product do not add placeholders. It’s take away first impression.
Doesn't matter if it's open source.
Do you not understand it?
This person doesn't owe you any work. He's providing a product for free and this is a reasonable enough description of the product.
> Did the LLM generate some amazing rm -rf somewhere, or another blunder that wrecks data I might care about?
I'm pretty sure at this point hand-crafted code is more likely to contain security bugs. The mythical "rm -rf" random LLM insertion is not a real threat. Every time I see stories about this kind of issue, it's almost always preceded by basically prompt poisoning.
It is real, typically happening when dumber models (haven't personally seen any of the SOTA ones on reasonable thinking/reasoning level do this) try to clean up stuff via bash and forget to assign a variable. Things like "rm -rf sessions/$id" without double-checking $id is actually defined, would do "rm -rf sessions/" and remove the entire directory. Add in more variables in a path like "rm -rf $HOME/projects/$user/$repo/$tmpdir" and the dumb models people think they can use for local coding, promptly removes a lot more than expected.
Not sure how people aren't already running these agents in an environment/sandbox where stuff like this wouldn't matter, locally or not, but some LLMs do truly accidentally delete stuff for people, without "prompt poisoning", I had it happen myself while testing Qwen3.8-27B (BF16) locally just a week or two ago, exactly as described above.
A product being free doesn’t make it exempt from criticism. It’s not about “owing” anybody work.
> and this is a reasonable enough description of the product.
It’s not a great idea to signal a lack of effort, nor is it wrong for users to pick up on that signal. This is the post-llm equivalent to spelling or grammatical errors.
> I'm pretty sure at this point hand-crafted code is more likely to contain security bugs.
LLMs produce code which is fairly ‘locally optimal’, so in good hands they can absolutely be used to build correct software. They also allow those with little to no experience* to cobble something together very quickly and easily while creating a ton of security holes. I think you might be underestimating how common the latter is.
* not to suggest this applies to the OP necessarily. Rather some extra wariness is necessary nowadays since the floor has been lowered so much.
You can criticize it but your criticism is hallow
> It’s not a great idea to signal a lack of effort, nor is it wrong for users to pick up on that signal. This is the post-llm equivalent to spelling or grammatical errors.
Why should you put in effort to something that should be effortless? Why should I waste my time writing some inferior copy by hand?
> LLMs produce code which is fairly ‘locally optimal’, so in good hands they can absolutely be used to build correct software.
Humans produce code which is fairly ‘locally optimal’
Also, interesting you use ‘ as a quote rather than '. I notice these quotes are used with LLM generated text, as I can't find this on my keyboard.
Jokes aside, how can you be sure that the official Spotify app (or any app, or Windows) was not written by a LLM without supervision?
I highly recommend anybody to take up a similar rule, in any context. Slop in a website? Close. Slop in an email? Bin. Slop in a code comment? Skip.
I haven't seen any evidence of Spotify killing librespot. To me the project looks active and works totally fine. I don't have a new Spotify account to verify the claim above.
I suspect wilted-iris is conflating it with the recent changes to the Web APIs: new developer apps can't use all endpoints anymore. In Fastpotify if you add your Client ID I use both an older developer app and your app to keep everything as fast and seamless as possible.
Biggest mistake most librefication projects make is to do their project out in the open where they can easily be subject to legal pressure, then fall into complete disarray the moment that pressure appears. They can't move underground once pressure starts, because everyone already knows who they are.
One part of the classical diaspora I think is both under appreciated and undergoing something of a renaissance is that of contemporary choral music. There are many great examples but two I'd like to draw to attention to two of those I have recently sung, and really enjoy:
(1) The works of Ēriks Ešenvalds,[1] a Latvian composer who was a fellow in composition at Trinity College, Cambridge and brought really a large part of the surprisingly rich eastern European singing tradition to the west. I had never heard of the Singing Revolution against the USSR in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania – countries with a wonderful, rich choral tradition where music (and choirs) played a really nonzero part in the downfall of the USSR. All absolutely beautiful and a group I sing with has worked with a lot of composers from this part of the world. Amazing soundscapes with harmonies that are never quite as good in equal temperament as outside it and yet always tonal and beautiful.
