Spotify is, without doubt, the worst piece of software that I still use on a daily basis. It's incredibly buggy, incredibly slow, and the UI has so many "usability inconsistencies".
I find the Android app particularly bad, just a couple of examples:
- Under a playlist you get a list of suggested songs, the UI element looks like a "regular song", but unlike every other "song" element the user has been trained to recognize, the "swipe right to queue" does not apply to these elements. For some reason.
- When you don't have connectivity, e.g. you walk into a Faraday cage, then the
search tries to reach the internet and won't show you results before it either: 1) does so, 2) times out. Which means you can't browse your local library before some websocket times out. Just show me the local results first?
It truly has been one of the worst UX experiences and poorly made apps that ever made it to mainstream.
I remember a decade or so ago there being a bunch of buzz about them in software dev because they were a microservice node.js/react stack or something with each UI element or portion of back-end having a separate dev team.
I can vividly remember thinking "oh that's probably why when I change song sometimes the album art doesn't update."
they're living proof your product doesn't even need to be that good you just need to be first to market and not really piss anyone off.
I worked for a startup in 2019 which was really pushing the "Spotify model" of team structure. Apparently it's all about self-organising teams and having no leadership. The fact the technology output of the Spotify model - the Spotify app - seemed to be kind of crap didn't seem to matter. I think the main output of the Spotify team structure was blog posts promoting the Spotify team structure.
> Apparently it's all about self-organising teams and having no leadership.
Gross over-simplification. For anyone curious they have videos out there, though they are 10+ years old now so may no longer be accurate, but in 2019-era this was still a thing (company I worked for did it too).[1]
This video was created in 2014 and was more a description of what they strived for at that point rather than of the full messy reality. Spotify quickly after that grew larger than those ideas would sustain (without changes) and rapidly became more alike any other tech corpo. Certainly around 2019-2020 it was not like in the video by any means. Some structures or names of concepts stayed way longer than the actual practices as described.
(I was active as a coach in Stockholm around this period and know multiple people, both engineers and coaches, who worked at Spotify including Henrik the author of the video.)
The Spotify model is basically just Amazon’s team-owned KPIs and independence, put into a UI so you can really see how much their app is conways law.
This is why all the sections of Amazon.com are barely coherent. AWS does this too but it’s more naturally split and text works better than stateful rich media.
> so you can really see how much their app is conways law
The headache of using the shared playlist "Jam" feature and trying to add a song without playing it directly. There is like a separate queue system for "Jam" and things work differently.
Right now, if you have video clips in Spotify enabled, your lockscreen controls will display 'Artist' - 'Song' - 'Video Available', instead of 'Album Name'. If you disable video all together, it just leaves that area blank instead of displaying the album title.
This has been a thing / issue since 2025. It's pretty clear the video team probably put that in to bump video interactions, then the whole team got put on something else and now this problem is blackholed. The most bizarre to me is: even Spotify's top managers must use their own product when they helicopter to home, right? So they would see this too.
Where is a Jobsian anger for user experience when it is needed. Although in that respect even Apple is in the gutter these days.
Totally agree. They also have some stickiness going for them (at least for me). Now that I've organized my music in Spotify and have my habits in place that deal with the crummy UX, I've gotten numb to the poor UX.
Case in point, I make a daily playlist for running and that UX is frequently changing and often for the worse, but I deal with it because it's a habit that costs me a few seconds maybe a minute per day. The cost of switching to a new thing just feels daunting so I stay.
I also am guilty of enjoying the wrapped summaries at the end of the year :)
I definitely enjoy Wrapped. But also something that keeps me in Spotify is the social aspect. If I want to make a playlist for someone, 95% of people I know use Spotify, so I need to have Spotify.
Yeah this is a good point. They also have a feature that lets you build and mix playlists together with others, not my personal speed but adds to the stickiness.
I also enjoyed wrapped, but at some point they made it only viewable in the app. It was previously available in the browser. That was the last time I thought about it.
Good point. Regrettably, newer phones have eliminated external SD cards. I preferred upgrading my phone storage on demand and having external card for stuff like MP3s and videos and manually doing large data transfers directly on my computer.
