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this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2025
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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and apparently spotify has found a new low
I killed my sub years ago because of the rogan shit along with disliking what they were forcing the product to become (and clearly indicated all of this in the why-leaving input field) but this makes me wish I could kill it even harder
I’ve been wanting to go back to some sort of DAP full time but I’m not a huge fan of Android being the experience. Anyone got recommendations of a non-Android based DAP so I can cut the streaming services out for good?
I miss my Creative Zen back in 2008.
I just got a cheap-ass Sandisk MP3 player, as part of my efforts to both stop streaming and stop depending on a phone so much when I'm outside. It has an audiobook function which didn't work but after a firmware update it does, mostly. It's not a good device by any stretch but it cost me 20€ and I consume a lot of audiobooks, and it's extremely calming to not be exposed to a smartphone when I read.
On the music side of things the biggest change wasn't so much the devices but getting more into bandcamp, with a healthy supplementation of stuff downloaded from soulseek, torrents, and on a pinch, youtube. I make wishlists of small bands I like and buy full albums on bandcamp friday. Listening to these offline made me able to listen to entire albums again, like in the physical media days, which again I find to be incredibly calming compared to hopping between the same favourites on shuffle.
Spotify actually helped me discover music, both through user-created playlists and algorithmic suggestions. I hear it's all full of "AI"-generated music and lists, though, and I found a much more powerful algorithm to discover music, called "asking people".
Got a couple of these sandisk players for my boys. Theyre solid!
Tangara is an open source project made by a fediverse hardware hacker with contributions from other fediverse personalities. it’s reputedly pretty good, though all the reviews I’ve seen are from other fediverse posters so it may be worth looking at some independent reviews to confirm it’s not just homegrown optimism.
at the risk of going open source reply guy and making a recommendation you can’t follow up on, I’ve had a lot of success with Jellyfin as a media library/local streaming host and the beta version of Jellyfin as an app that lets me stream FLACs on my local network and seamlessly download them onto my phone. a VPN or a Jellyfin library on a VPS can let you stream your stuff almost anywhere in much higher quality than Spotify.
I don’t own a Tangara though I do want one, and I’m fairly sure they don’t support the Jellyfin API yet, but if you end up missing a more Spotify-style listening experience then it might be worth inquiring if there’s any Jellyfin client projects in progress.
I can speak for the tangara, lovely hardware but it is an mp3 player first and foremost. the hardware is technically capable of network stuff but their software stack is mostly focused on recreating that iPod experience and keeping the battery life to days of playback. It does take some getting used to if you've been living in musical algoworld for a minute
I miss my old Sansa Fuze running rockbox and absolutely wouldn’t mind a new device in that class
I miss mp3s being widely available. The lack of easy piracy also coincided with me just spending less money on music at all. (Lot of other factors as well).
However I think some of those other streaming services provide lot better rates per song for the artists than Spotify.
last analysis I saw (which, admittedly, was almost ~2y back now I think) said Apple Music was the best by a pretty wide margin, with the rest falling with lower marks after
probably need to look around for updated data soon
I fell off Spotify years ago and never subbed, nice to see I made the right call.
This has been a problem for a while esp with podcast providers, who put ice ads in podcasts and then the podcasts get blamed. (Despite having very little control over it, and the control also often being ignored).
I feel that if you are an USian who thinks that accepting US government contracts has become morally incorrect then fretting over swedish audio streaming companies is a waste of your time.
edit: free market solutionism as a response to having a dollarstore sturmabteilung running the streets in the USA just rubs me the wrong way. Sorry if the original post reads a bit coy, I just feel it would be incredibly cringe of me to make overt recommendations on how to handle things from the relative safety of living in a first world country on the other side of the world.
Swedish audio streaming companies who recruit for ethnic cleansing militia squads, and whose profits are reinvested in "AI" murderdrone arms dealer Helsing.
This wasn't a pro-spotify post, it was a your government isn't something you can just boycott away post.
Like, your taxes are already paying for ICE directly.
That's like "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism so I'll get an Amazon Prime subscription" thinking.
You can't boycott away a government, you can't even boycott away a corporation for that matter. That doesn't mean we should just give up and be complicit.
Governments are toppled, not opted out of, is all I'm saying.
Also not sure I agree that all consumer activism is inherently in vain.
@Architeuthis @froztbyte if someone built, say, social housing with money from the US government, I wouldn't care who was currently president. Guns guns guns, WMDs and Gestapo recruiting, OTOH 😬
(As long as they deliver, and aren't just lining their pockets, ofc)