(2) Desmond Earley and the choral scholars of Trinity College Dublin – who conjures up a rich sound world of very pure, Irish tones that almost sounds synthetic but is made entirely from human voices and traditional instruments. It is simple to sing but difficult to master. I would highlight Dúlamán, [3] a traditional song about the economic importance of seaweed.
[1] https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_HYP202607B – track 6 (the whole lot is free!) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing_Revolution [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iRfI1ezYjA&list=RD3iRfI1ezY... – this was a sampler from hyperion too and I have the whole lot legally as flac.
Would you be willing to share a bit more about this setup? The only thing keeping my on streaming is the fact that its almost impossible to find new music otherwise. I know LastFM exists but it just doesn't click for me the way that streaming does. I like discovering music organically.
- Actually listening to the music I have now. I think the art of listening through full albums has slowly died, but there is so much music we're ignoring because we just listen to Artist's top tracks.
- Word of mouth. Asking my friends what they listen to. This is a way that people used to discover music and I've found so much good music this way.
- Bandcamp. Bandcamp is SUCH a good way to discover new music. You can listen to the music in app, there are great articles and you can actually support the artists!
Also, a great resource for discovering new music is the public library. They often have a curated CD section that I then rip into FLAC. I've had great chats with the people in my town's library, and I often pick a totally random CD off the shelves and discover some amazing artists.
I had to migrate away from youtube music since the experience was infuriating me every time. I love making playlists on the go. In youtube music after adding 30 tracks to the play queue, tapping 1 track accidentally deletes the play queue and plays this track. This made me feel bad every time it happened.
I don't see how it is just accepted to lose progress in 2026 as if we're using win95. It feels like 80% of the sw I use provides a caveman UX, not leveraging the tech, leaking implementation details and being constrained by technical reasons. On the other hand, working on Prepbook[0], I realized how hard it is to create the perfect experience and how it's even harder to justify it financially.
I'm doing discovery by talking to people, I love it. Every time I listen to Monolink I recall my co worker that just said "check out monolink" when he heard I love Ott. I love that it makes the experience about connection to people as well.
[0] https://prepbook.app
I found that Spotify was increasingly recommending AI artists and songs I already knew. It surfaced very little outside of my comfort zone and effectively nothing that wasn’t new. There’s a whole world of music out there that Spotify wasn’t showing me.
was a big question mark I had as well. The Clear Channel and iHeart stations are not known for discovery. Now if you find a college station or by some miracle an independent station you can get some new stuff. My favorite local college station is also ad free. They also have an app which I lean on as it's not the strongest transmitter so their coverage is spotty. Maybe there's other indy stations with apps as well??
https://threedradio.com/
I subscribe to them, have done so for ~10 years I reckon. I don't listen as much as I used to, but I want them to continue existing either way.
Be aware, the quality of their playlists is incredibly variable, but that's part of the charm. I guarantee you'll hear something you haven't heard before... for better or worse.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zHR0HMFY60 (with 2 minutes of silence at the start to, presumably, avoid auto-copyright claims).
I listen to a lot of SomaFM (free, https://somafm.com/) and the Flow State radio-podcast (paid, https://www.flowstate.fm/).
I don't know where this opinion came from (Probably Spotify's PR department) but it's just so weird to me. Do you think people didn't find new music before streaming? It's not impossible, you just have to talk to people.
So I can say for sure that I don't share the slop sentiment. Sure, there's some generic filler every now and then, but any non-cohesive mix, as opposed to a carefully curated album is going to have songs that naturally become "fillers".
Just now, I discovered that Spotify snuck in "The Juan Maclean - Running Back To You (2014)", which is a cover of "Brian Bennet - Solstice (1978)". Neither songs are completely unknown, but they're also not exactly Bruno Mars.
I don't know if this is pure luck or algorithmic rhythm analysis, but for me it's working.
How could they possibly do that? They cannot prevent people or AI from reverse engineering their APIs.