I carry my entire music library on my phone in Opus format. Smaller than a similar quality MP3 and good enough for the times I’m likely listening offline (working out, riding transit, on a plane).
Yeah last I knew the Spotify desktop app loads many dependencies in triplicate or more because each pane is its own independent iframe universe, all so the engineering teams don’t need to talk to each other and they can A/B test incessantly. Inefficient madness.
It's a music player, and it's way too heavy for what it does. Well, it does a lot it doesn't need to, too. Uses 1.5GB of RAM on my laptop atm. Since I only have 16GB on my work laptop that's noticeable. I'd love it if Spotify AB could replace its client with a native Rust one, although using an immediate-mode GUI library like fastpotify does might not be the best option...
Is there any music streaming service with fast native cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows, Android) clients? Because I'd switch. Feel like Spotify's recommendations have taken a nosedive lately, so that wouldn't hold me back too much.
> Is there any music streaming service with fast native cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows, Android) clients? Because I'd switch.
i use apple music. love it way more than spotify. i originally got it because their descriptions of albums and their playlists are done by actual music nerds. i use the website on linux since it’s my daily/work driver and their app on my phone and macbook when i use it. the apple music app was fine on windows before i switched to linux entirely. definitely leagues better than itunes was.
have the family plan and i never hear complaints from the family members who use it on android.
i hated how spotify would just remove tracks after id spend time making a playlist and suddenly it would just be gone, like not greyed out, just gone. so irritating.
in terms recommendations, apple is a definitely far better than spotify, but it’s still nothing compared to music store nerds, college radio, or friends. recommendation algorithms from every platform are trash and just can’t compete with other people, at all. go to your local record store, look through the employee recommendations or just talk to them, most of them are working in a music store because they love music (its not for the money lol) and then buy the vinyl, you’ll thank yourself later.
Apple music still gets a bit of a bad rap, the first iteration of the desktop and mobile apps for it were god awful. And if you lived outside of the west coast of the US, buffering was a noticable issue as they rather stupidly centralised all streaming out of one location in California for a long time. If you hit skip a handful of times from a UK/EU machine for example that was it, game over, apps locked up and you've gotta force quit.
It's way better now, and the recommendations are pretty good. The app is still crap though (although granted significantly better than Spotify!). Theres some bonkers UX decisions and the mix of Apple Music and iTunes store is piss poor. It's just got some illogical crap going on where depending on where in the interface you right click a song or artist it changes what options you'll get.
This is so confusing to me, many people say that, but a year ago my wife and I tried to switch to Apple Music. Bad recommendations were the main reason why it didn't stick for us. Every time my children would listen to some kids songs a few minutes later it would start playing "random" songs.
Maybe it's similar to Apple Maps, it works good for the American market, but once you try it in other countries/languages the quality is not the same.
Apple Music has native clients on macOS and Windows (the latter being a greenfield WinUI app rather than based on iTunes heritage). No native Linux app, but unlike Spotify they actually allow third party clients to exist and even furnish a library for devs to use, and so third party clients like Cider[0] exist on Linux. It also has a web app that can be installed as a PWA.
‘Spotify is a digital music, podcast, and video service that gives you access to millions of songs and other content from creators all over the world.’
I left in the middle of their ‘we do Podcasts’ bs, where they were pushing Joe Rogan hard.
I think a lot of people were in that camp. I'm not going to sign up for a Spotify account to listen to Rogan. I don't really have any problem with him and have found many of his guests interesting. No hate for Spotify either--I have never used the service so I don't really have an opinion about it, but the overhead of creating and maintaining another account and app was not something I was going to do for one podcast.
Isn't it just another ad distribution platform? The amount of ads they started to push to paying(!) users recently makes me want to cancel it every day (but I'm also too lazy to seek alternatives).
I get ads in podcasts. Not sponsored segments that the podcast creator inserted/narrated themselves (like used to happen), but ad served by Spotify itself, injected into the podcast. Easily 5 minutes in 30 min podcast[1], though this varies and I'm sure it is configurable by the podcast publishers.
1. This is not by feel, Spotify leaks it by displaying the original length and then updated one once it loads.
Other platforms do this too like pocketcasts. I assume it's the backend distribution network identifying your IP address and inserting 'relevant' ads. I don't believe it's being added by the podcast app (though for Spotify it may be, don't know)
Try using it abroad in a non English speaking country. You’ll notice the ads because they won’t be in English. This happens to me on Pocket Casts every time I travel.
