I’m going insane. I cannot for the life of me find a suitable way to listen to music privately. I’m on iOS, and I don’t know whether to just stick to Apple Music or give up on music in general (I tried, TRIED to go local, but all the apps are shitty). Any way to listen to music and not have your data compromised? Should I just stick to Apple Music and hope that laws change (maybe something like EU’s DMA?)
Edit: Hey all! First of all, thank you so much for all the recommendations! I’ve discovered so many great apps and tools I didn’t even know existed (and it has also brought my hopes up for privacy in general). Even though it’s still not perfect, I’ve been using foobar2000 on iOS, downloading music I find (I’m still using Apple Music for discovery, but will probably stop when my subscription ends this month). For desktop I’m using HyperPipe, which although a little buggy at times is so awesome! One thing I do miss about this system is the lack of lyrics. Apple Music has such a beautiful UI when it comes with lyrics, but you can’t have it all when it comes to privacy it seems. Thanks for the amazing discussion! I’m so far loving Lemmy ;)
I’ll be honest, the only way to listen to music privately is to download it. (And using an opensource music player)
There are Github repositories with CLI programs to download complete Spotify playlists with Youtube and also download their metadata.
there are also CDs and vinyl 🤷
something brilliant I’ve found with modern vinyl is a lot of them come with a download card so you can get lossless files.
now if they would just fucking advertise which ones that would be great.
This. There was music before the internet.
Whoa, you can store music on CDs? That’ll save me a lot of bandwidth!
I wrote a few scripts to automate this entire process for me:
Any opensource music players for iOS you recommend? I found Flacbox which seems alright (a little buggy but you can’t win them all, can you?)
I just use the Music app. With the privacy protections turned up and Apple Music disabled. All it does is ply my aac files without sending data back to Apple.
I’m not sure that’s totally true. The iOS ecosystem is very intertwined. It’s possible that the Music app isn’t sending data to Apple, but it is likely sharing it with whatever Apple calls the launcher, which likely shares it with Apple (or shares it with Siri or another app, which shares it with Apple).
Its not opensource as far as i know, but i use documents5 (or 6 now?) by readdle and its been p good for music
If you’re able and willing to self-host, I’ve developed a pretty great system that automates my entire process. The app I’m using on mobile is also available on iOS
I use a jellyfin server plus finamp for ios plus totally legal downloaded music that was 100% legally obtained.
+1 for Jellyfin with Finamp (or Fintunes). Also what I use and it’s fabulous.
MP3 files that you own. They can never take them away from you, and you don’t have to pay every month for them.
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It sounds like they have Apple Music already. And their problem is privacy, not price.
Android has a fair few foss music apps.
Guess I’ll be the one to ask. Why do you want music privacy?
You assume to know what kind of information is leaking when you use these apps.
How did you come to have these proprietary information?Unless you have proof otherwise - I’m going to assume that they have access to: My location, my ip, typing speed and common spelling mistakes, IMEI identifiers , installed social media apps…
Now all it takes to make an online profile about you is just one more app or website that leaks the same kind of information
Yea of all the things to keep private, my music listening habits isn’t one of them. Tbh the algorithms give me good recommendations
The companies that aggregate data and find patterns in them can probably predict a lot about you from your music listening habits, when they correlate it with data about other people, or even about yourself. The power of profiling isn’t in any specific data but in the patterns that emerge when you gather a lot of diverse data about a lot of people.
Listening habits will tell them about your routine, including where you are, when, and when you have time to listen to music (so, therefore, when you don’t). If you don’t ever listen to music between 8pm and 10pm, for example, it may indicate that you have children to put to bed. If you listen mostly between 12am and 5am it may indicate that you work a nightshift. If you listen between 8 and 9 and again between 5 and 6, you’re probably a commuter. When you listen on a computer and when on mobile will tell them something too. And these are only the obvious patterns that I can think of off the top of my head. AI systems running on big data are designed to find patterns humans don’t notice.
And of course the styles of music you listen to will be readily correlated with demographic profiles. When you feed data into AI systems designed to find patterns people can’t spot, you’ll find the most unlikely data reveals things about people that they’d never imagine you could know.
Given this, it’s entirely possible that your music listening telemetry could eventually influence your credit score, your insurance premiums, your qualification for security clearances or your employability. You don’t know where the data ends up, or with what other data it’s correlated. This is why it’s desirable in general to keep data private if it’s not needed to provide the service.
flac
Jellyfin.
Why? You can just use syncthing
Some people have hundreds of gigabytes of perfectly legally obtained music.
They don’t want all of this on their phone. Also you can have your movies and shows on Jellyfin.
VLC for iOS?
I buy music from 7Digital and Bandcamp, store the files on Plex Media Server and use PlexAmp for playback on my iOS device.
Gotta pirate it unfortunately. Buy it on band camp and support the artists directly, then host it yourself. Navidrone works great.
Do people not just download music anymore?
I’m 26, and don’t know anyone, myself included, who purchases and downloads music to any significant degree. Essentially everyone I know just uses streaming platforms.
He didn’t say anything about purchasing…
to be fair, to buy albums off sites like bandcamp, cutting out greedy multinational media conglomerates and give the money to the ppl actually working on it (yeah, i know, fees, welcome to distribution) and getting basically every (losslees/hr) codec in return for “name your price”-conditions makes it questionable to pirate some indie album to save like three bucks.
Part of my job is traveling by air, so I got a $30ish sandisc mp3 player with a 200+gb sd card. I have a bunch of music and sometimes podcasts on there. Saves my phone battery, has zero ads, and as a bonus it has fm radio for surfing the stations below as they fade in and out every minute or so.
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Sounds terrible for privacy.
Respectfully, I think you may be drastically overestimating how much average people care about that.
Well, considering the community this discussion is in…
And, respectfully, the average person doesn’t seem to give much of a fuck about anything other their own base desires most of the time.
Sure. But the question you asked was “Do people not just download music anymore?”, and the answer to that question, which you seemed unaware of, is “Not really, no”.
Do enjoy your highly refined and elevated desires, O noble one.
How to undermine one’s own comment with a gratuitous insult.
Wow, they got your generation good. I’m over here listening to flac files and mp3s I ripped in 2003.
I have my music library that I listen to, to which I add songs by getting them from youtube (it’s good enough for my cheap on the go earphones). Sometimes I tune into radio stations that offer nonstop music (like stubru tijdloze).
This is always surprising to me. I can understand streaming video due to their high file sizes, but audio (even FLACs) is a lot smaller in general. The only reason I use spotify sometimes is to discover new stuff.
Yeah. Buy it directly from the artist then throw it all into a self hosted service like plex or jellyfin.
There’s also navidrome, if you only want to stream music.
If you only need music streaming, then a service like Navidrome may be better.
Fair enough. Ive never used navidrome
Yup. Buy CDs, vinyl or digital from Bandcamp or from the artist direct and then host it on Plex.
I’ve thought about trying jellyfin but Plexamp is just so nice that I don’t think I could leave it.
There is finamp Im told but yeah plexamp is goated
Classic iPod or mp3 player? Also, the “Music” app on iOS still works like iTunes. You can load albums directly from your computer, even without an Apple Music subscription. Or you could get a Walkman.