I assume that for a long time, Spotify was content to ignore projects like librespot... they didn't help those projects, but didn't harm them either, and generally to keep things stable enough that a project based on librespot basically stayed working, which is why you saw so many OSS tools that used it behind the scenes. It does seem like that balance shifted over the last year, and now librespot is constantly breaking in new and mysterious ways. Some accounts work, others don't. Some tracks play, others don't. The devs did a great job fixing that stuff, but it's a game of whack-a-mole, and Spotify seems to have really upped the frequency of how often they break things. And that's for the lossy decoding, which is functionality that used to be pretty stable. Spotify reached out and (I assume) made some threats that explicitly shut down their work around lossless audio [1].
FYI -- I'm not associated with the librespot project, but I was actively working on a project that relied on it. Eventually I gave up in favor of self hosting, because I want my music to not break all the time. Shame, because I used to like Spotify a lot and now I'm actively looking to move away from it. That's one premium family plan subscription they're gonna lose! I'm sure they'll feel the sting.
[1] https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/issues/1583#issue...
By plausible deniability I simply meant adopting a similar approach that Stremio has, to keep it on the good side of App Store approval processes. The app itself only allows for creative commons content by default, but with the right incantations it can host anything.
Perfect quality and it great selection.
If several artists / bands share the same name, there will be one artist page with all of the artists/bands releases. The queue management sucks, I can add stuff to the queue, move / remove individual entries. That's it. If I added an album to the queue and want to remove it, I have to click a little cross one time for each track of the album. Notifications about new releases: great. Except the UI is a tiny dropdown, and hovering over an item removes the little marker signaling it's a new one. It's really difficult to catch up when there are more than 5 new entries. etc.
Now the dzr developers will break the functionality. On purpose.
I used to use Tidal, until they patched something, and now FLAC is impossible to obtain from Tidal. Hopefully it still works tomorrow, sheesh.
1. (already posted on HN) Wanted to try Midori's early stuff, but no "1st" EP nor "2nd" LP. Not on Spotify nor Apple Music either.
Only yesterday:
2. Looking at Bleach (the Japanese hardcore punk/noise rock band): nothing and they aren't extremely obscure or anything (https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/bleach-4). They're on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/artist/5gRsPZZNgrkagQnDlyFZUC) but missing two LPs; on Apple Music too (https://music.apple.com/us/artist/bleach/74570682) and one more LP available.
3. Okay, let's try Meat Puppets' lauded second LP from my backlog... artist is there, but four first LPs aren't. On Spotify and Apple Music.
4. For fun, let's try to find that very obscure kote kei demo, (螺旋 (Rasen) - Hysterical Noi「z」e / Like「M」(1997)). Nothing, of course, but well, I can't even find it on private trackers or SoulSeek (got some mystery mp3s "somewhere").
So, if I were to stoop down to streaming, looks like Spotify/Apple are less worse here.
In my case, some music I want is unavailable, some releases from Discos Fuentes of Salsa Brava from the 1970s.
But, in this case, they are also unavailable from Tidal, Spotify, etc...
There was a world before Spotify. Though the music labels didn’t much like that world we can easily go back to it.
There was, and it was definitely not "the golden age of music streaming".
Source?
We are seeing a slow but steady stream of small breaking changes, designed to gradually piss off everyone involved. While avoiding a large breaking change that attracts a load of bad publicity.
Sadly this strategy is the only good idea they've had in years.
And arguably Pandora always had a better radio algorithm than Spotify.
It wasn't, really. At least not completely. I fully agree on the algorithm - I miss times of scrobbling to Last.fm, which was much better at this. (Spotify always supported scrobbling to Last.fm from their client, surprisingly).
Spotify used to be snappy and worked really well on Linux. I even used it for local libraries, as it was one of the few options that didn't crash on mine.
It was at the beautiful time when we realized web apps can have local storage, Google released that experiment called Chrome to "show public how modern browser can evolve and inspire other browser makers how to progress". We know it ended up in "extinguish the market with it", unfortunately.
But Spotify chose native app approach - they distributed it as packages. Deezer on the other hand, back then (I don't know now) had just native web app that could pull music locally. I think it was an extension of Chrome (?). It also worked perfectly fine on Linux, almost two decades ago.
