HN Distilled

Essential insights from Hacker News discussions

De-Clouding: Music

Original Article

Hacker News Discussion

This Hacker News discussion primarily revolves around the desire to own and control one's music library, moving away from the limitations and uncertainties of streaming services. Here are the key themes:

The Appeal and Necessity of Owning Music

A central theme is the frustration with the ephemeral nature of streaming music. Users express a strong desire to truly own their music, unburdened by the policies and potential removal of content from streaming platforms. The cost of streaming over the long term is also a significant concern, with some users calculating that lifetime subscription costs far exceed outright purchase.

  • "It's frustrating how having been in the 'streaming world' for a decade now, it put a stop to me getting music that I can own DRM-free which puts a pretty big wall in front of this optin for me." - xp84
  • "It's kind of like we've been incurring debt all that time, and the 'payments' are all deferred as long as you keep the subscription. But if I drop the subscription, suddenly I don't own any music newer than 2015, despite having paid $1200 -- it was just to rent music from Apple all that time." - xp84
  • "Consider that if you spend 9000USD on bandcamp you can pass the files on to your great grand children" - jazzyjackson
  • "jen729w: It's also revealing to do the maths on how much you'll spend on streaming if you assume you'll keep your account for the rest of your life. I'm ~50. Let's say I live to 80. 360 months × AU$25 = NINE THOUSAND DOLLARS WAIT WHAT?" - jen729w
  • "The chances your esoteric finds will stick around are precarious. Their entire economic model relies upon providing the least amount of money possible to the rights holders. This seems to often mean removing access to 'expensive' content in customer libraries." - bob1029
  • "I'm considering this idea currently because ATM all the Pink Floyd albums on streaming platforms have names describing the image instead of the original artwork (I assume for the WYWH anniversary.) What it reminded me was that we don't own anything they host so I look forward to exploring this as well." - sailorganymede
  • "It's a good feeling to know none of my albums will ever disappear. (To be sure, albums have disappeared from Qobuz, and now they have a message that says 'be sure to download after purchase !!')" - Jellyfin + Finamp

Self-Hosting and Personal Cloud Solutions

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on practical methods for achieving this ownership through self-hosting and building personal "clouds" for music. Various software solutions and hardware setups are shared as alternatives to commercial streaming services.

  • "I did this by making my own cloud. Simply run a mod server that uses icecast as its audio backend." - zer0sss
  • "I did the same like 2 years ago, but I am using Plex on my NAS. That gives me both, flexibility and owning my music." - zuInnp
  • "I have a 512gb s22 ultra wifi only that was a handle down, the carrier radio was fried and they just sent a replacement... It's an amazing offline mp3 player loaded up with my 45k song Library." - sn0n
  • "obligatory plug for Navidrome [0], a 'personal spotify server' which is simple to set up and allows playback + offline caching on any desktop/mobile device. it's a really polished piece of self-hosted software." - Liquix
  • "I created my own cloud, exposing my Apache WebDAV server via DDNS. Using Evermusic for iOS and simply mounting it as a folder on my laptops." - rckt
  • "I self-host navidrome[1] for music and audiobookshelf[2] for audio books and podcasts as well as syncthing[3] for documents (e.g. ebooks)." - sandreas

Software and Tools for Music Management and Playback

Users recommend specific software and tools for managing, ripping, and playing back music collections. This includes players for various platforms, ripping software, and tools for organizing metadata.

  • "For me Foobar2000 just works on macos" - p0w3n3d
  • "I had a look at Petrichor and Doppler, but the feature-set is incredibly limited. Foobar2000, while strange to use, at least allows me to do basic things like navigate my library by genre." - tern
  • "Jellyfin + Finamp is a solid combo, and a flash modded iPod 4th gen (last one with a black and white screen) to play music in the car." - Jellyfin + Finamp
  • "iTunes 12.13 is actually a solid music player on Windows. Ripping CDs works great too. There's no iTunes that runs on the latest MacOS tho, since they supplanted it with 'Apple Music'." - Jellyfin + Finamp
  • "I also use a python script to quickly add the artist and name id3 tags, but I always just rename the file to 'artist - songname.mp3' too" - voidUpdate
  • "For standalone music players you could try the following: - Hifi Walker G7 mini (cheap) - Hiby M300 - Shanling M0 - Fiio M11 Plus - Sony NW-A306" - sandreas
  • "I rip bargain Audio CDs with EAC[7] to FLAC and then use beets[8] with a cronjob that runs every 30mins to automate the process of importing the files and converting them to MP3 V0[9] to make it compatible with all of my devices (e.g. Car USB Stick)." - sandreas

The "De-Cloud" Movement and Backups

The core concept of "de-clouding" is embraced, referring to the act of reclaiming music from cloud-based services. This also ties into discussions about creating robust backups and ensuring long-term access to purchased or acquired music.

  • "The beginning of a post series? Could be interesting. De-Cloud is a great term for what you’re doing." - unbolted3032
  • "moving away from streaming honestly. recently i was without net for a bit and i found actually i dont have a lot of music anymore locally because i switched to streaming when it came out, happy to ditch a lot of diskspace/cupboard space. now i slowly build it up again ;')" - sim7c00

Discovery vs. Ownership Trade-offs

While the desire for ownership is strong, the convenience and discovery offered by streaming services are acknowledged. Some users try to balance these aspects, using streaming for discovery and then purchasing music they want to keep.

  • "Is there a workflow of fetching individual songs and getting recommended songs? I'm now firmly in Spotify, I used to have whole albums and 'scrobbled' my playlist to Last.fm." - aitchnyu
  • "Spotify, et. al., are wonderful for discovery but the chances your esoteric finds will stick around are precarious." - bob1029
  • "I'm buying used CDs on ebay when I can get them for ~8USD per album, and buying FLAC/ALAC on bandcamp and qobuz for anything that's hard to find." - jazzyjackson

Piracy Concerns and Ethical Considerations

A brief but present thread touches on the line between archiving personal music collections and piracy. While some users justify downloading or ripping music they've paid for, others are more cautious.

  • "rmunn: It's not that hard to set up Audacity to record the audio loopback input on your computer... I'll refrain from explaining the rest of the steps to commit what some people would consider to be copyright violation, though IMHO if you paid for the music you should have a right to download a DRM-free copy as long as you don't distribute it to others." - rmunn
  • "brokenmachine: Sounds like piracy with extra steps and a worse end result." - brokenmachine
  • "Occasionally, for really hard to find stuff, I download from YouTube or get a torrent, but only if I can't find it legally." - raffraffraff
  • "yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 'URL' does the trick for me, then I just load it on to my phone's mp3 player." - voidUpdate