4 ms·

> it seems that Funkwhale would be the easiest one to get people out of Spotify/Apple Music/Youtube Music/etc, and I am trying to figure out what is missing to

by bhaney 3y ago

> it seems that Funkwhale would be the easiest one to get people out of Spotify/Apple Music/Youtube Music/etc, and I am trying to figure out what is missing to get more people interested and using it As someone who's subscribed to Apple Music despite thinking it's overpriced and would love a good alternative, I guess I can be a case study here. I use Apple Music for roughly three situations: - I'm driving and want to listen to music. Usually a mixture of music I hear all the time and like, and new music that is similar to the music I already know I like - I want a random assortment of chill classical music to lull me to sleep or get into a relaxed mood - A song comes up in conversation and I want to quickly pull it up ("oh, you think that noise we just heard sounds like that riff from song X? Let's check. Hey siri, play song X") I'm not very well informed about Funkwhale's feature-set, but I'm under the impression that it wouldn't do any of that well, much less all of it. Am I wrong?

rglullis 3y ago
The main difference from Funkwhale to the "streaming" services is that you need to "build" your music catalog, either by uploading your own music collection and/or following other people's libraries. So, "out of the box" you are not going to get any music available unless you join some instance which has an extensive catalog of copyright-free music or gives public access to songs they own copyrights. For your use cases: > I'm driving and want to listen to (...) mixture of music Yes, Funkwhale can create "radios" which generates playlists like what you describe. You can choose to generate the playlist according to how often you listen to it or whether it is your "favorites" list or not. > I want a random assortment of chill classical music to lull me to sleep or get into a relaxed mood. If you have already access to this music, the radios can be set according to a specific genre. > A song comes up in conversation and I want to quickly pull it up That will depend on whether this song is available to you on the instance.
- bhaney 3y ago
  Well that makes the problem pretty clear. People are sticking with Spotify/Apple Music/Youtube Music because those platforms enable algorithmic discovery of new music that they want to listen to. Somewhere on my hard drives, I have hundreds of gigs of flacs comprising my "old" music library that I used to maintain, because that's how I used to interact with music. I haven't accessed or updated that library in 5+ years now because manually maintaining a personal music library completely fucking sucks for the casual music listener, even with perfect interfaces. It's a lot of effort, and the end result is that you get to listen to the same songs over and over again and are completely on your own for finding any new music that you want. Compared to algorithmic discovery services that can cut through the monotony of repeat plays with fresh songs that I've never heard or barely remember but am still very likely to enjoy, it's no surprise that a lot of people are moving away from manually curated libraries. I don't want my music listening to be limited only to songs that I've previously discovered myself - I want something that has awareness of more or less "all" music to pick good songs for me without having to lift a finger, and existing services have gotten pretty good at that. I recognize that for copyright reasons at the very least (not to even get into technical issues), projects like funkwhale can't possibly provide this functionality. That's okay and understandable, but it's also the reason why people aren't switching to it.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    Funny I lean on YouTube for music discovery but mostly listen out of my own library. The worst problem I have managing it technically is that M.F. Doom hasn’t recorded two albums under the same name.
    - bhaney 3y ago
      What does your process look like for discovering music on youtube and then getting that music into your personal library? If you're not discovering while you're typically listening, then you must be setting aside some separate time for discovery, and then curating those discovered songs, acquiring their files somehow, and integrating them into your library, right?
      - PaulHoule 3y ago
        Basically yes. If I was smart about it I'd get one of those YouTube downloader scripts and attach it to something that puts on metadata and do it all in one step. I do it in bursts and frequently it is motivated by reading something about music, then looking up the music on YouTube and listening to it there for a while before I decide something is worth putting in the library. For what it's worth I am not particularly interested in music that came out in the last year or so, not like I am fundamentally opposed to it, but given that the event horizon for decent music recordings is roughly 1965, I think there is more older music than I haven't heard yet than there is new music. Also my approach is album and discography oriented partially because I really like listening to albums and partially because it's often easy to get a whole discography. So it is not like I am keeping track of tracks I like as much as it is albums and artists that I like.
      - SAI_Peregrinus 3y ago
        I do the same thing with Youtube & Spotify. Use the algorithmic feeds when I feel like listening to new music (or being notified of releases), buy downloadable versions or CDs & rip them if I like something new that showed up in the algorithm. Most of the time I listen to music from my library, but sometimes I feel like a change.
kej 3y ago
>subscribed to Apple Music despite thinking it's overpriced and would love a good alternative It's not perfect, but a YouTube Music subscription also gives you ad-free regular YouTube. That's a pretty nice bonus if you're going to be paying for music streaming anyway.
- bhaney 3y ago
  I think I would much rather just stop streaming music entirely than make a Google account and pay them for their music streaming service.