We had a lot of decent options back then.
Already ended for me. They killed the plan I was on, and then started sending me begging emails to sign up for a new, more expensive one.
But once I experienced their platform with ads, I just stopped using it entirely.
It's just getting started.
We're going to vibe code the entire enshittified internet to be ours once again.
The dream of the 90's and 00's is alive again. The indie web is going to become unstoppable.
We can build anything of size and scale with the limited spare energy we have now. Every product will be reborn without big tech tendrils.
It’s such a wishful thinking, but no it doesn’t and won’t work this way. Code != useful product. Plus today’s web is all about fabricated content, AI bots, cloudflare challenge walls and all other annoying stuff. The very idea of being able to create something in seconds is already killing internet.
No one in all these years had gone through the effort of replicating the Spotify client with a snappy fast interface for a reason. Everything had been an integration into already existing software, or simpler interfaces, because the effort was not worth it. The equation has changed.
This is the best year in all of my 20 years in tech. I'm creating so much stuff and it's all I've ever wanted.
This is the dream of the 2000's, and big tech can't stop us anymore.
I think I'm going to write my own music player soon that behaves exactly like I want it to. Maybe this weekend. Or maybe right after my home automation project. But I can probably squeeze them both in.
It's like Christmas every day now.
I use explo+slsk+lidarr+navidrome, for access on my phone I use dsub2000 or symfonium but mainly dsub2000.
Explo is the software used for the discovery https://github.com/LumePart/Explo It automatically downloads daily jams, weekly jams and weekly exploration playlists from your listenbrainz account(free) using youtube, soulseek(with slskd) or lidarr (support was merged very recently).
I also imported all my artists from my spotify account when I migrated which you can do in lidarr with the plugin ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶k̶ ̶ bellow ̶b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶s̶u̶p̶p̶o̶r̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶i̶n̶ ̶l̶i̶d̶a̶r̶r̶.̶
plugin: https://github.com/TypNull/Tubifarry
̶f̶o̶r̶k̶ ̶d̶o̶c̶k̶e̶r̶ ̶i̶m̶a̶g̶e̶:̶ ̶g̶h̶c̶r̶.̶i̶o̶/̶l̶i̶n̶u̶x̶s̶e̶r̶v̶e̶r̶-̶l̶a̶b̶s̶/̶p̶r̶a̶r̶r̶:̶l̶i̶d̶a̶r̶r̶-̶p̶l̶u̶g̶i̶n̶s̶
docker image: lscr.io/linuxserver/lidarr:nightly
This plugin is also needed for downloading songs with slsk in lidarr.
There are also excellent listener-supported radio stations that are dedicated to nothing but introducing people to really cool music they wouldn't otherwise hear. Examples:
- KEXP (Seattle, WA)
- KCRW (Los Angeles, CA)
- KUTX (Austin, TX)
- WYEP (Pittsburgh, PA)
- So many college radio stations; they still exist and are probably going to see a resurgence now that the youngs are detaching from tech
(Soapbox: I believe that algorithmic music discoverability works for music _you already like and listen to_ but is terrible for music _you haven't heard before but might like_.)
https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip
I’m using a similar setup, with Lidar/Navidrome, but using Subwave for discovery. It works very well for going through your library and playing music like a radio station would, but it won’t recommend anything that’s not already in there.
Sorry I set this up quite a long while ago and didn't remember correctly.
And it seems to have been merged so the plugin branch is not needed anymore, see: https://github.com/Lidarr/Lidarr/pull/1829
So the official image would work.
edit:
I just migrated and I can confirm it works.
I used lscr.io/linuxserver/lidarr:nightly, note that the `latest` tag won't work as it's using the `master` branch which doesn't have plugin support yet, so either use the `nightly` tag or the `develop` tag.
See: https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-lidarr/#version-ta...
As Music Assistant supports subsonic (https://www.music-assistant.io/music-providers/subsonic/) and Navidrome expose a subsonic endpoint it should be possible (https://www.navidrome.org/docs/developers/subsonic-api/).
