I use deemix to get songs and jellyfin/finamp to listen on my phone. I do miss the discovery of new music from things like Spotify or YouTube music. If anyone has suggestions for music discovery I'd love to hear about them.
Open the Nicotine program that connects to the Soulseek network, then chat with the heads on there. Name a few artists you like and they can hook you up.
The most knowledgeable music listeners around.
Pretty sure you can search for ppl who have files of an artist you like, and then view their entire library.
(NB. Been 10 years since I've used it, so YMMV)
Sources:
• FLAC on Plex or Jellyfin
• Apple Music set to highest quality
Output:
• Bluetooth to Car speakers when driving
• AirPods when walking
• AppleTV to Denon receiver to Polk speakers when playing music for whole house (occasionally I use a turntable here instead)
• iPad to a 2.1 Edifier setup playing VSQ when falling asleep
Not often enough:
• Technics SL-1200MK5G or SL-1500C to my AKG K240 Studio headphones
• high
Edit:
Now I’m gonna have to go back through all my old Lemmy posts because there’s so much info here it feels like I doxxed myself.
Spotify through Sonos at home and work. Spotify on Google earbuds when out and about.
I used to really love music discovery on Spotify. I now find it's the same ald songs over and over. It finds what you like and reinforces that rather than gradually expand it.
I used to really love music discovery on Spotify. I now find it's the same ald songs over and over. It finds what you like and reinforces that rather than gradually expand it.
I'm in the same boat. For years now it's felt like every daily mix and discovery playlist is 10 songs I recently just listened to on repeat and then 2 songs that aren't even tangentially related and I'm left questioning why they were being shown to me.
FLACs through PlexAmp, either to nice headphones ($500 range) or two channel stereo into some decent speakers with a decent subwoofer. I'd like to upgrade to "full range" speakers one day and save the subwoofer for movies.
PlexAmp does FLAC when connected to Wi-Fi but I have it set to transcode if I'm using mobile data.
At home it gets played through Chromecast Audios (R.I.P) which keeps it all digital until it hits my receiver.
Not everyone can discern the difference between a 96KHz FLAC and 256kbps AAC.
I can't. But I still can (barely) tell the difference between 256kbps AAC, and 96kbps AAC.
But I can tell if a song was well-engineered or a mess.
I believe those who can't discern the difference between bitrates (especially on high bitrates), but have the appreciation for good music, good mixing, and good mastering, can still be considered audiophile.
Especially when your browser or application requests a high quality bitrate, youtube compression is opus 128.
A person could make the argument that it’s not lossless so it’s not worth listening to, but opus is extremely high quality especially at that bitrate.
If you wanna try it for yourself, take a flac or whatever, upload it to yt, then use something like yt-dlp -x that defaults to the highest quality to redownload just the audio stream.
As I get older and the abuse I put my ears through starts showing up, I completely agree. After upgrading my music library to FLAC from VBR mp3s, I stopped having the, "Oh! There's a subtle instrument going on in this part of the song!" moments.
It doesn't stop me from trying to listen to the highest quality music formats that I can get my hands on, but I 100% know if I think there's a difference to my mid-40s ears, it's probably a placebo.
Also a musician here. I cared a lot when I was younger, but I have so many other more important things to care about now. You only have so my capacity to care about stuff in your life, and the quality of my music doesn't even come close to mattering these days.
The people there tend to discuss things which can go slightly over my head, but that's something I appreciate since it gives me things to look into and learn.
Easier question to answer: how don’t I listen to music:
Out of my phones speaker.
I’ve got a few pairs of earbuds, headphones, headphone dacs, and 2.0 system attached to my TV,
Oh and the “premium” audio system my Prius came with. Spotify, Apple Music, Plex… wired, wireless
My current chain is Tidal + Schiit Asgard DAC/amp + Audeze LCD-X. Moved from Spotify to Tidal last month and will never go back. I definitely prefer headphones over speakers, but have really been enjoying IK Multimedia iLoud Micro Monitors.
I did! I do think it's a great alternative, but when moving some of my playlists over, I saw too many missing songs. They were my more niche playlists/genres so I was kind of expecting it. Tidal didn't have all of them either, but did have more so I decided to go with them.
I definitely can't argue about the size of their library! While the continued dragging of their feet on HiFi was frustrating (years of telling us it was coming), the thing which finally drove me away is their constant tweaking of playlist and queue management.
I mainly use their desktop client and controls would disappear with each update- no way to block songs, inability to remove a song from auto generated queues, playlists not syncing between devices, songs being weighted in a shuffle. I made a post on their forums about the missing options for their autoplay queues- their response was that while there was no button or context menu option to remove a song, I could select it and use the delete key. I just gave up on whatever type of user experience they want me to have.
FLACs from CDs, deemix-gui, qobuz-dl, and Soulseek. 102,000 songs. Play at home with Logitech Media Server. On the road I've transcoded it all to 128kbps Opus so i can fit it on a microsd card and I play it with PowerAmp. I mostly use Blessing2 Dusk earbuds with a Shanling MW200 bluetooth neckband, but sometimes also I use Focal Clear OG open-back over-ear cans with a qdelix 5k for bluetooth.