For the monthly price of Spotify, one could rent a VPS and host Navidrome on it. In case you already have spare capacity, then it might be (almost) free.
Quite annoying when, as we see in the tv show “the playlist” that traces back the story of Spotify, the founder put a huge emphasis on performance to differentiate them from the rest and create the best possible UX…
I switched from Spotify to Amazon Music about 9 months ago, and cancelled Spotify Premium as a result (due to price, not bugs). Amazon Music is so much worse.
1. If you have no connectivity, the app will frequently get stuck in the offline state, playing the spinner indefinitely, even after connectivity has returned. I had similar issues on Spotify, but Amazon Music is so much worse.
2. I had Amazon Music eat my entire cellular plan's data monthly allowance in a day, after it seemingly got stuck in a loop trying to download the same podcast again and again. The podcast is unplayable when it gets in this state, even on perfect Wi-Fi, it just never starts playback. This has happened twice now (incidentally on the same podcast, but different episodes), even after deleting and reinstalling the app entirely.
The second bug is a deal breaker, so I've gone back to Spotify.
I canceled Spotify a few months ago have been using a free Amazon music trial. It's staggering how the Amazon interface is just worse in every single way.
Concurrent to this streaming evaluation, I inherited a Sonos system and by the gods is that app pitiful! You would think the premium sound solution that is supposed to "just work" would prioritize UI.
I mean, Amazon just sucks in general when it comes to design. I don't understand why Amazon videos (or whatever their purchased streaming app is) doesn't even queue up sequential movies automatically. It'll play the first Harry Potter movie, then skip to the third, fourth, and then the second, etc. It's not just HP , either.
Why is spotify so popular?
There are different solutions to listen to music.
What does spotify do that almost no one else does?
Is it the music library or something else?
I use youtube music, but I am looking for alternatives (but not spotify for various reasons).
Because as much as the app sucks the everything else is better than everyone else's music app, at least here in India where we have Apple Music as well. Recommendation, organisation, playlist - it feels like Apple Music is doing all that for a different species altogether. Now I already have said how bloated Spotify iOS app is and I still take it any day over Apple Music's native app. Hell, there are flows in Apple Music that has never gonna past a click at certain page whenever I've tried (that's quite a few in times in last few years). Esp. flows around which they try to play with iCloud and social aspects. Hell, I can't even decide what not to see on my Apple Music home screen. Sometimes I've to do few sipes to reach what I am looking for. Even with all the bloat Spotify never tires me like that.
I can’t speak for everyone, but for me, it just works. I’ve never had any of the issues people are mentioning in this thread. The app isn’t slow or buggy for me, I’ve never had artists I listen to disappear from my playlists, and I can find pretty much every song I want to listen to. Most people I know use Spotify too, so sharing stuff is just a little more convenient.
Other people no doubt have legitimate complaints, but using Spotify is barely registering as a problem compared to other applications I have to deal with.
$25/month for 5 users "all you can eat" music library every month is incredibly hard to beat, even if self hosting terabytes of your own music library.
I have been on Spotify from almost the beginning, and see zero reasons to switch. The app never bothered me at all - I find the reactions in this thread startling.
I have no issues with Spotify either, but my usage pattern is pretty simple.
I search for the album I want to listen to and then listen to it. Sometimes I search for an artist and then locate the album in their discography and listen to it.
The ‘Jam’ function is fun when you have a group of people listening to music together.
I use the discover weekly / radio / and other discovery features all the time, and still never had a problem. I mostly use apple hardware + osx and ios, however, so perhaps mileage varies on other platforms. It worked fine in Firefox on Linux when I tried, but I didn't push it too hard - usually when I'm at work, I just listen via the phone.
I have absolutely noticed all the complaints and stupid problems with the App on desktop. It constantly breaks in stupid ways. Every few releases, the "Discover Weekly" generated playlist loses the ability to hide/disable songs which is supposed to provide signal to the system to recommend fewer songs you dislike. So of course it barely works even when the UI element is there. 1/4 of the time the discover playlist is exclusively songs Spotify should be able to figure out I do not like at all. But song recommendation hasn't really advanced past what EchoNest demonstrated over a decade ago, and unlike most situations I comment on, I actually did a project to try and make a ML model for music like that and understand why it's difficult.