Whether the distinction matters or not, it would be nice for everyone involved if projects falling into the second category were more upfront about that.
When I commit I either mark it as my own commit if I've read through every line of that commit at least once (not skimmed), pushed back, changed, etc, or put as "ai@<a word I use>" if it was mostly "fine, do it…" or the "whatever… " phase. I never let AI write a single word of documentation or comment. And I made sure Claude removed its attribution the first time I started using it. Besides I was using GLM 5.2 at that time so Claude was not a fit anyway. I don't think they should have that default behaviour.
I can look for myself and see that the repo was started a week ago and has had hundreds of commits since, and that the author exclusively talks about ai on twitter. I'd just like it if I could save myself some time, and it would prevent useless discussions in this thread were people argue whether the commit-messages look like ai.
The demos are very good: https://www.egui.rs/#clock
Edit: egui is an immediate mode GUI library written in Rust. egui runs natively on , and on the web it is compiled to WebAssembly and rendered with WebGL or WebGPU. Everything you see is rendered as textured triangles. There is no DOM, HTML, JS or CSS. Just Rust.
egui is great for video game debug UI overlays and internal tools, and maybe some specialized graphical tools. Otherwise its quirks are too annoying for general purpose app usage. Sure, you banged out a UI quickly with it, at the expense of your users.
* Right off the bat in the login screen, if you resize the window, it flickers
* I logged in. Double clicking the top part of the window doesn't maximize it, like I expect on basically all other windows. I'm using MacOS, btw
* Resizing the main home screen is also a flickery mess. Though I'll give credit, it's a fast flickery mess, because the official spotify app resizes like ass
* Okay, here's one more specific to egui and why I think its approach is not good outside of the app types I listed in my original comment: I type some text in the search bar. Let's say I want to highlight the last word after I've typed it, in order to delete it or type something else. On every other app on my system, I can hold Option + Shift + Left Arrow Key. Or perhaps Cmd + Arrow Keys to move the cursor to the start or end of the line. The egui app just doesn't work, because egui misses so many fine details about text manipulation on a given OS.
* In general, text handling just sucks
* Scrolling doesn't have the inertial bounce when it hits the ends of a scroll action
* It's very easy to create overlapping UI elements by resizing panels and/or the window itself.
Anyway, those are just some of the things from a few minutes of trying this specific app out.
In general, if it's an egui app, I already know there will be weird resizing glitches/flickers, a poor text editing experience, and it will typically not follow the platform's idioms and built-in gestures, scroll physics, behaviors, etc. In this case, the app is decent since it mostly just needs to play music, and you mercifully don't need to interact with it much when it comes to text and such.
But saying "It's a GUI like any other" is like saying "wonderbread is a bread like any other". Maybe it's a curse of knowledge? Similar things happen with coffee. One person says "tastes like coffee" while another can pick out individual flavor notes. Maybe I'm shouting into the void and no one gives a shit anymore, I dunno. But to me, these things matter and are a mark of quality.
If we have LLMs that can shit out whatever code now, why aren't people having them output truly "native" GUIs that use the UI framework of the OS so they can get all the expected behaviors by default?
This is really not a good solution for web apps, and if you're vibe coding your apps anyway, there isn't any reason not to have a native browser application.
But maybe it could be cool for doing some advanced animations or rendering games or something.
https://crates.io/crates/tauri-egui
Maybe I’ll use it in my next project, the demos are good!
So that's why text selection doesn't work.
Hoping for a future in which people complain about missing basic functionality like winamp mode being missing in their music player of choice!
Let me start: I was going to recommend foobar2000 with the spotify plugin but the lack of a winamp mode must be a dealbreaker for many!
I did the same for Postman/Bruno.
Spotify's "random shuffle" has been broken for years, with a long running thread [1] complaining about it. A lot of the commenters think there is some kind of "artist priority" playing algorithm, with some kind of maximum profit goal or something. But I think it's simpler - if Spotify just plays the same ~20 songs, they save a lot on bandwidth as it can just play from a local store. Who knows the real reason, I just know that it's annoying when I have a 2000+ song playlist and only hear a small percentage of it.