by bhaney 3y ago

rglullis 3y ago

The main difference from Funkwhale to the "streaming" services is that you need to "build" your music catalog, either by uploading your own music collection and/or following other people's libraries. So, "out of the box" you are not going to get any music available unless you join some instance which has an extensive catalog of copyright-free music or gives public access to songs they own copyrights. For your use cases: > I'm driving and want to listen to (...) mixture of music Yes, Funkwhale can create "radios" which generates playlists like what you describe. You can choose to generate the playlist according to how often you listen to it or whether it is your "favorites" list or not. > I want a random assortment of chill classical music to lull me to sleep or get into a relaxed mood. If you have already access to this music, the radios can be set according to a specific genre. > A song comes up in conversation and I want to quickly pull it up That will depend on whether this song is available to you on the instance.

bhaney 3y ago
Well that makes the problem pretty clear. People are sticking with Spotify/Apple Music/Youtube Music because those platforms enable algorithmic discovery of new music that they want to listen to. Somewhere on my hard drives, I have hundreds of gigs of flacs comprising my "old" music library that I used to maintain, because that's how I used to interact with music. I haven't accessed or updated that library in 5+ years now because manually maintaining a personal music library completely fucking sucks for the casual music listener, even with perfect interfaces. It's a lot of effort, and the end result is that you get to listen to the same songs over and over again and are completely on your own for finding any new music that you want. Compared to algorithmic discovery services that can cut through the monotony of repeat plays with fresh songs that I've never heard or barely remember but am still very likely to enjoy, it's no surprise that a lot of people are moving away from manually curated libraries. I don't want my music listening to be limited only to songs that I've previously discovered myself - I want something that has awareness of more or less "all" music to pick good songs for me without having to lift a finger, and existing services have gotten pretty good at that. I recognize that for copyright reasons at the very least (not to even get into technical issues), projects like funkwhale can't possibly provide this functionality. That's okay and understandable, but it's also the reason why people aren't switching to it.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Funny I lean on YouTube for music discovery but mostly listen out of my own library. The worst problem I have managing it technically is that M.F. Doom hasn’t recorded two albums under the same name.
  - bhaney 3y ago
    What does your process look like for discovering music on youtube and then getting that music into your personal library? If you're not discovering while you're typically listening, then you must be setting aside some separate time for discovery, and then curating those discovered songs, acquiring their files somehow, and integrating them into your library, right?
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      Basically yes. If I was smart about it I'd get one of those YouTube downloader scripts and attach it to something that puts on metadata and do it all in one step. I do it in bursts and frequently it is motivated by reading something about music, then looking up the music on YouTube and listening to it there for a while before I decide something is worth putting in the library. For what it's worth I am not particularly interested in music that came out in the last year or so, not like I am fundamentally opposed to it, but given that the event horizon for decent music recordings is roughly 1965, I think there is more older music than I haven't heard yet than there is new music. Also my approach is album and discography oriented partially because I really like listening to albums and partially because it's often easy to get a whole discography. So it is not like I am keeping track of tracks I like as much as it is albums and artists that I like.
    - SAI_Peregrinus 3y ago
      I do the same thing with Youtube & Spotify. Use the algorithmic feeds when I feel like listening to new music (or being notified of releases), buy downloadable versions or CDs & rip them if I like something new that showed up in the algorithm. Most of the time I listen to music from my library, but sometimes I feel like a change.

kej 3y ago

>subscribed to Apple Music despite thinking it's overpriced and would love a good alternative It's not perfect, but a YouTube Music subscription also gives you ad-free regular YouTube. That's a pretty nice bonus if you're going to be paying for music streaming anyway.

bhaney 3y ago
I think I would much rather just stop streaming music entirely than make a Google account and pay them for their music streaming service.