One time an employee even stated in the support forum that the ability to disable songs on the Discover Weekly playlist was purposely removed! Yet it was back within a year.
Spotify as a service is also pretty shitty. Their catalog has constant churn from whenever they change licensing deals, but they make no effort to point old playlist references to the exact same song under a different database id. It's infuriating, because it means that playlists rot, and often within a year! Every time I look at my saved songs, more are just missing. They colluded with rightsholders to rip off artists even more, and they have been purposely colluding with a company (run by a friend) making "AI Music" to swamp the service with so they can manipulate the royalty pool to pay out even less money to real artists.
I don't switch because the whole "Play songs" feature works just fine, I like the discovery features when they are semi-functional (I even use the AI DJ garbage sometimes, and it works well!), and the alternatives are Youtube (Which I hate but will probably switch to if Google ever succeeds at banning ad blockers from Youtube), and Apple, who's entire theory of business is hostile to me and I don't own any iDevices.
I use Youtube also, I subscribe to Premium so that includes music and is ad-free. Never not found a song or artist I was looking for.
I listen to music mainly in the car or maybe as background when I'm cooking or doing other chores. I am not someone who has earbuds in all day or who does focused listening or spends time making playlists or seeking out new artists in my favorite genres. So the playlist management, discovery, etc. features and whether they work well are not really relevant to me. I care that its main functions are easy to use and work, and YouTube music does that.
Spotify has gone downhill in that regard for sure. It floods my pages with "created for you" which is just the same 4-5 artists played in the last few weeks ago kludged together into a playlist. Alongside some of the worst music you could imagine (Payola? Idk..)
Any recommendations anyone has for music discovery I'm all ears. I recently moved away from a town that had a 10/10 radio station and I'm really feeling the TOP-40-only pain.
I miss my old Google Music premium account. Those song radio stations had amazing variety. It's incredibly obvious that Spotify plays what you like unless you go out of your way to listen to something new or a new releases playlist but I wish there was a knob I could twist to adjust the temperature of my playlists.
they try to sneak in stuff like payola because they dont have to pay high premiums like taylor swift so its in their interest to move ppl away from top artists into arcane.
Another reason why they are so popular is that they were first to market. They’ve been good enough that they have not lost first mover advantage that other first movers often lose (MySpace for example)
I've cancelled mine 5 years ago after they keep showing me ganster music and podcasts on my main page, even though I no history of listening or liking such content. So they keep trying to force it into my life. Secondly, they messed up the explorability of artists, playlist and related music. They also removed music from the catalogue, meaning on my playlist there are big memory holes of my favourite music, as they don't even show the artist or song name anymore. They also broke the offline-mode for when I drove my car.. so even if I switched it to offline-mode, music would still not play (after they downloaded and using 10GB+ on my phone). Then they added Joe Rogan and pushed other politics and stuff, more mainstream gangster shit. I just needed a good music player with a good discovery system and decent offline-mode. It used to be very simple. Now its a mess.
So my only path/answer to this was to cancel it. They poisoned the well so efficiently that I will never trust another streaming service again for my lifetime. I hate rewarding bad business practices, businesses pushing their ideologies towards me. No thanks.
I ran sound at a friend's wedding recently and unfortunately the music was all on Spotify. Every time I tried to play a specific song from a playlist, "Spotify can't play this item right now" and it would skip to the next one (or the one after that). I ended up having to yt-dlp all the timeline-specific songs.
But how would the App be deciding that? Listening for large crowds? Listening for it's own output from high output speakers?
Spotify will keep the entry in a playlist even after they lose the rights to a song, or worse, keep the rights under a different internal database entry. That's how you get songs that they "Can't play right now", which is a horseshit error message for "Spotify doesn't have this song anymore" but they don't want you to recognize just how much their catalog is constantly rotting and rotating.
They’ve left Airplay out of their Mac app for the history of the company and I have no idea why. They have hundreds of engineers. I have airplay running on a raspberry pi since 2019.