And yes I'm aware last year Spotify announced "fewer repeats" shuffle - but it doesn't work, or isn't sufficient anyway.
[1] https://community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/All-Platf...
All the other lightweight Spotify clients roll their own UIs in ways that I don't like, so I really appreciate that their LLM has taken the time to clone the UI 1:1.
But now I have to decide if I want someone else's vibecode on my computer. I think not.
I've been slowly trying to stop my spotify usage and replace it with owned audio files.
Mostly I try to use Bandcamp but many artists are not there. Sometimes I just rip the audio from youtube but would prefer a way to buy that gives most of the money to the artist.
How do you all GIFT music these days?
My brother recently sent me a new album for my birthday. Very kind. But, it's on vinyl. And I don't have a player.
But it just reinforces thoughts I had before. I had wanted to gift him some music too, but, how? He has a phone. He has a computer. He's not particularly tech savvy. I know I can't ship him a CD, he has nothing that can rip it.
I know you buy an album on Amazon, they let you download the MP3s right away. But, how do I even gift that? Can you even download MP3 to an iPhone? From someplace not Apple? I honestly have no idea.
And it just highlights, to me, the entire (seemingly) difficulty of gifting music today.
Me, I still buy CDs and rip them.
- Bandcamp (for new music)
- Second hand CDs for charity shops and discogs (for older music)
- Quoboz / Amazon (for new music not on bandcamp or something specific I can't find elsewhere)
But it's been a long time since I've heard anything good enough to purchase.
- Bandcamp
- CD
- 7digital
I host the media on a Jellyfin server and use offline playlists on my phone with Finamp for Android, works quite well for me!
Obviously streaming was the big selling point, something that iTunes didn’t offer at the time, but I swear the client was written in some native UI framework, along with the C/C++ library.
Or was the spotify UI always just a browser engine skin and the perception of speed was from the playback engine?
Anyway, cool to see projects like this
The calibre went from extremely high to surprisingly average within a decade. Not bad, to be clear, but kinda mid. I think they scaled too quickly and hit the 'bozo effect'.
Yes, anecdotal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UsnX5X_DF0
It was originally native, then native with some web-based bits, and then the web-based bits slowly ate the whole thing. It seems the ease of development with web-tech compared to C++ (also the better font rendering and screen reader support) was just too tempting.
Interestingly the Spotify client was never based on electron but instead arrived independently at the "chromium + web app" architecture at around the same time as Atom did.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28203654
What's funny about having to rely on unauthorized clones to provide a fast native UX was that Spotify's original client back in 2008 started out as beautifully light, custom rendered native client.
Few Apps ever had that wow factor the first time I used it, it was so much lighter and more responsive than anything else of the day. I remember being perplexed at how I could search and skip to any part of a song quicker than iTunes could looking at a local library. Everything was latency-free and instantaneous.
We were building a Music Startup at the time, so we investigated how it worked. We we’re very surprised we couldn’t find any evidence of an established UI toolkit. It looked as though they had built their own custom UI renderer and optimized TCP protocol which sent back its metadata in XML. Their traffic looked like it was initially seeded from their own (or CDN) servers (for best latency) and then overtime we would see some P2P traffic on the wire.
Our QT/C++ client had decent performance but was noticeably heavier than Spotify's. I was disappointed to see their native client eventually be abandoned and succumb to become yet another Chromium wrapper. I expect it fell to the pressures of a growing startup adding 100s of developers (without the skill of their original CTO/devs) where a native UI couldn't be updated and re-iterated as fast as a Web App. I wish they maintained 2 desktop clients, and left their native client alone to just be an audio player and push all their new social features to their new flagship CEF app.
It's unfortunate the skill and desire of building fast native UIs are being lost to Electron and CEF wrappers. Seems the larger the organization the more likely they are to build new Web rendered Desktop Apps and we have to rely on unauthorized Indie efforts like this for fast, responsive native UIs.
(The comment is from a 2021 post about another Rust-based Spotify client.)
Most of the GUI apps had something similar to the official app in the maximized window, but none had a good mini-player, something I could put in the corner of an external monitor and control most of the important functions with minimal mouse clicking, including EQ and playlist.
Interestingly this one with its Winamp mode is what I was looking for. Nostaliga is probably playing a part, but it a good UI does not have to be "modern".
I also went through a tour of TUI apps. Lots of interesting work there, but a full TUI with windows was less convenient to navigate, and some of them try to do too much. I wound up using https://github.com/hrkfdn/ncspot because it specifically does not attempt to be a character mode GUI. Almost like a ViMusic.
For comparison I was using Apple Music via safari before.
I’m just surprised that such a big company can produce such an awful web experience, guess everyone is just using the native app, but for some that’s not possible
The UI feels a lot less sluggish than the official client (which in my experience seems to have gotten way worse lately) but in many cases I am just sent to a loading page which ultimately takes a similar amount of time to load the content. So it seems a lot of the slowness is coming from the Spotify server side, it's just that the official client seems to freeze while waiting for a response whereas this doesn't.
Hopefully Spotify don't kill librespot. As I understand it you can basically only use it with Premium accounts, so it's not like they aren't getting paid anyway. If some other provider were to come along and offer access to the same content as Spotify with a stable API that you can use with any client, I would pay more for that than I currently do for Spotify.
As an aside, ncspot is another good and more minimalise Spotify client, which is a TUI.
Potify sounds like a toddler is learning to take a dump. And well, putting "fast" in front of it doesn't impress either in that case.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-E24t0YM2g
Must be one of THE WORST engineering orgs running right now.
They're great to integrate into a game loop because you control your loop, (and they're a delight to use) but I thought for perf retained mode was the way to go?
Am I missing something? Then again if the bar needing to be beaten is spotify's existing desktop app maybe it doesn't matter?
I have a custom IM GUIs based ide thing in C++ that uses like .2% of my 10yo CPU.
1. Latency. A click paints on the next frame, because it sidesteps the stages of a retained mode UI: there's no dirty-marking, no layout and paint passes scheduled for later, no cached visual state that can be stale.
2. Simplicity. The UI is a plain function of app state. There's no retained tree to keep in sync and no invalidation bugs: mutate the state and the next frame shows it.
Yes, the drawback is that you have to watch what a frame costs, but it doesn't repaint at every frame. It paints on input and you can schedule repaints yourself. Fastpotify sits at zero CPU when idle, asks for a few frames a second while a track plays, and runs at full rate only while you scroll.
Once that happened I wasn't then sure if issues I'm seeing are from api or the app itself. It's possible this is prioritising the responsiveness of the UI rather than the actual speed of user interactions.
Also the menu bar icon doesn't work for me (on MacOs). I can see it, but it doesn't do anything and there's nothing in the app itself to enable/disable it (though thankfully it does respect cmd+drag to delete).
However, at the beginning I had to choose between Slint[1] and egui[2] (which this project uses)
[1]: https://slint.dev/
[2]: https://www.egui.rs/
Anyone has experience in both and is able to drop some thoughts on their strengths & weaknesses for mid-to-large projects?
I have been using Spotatui and it's been fast enough, but it would be nice sometimes to have a better 'new music' search experience. I'll give this a try, but if Spotify are hell bent on destroying API users, I fear the project maintainers will have more work than it's worth.
- would love to be able to disable podcasts / anything non music related. it's my #1 gripe with the official Spotify client today.
- Winamp buttons shouldn't remain "pressed" in that play state
- Winamp doesn't like being stuck to one edge of the screen, after putting there and interacting it will often jump inward a bit
- Winamp could use the EQ in collapsed mode
- Would be nice for Winamp to remember its position (i think it grabs the NW corner of the large player every time?
Although the scope is different but I imagine a similar debate when one didn't need to write machine code anymore...
It uses 300 MB of RAM on my MacBook. Saving 50MB of RAM in exchange for losing the ability to play lossless files isn't a trade I want to make.
Cool project though, will keep an eye on it.
https://quad9.net/result/?url=fastpotify.rocks#domain-tester
ThreatStop lists the following info:
Severity Level: 5 of 5 Confidence Level: 5 of 5 Risk Level: 4 of 5
I assume this is a false positive, but who can be sure in this day and age...