The black and neon is truly a not-good choice for a UI. Nevertheless, they persist.
Apple Music has a much better UX. Things like “play next” when you want to play that song next but not clear your other queued up songs are little treats that Spotify took years to catch up to. Many of the other bugs—which people document for them!—go untouched for literally years.
It’s fascinating to me how companies like this ignore easy wins for their users. Have a couple engineers burn down all of those and you’ll win fans (or at least not create enemies.) Take the wins!
This seems a bit harsh. In my experience, it basically works fine for playing music. I haven’t noticed it being particularly slow either. Could it be due to having different hardware, different expectations, something else?
Until you want to play back a playlist in random order over airplay or bluetooth, then the decade old bug with thousands of replies on their forum confirming it surfaces, and it only loops the first 100 songs in the playlist.
The number of bugs in their service that have existed since inception is insane. It's a buggy mess, and the UI & UX is comically poor. Not to mention the resource usage, as someone else pointed out below its incredibly insane that they think it's ok for it to be such a massive resource hog.
i'd love it if spotify split into two companies:
- an enterprise platform that just provided a an API to access/play songs and direct the payment to the correct rightsholders
- a consumer app that built on top of that to provide the 'spotify' we all have
let a whole ecosystem of music streaming apps take off that cater to different niches of listeners.
each app would be able to differentiation themselves with their UI but also features like recommendations/playlists/etc. And spotify wouldn't see them as competitors because they'd still be getting their cut because they all go through their API.
> Under a playlist you get a list of suggested songs, the UI element looks like a "regular song", but unlike every other "song" element the user has been trained to recognize, the "swipe right to queue" does not apply to these elements. For some reason.
If I remember correctly, it has a plus on the side to add it to the playlist. Clearly different I guess (and why would you want to listen to a song before adding it to the playlist amirite?). I also love the way you have to refresh a list to get 3 new songs instead of just getting a scrolling list where you can go back.
I think the notion that it's the worst piece of software is a bit of a stretch here. I've used various streaming music players and Spotify has been the best by far. Doesn't mean it's perfect.
I get that not all edge cases (eg swipe gestures) are bullet proof but that doesn't make it terrible software.
It's objectively really bad at a lot things. I've always had the feeling that the music is not even a primary feature of their product.
The last time I used it, I uninstalled once I realized that my kids could watch Logan Paul YouTube videos through the Spotify app. These masquerade as podcasts, but like a Trojan horse they are just vods of YouTube content. And at the time there was literally no way to disable this. No way to either turn off podcasts or specific content through parental controls or otherwise.
I just wanted to give my kids a way to listen to music while reading. I have since switched to our local community radio station.
Yes, the Android app is particularly bad. For the past couple of weeks, it's gotten to a point where the app will take 30s to load on my phone. Nothing, not even reinstalling the app fixes this.
> Spotify is, without doubt, the worst piece of software that I still use on a daily basis. It's incredibly buggy, incredibly slow, and the UI has so many "usability inconsistencies".
I left Spotify about a year ago and have tried Tidal, Deezer, Qobuz, and Youtube Music. They all have equally worse UI/UX. The Tidal and Deezer apps on Windows were absolute dogshit and would constantly bug out, randomly stop playing, freeze, take ages to load, etc. YTM's UI is awful, and it does not use your liked/saved songs and albums for its recommendations if your Youtube history is turned off, which isn't explained anywhere that I could find. Just absolutely baffling product design decisions all over the place.
I'm blown away by how much all the big music streaming apps suck. Music player UIs were a solved problem 20 years ago.
More and more now I'm using Bandcamp, Subvert, local music enthusiast Discord servers, and even Reddit to discover new music. It's a giant pain in the ass, but it's still less unpleasant than the apps.
The vast support for Tidal in these discussions is pretty baffling. The whole thing is just an abandoned Jack Dorsey side hustle. Basic things like gapless playback don't work. Playback on dodgy connections is spotty. I have my own fair share complaints of Spotify UX but it actually works as a music player anywhere and everywhere.
I gave YouTube music a try, mostly for the free premium and I have to say, it's ok. It still hiccups sometimes when I'm on the subway or a plane but I don't miss Spotify.