It's small ~10mb. Yes, takes a bit more memory, but it plays all your local files including rarer things like FLAC + Cue, midi and all the tracker files you could want!
And includes a bunch of viz - and you can write your own too.
It doesn't do Winamp skins; decided I wanted to add more than they could support.
Built a native Spotify player with Rust and GPUI: https://github.com/infomiho/cadence
[1] https://github.com/kraxarn/spotify-qt
asking it to "disassemble Spotify and find out the minimal code path needed to play a song" is much more in reach. I don't need it to oneshot it. If it gets stuck, I've read enough disassembled C to figure it out and get it unblocked.
Instead of banging my head against a binary for 5 hours, I'll have my agent bang it's weights for 20 hours, then put in my 1 hour of polish.
My first task would be to fix the Android version of Facebook Messenger. My friends still stick with it because they have iPhones, and that version works fine. I have been putting up with broken image previews for 2 years now. I'll fix that fucking wild pointer they don't care about and make it usable as a chat app. And I'll remove the ads while at that.
I decided to use the new PlayPlay instead, the DRM path the official apps actually use. That also gets you music videos, and lossless / FLAC (still working on the decode). Also the app is more focused on the native Win11 niche for the folks who like those type of UIs.
EDIT: I forgot about the Spotify Helper processes - taken into account the original spotify needs ~1GB. However it's still a lot faster than Fastpotify
What I've realized is that Spotify is great for discovering new songs. But I'm a grown up and listen to the same hundreds of songs every day anyway. No need to keep paying the taxes.
The most user hostile part about Spotify though, is that you can't just thumbs down a song and never hear it again. Why the fuck would I want you to "not recommend it for 30 days" if I'm telling you I dislike it?
If I didn't lock in a bundle deal years ago that I still can't pass up, I wouldn't use it at all. As of now though, it's relegated to my backup player for when I can't find a song on YT Music or Qobuz.
What would YouTube music support look like? And another random feature request - universal playlist import / export (i.e. take my YouTube playlist and convert it to Spotify and vice versa - Rosetta stone style)
I want the song to be a starting point, like Last.fm radio was, I almost never want to listen to every version of it.
Had a lot of crashes, it often took many many seconds to change between the songs and often getting stuck, the buffering algorithm was nuts and eating a lot of bandwidth.
Everything on a standard Pixel. Full 5G coverage was available.
Alternatives?
Downsides are no native client (same webview approach as Spotify), not as strong recommendations (though slowly improving), good but slightly quirkier UI (also slowly improving). For me the trade offs are worthwhile.
[0] eg. https://resources.onestowatch.com/ethical-music-streaming-pl...
Fuck Spotify and their rotten leadership. Was amongst the early adopters (2009). I'm sure they won't care for the loss, and I won't miss th when they're gone.
So, Deezer that had a audiophile target audience, has effectively lost the game.
how is a lack of an offline, standard, widely supported option a benefit?
Apple Music pays artists better, too.
I'd use it otherwise, this is great.
I stopped sharing after that.
[0] https://spicetify.app/
Hmm, a music player now use much RAM :/
that could hardly care less for it's users / customers.
Would love a setting to also remove the "Made for you" section, as well as the "Recommended for you" section, both on the home page.
I was using Spicetify to customize the official client to this effect, using CSS.
Could you speak a little more about the trade-offs and decisions there w.r.t. performance.
(Nice work btw, seems very interesting!)
C.f. this comment[0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49519099
I've been using it for a while, shows up as a speaker, and uses around 25-40MB of RAM.
My spouse, for example, doesn't interact with her clock app anymore—she just talks to it.
Wouldn't many programs just use a local LLM to perform whatever is needed?
How desperate do you need to be to resort to this?
I mean you can beat AI to do anything nowadays, but this looks not that bad
But hey, he's here, we can just ask him! @earcar
I guess what you mean is "OS-provided controls". In that case, ye that is not what this is.
Either it’s good or it isn’t, but it’s not good or bad because of how it was made.
Aside machining POM, what else is there. Injection molding tend to be great.