I do have a more pared down selection of mp3s loaded on my device in case of emergency, but I use it less and less now.
I recently started encountering full on crashes on iOS, as well as random freezing. Not to mention whole navigation just feels 'off', like canceling navigation mid animation. Nowadays, non-native apps don't have issues like that.
have you tried apple music app on mac? Apple music is also wrong in so many levels I personally believe teams that work on inside Appple hate it and made so bad intentionally. There is no other explanation.
> - Under a playlist you get a list of suggested songs, the UI element looks like a "regular song", but unlike every other "song" element the user has been trained to recognize, the "swipe right to queue" does not apply to these elements. For some reason.
There's a ton of these inconsistencies. For example, the new releases albums where songs become available over time also do not have it. It's infuriating how inconsistent the UI is sometimes.
Not so long ago they also had two versions of the "swipe right to queue" UI, one with long swipe (the current one), and one with a much shorter one. I preferred the shorter (with the hard break) one because it is much clearer when a song actually gets added to the queue. What often happens when you're adding multiple songs to the queue, if you only swipe a little bit, it is unclear if it was enough to add it to the queue. With one song this isn't a problem because a message with "added to queue" is shown, but for multiple songs, the messages are shown on top of each other.
I am a user since the beginning and had premium for almost as long. The state of the app is bad. Crash fest. They pretty much brags about that they slop code it. But was it better before? Let me give you a hall of fame of historical bugs/features.
1. Impossible to purge the play queue. Had to delete every track one by one.
2. Completely broke liked songs years after the feature was launched.
3. They broke offline mode like a billion times. Just download everything again. Especially annoying back in the days when mobile data was expensive. Still does not work like half of the time.
4. Changed to a yellow typeface! I am not even kidding.
5. Included some bittorrent like file sharing in the background.
Another annoyance is the “genres” in your liked songs. They change seemingly at random and when you select a genre eg country it has the most ass backwards way of grouping songs so I’ll get rap songs playing despite having selected folk or whatever
I realise I’m pissing into the wind here, but I find the LLM text on the homepage and docs quite funny/ awkward.
> “Ctrl+M turns it into a tiny player that wears any classic Winamp 2 skin, spectrum analyser, equalizer, and playlist included. 2000s vibes, pixel for pixel.”
Everything is said with too much intensity, and phrasing that sounds impressive but doesn’t really mean that much. Like “wears any classic Winamp 2 skin” feels so awkward, what’s “wears”? You mean it can use it?
I feel like if you can’t be bothered to write the code, at least document it yourself and write the marketing copy so I know you understand the product. Otherwise how can I trust running it on my computer? Did the LLM generate some amazing rm -rf somewhere, or another blunder that wrecks data I might care about?
Yes, the code is generated. Yes, the docs are generated. I agree LLM copy is annoying and will rewrite them myself.
But I built this for myself out of frustration with the official client, and I use it every day, so every bug I find is fixed immediately. I also care about bugs and PRs from other people, as you can see the amount that have been closed on the repo. The only reason I would stop maintaining this is if Spotify kills it.
I also wouldn't call this vibe coded either. Human directed and LLM generated is fairer. It's been an intense 5 days with tons of design decisions and testing on 3 platforms. I think we need a new vocabulary to distinguish it from "author doesn't care". I do.
Also: nagging about the specifics of the README's tone of voice, while the 600-1000MB RAM usage drops to 100-250MB seems a little childish to me.
It's still open source! Just like in the pre-AI era they are welcome to submit a PR and improve it in the way they like it. The main dev seems very open to accepting help.
I don't see you publishing something which further reduces the memory footprint?
Given the project is open source, have at it! See if you can help improve it instead of complaining. This is a significant improvement and a cool project!
I run actual Winamp for my music streaming, and windows task manager claims it's using 4.1 MB.
Even that seems pretty high, but whatever, but given y'all are spending hundreds of mbs, I think I'm ok. Yes, spotify has features my subscription music service doesn't have... but the one I use lets me stream with Winamp.
I'm not complaining and it is a cool project (from what I can tell). But I think it's fair to say 200 MB memory usage is a lot without providing source code as a proof. Just by feel when you recall what were computers capable of when they did not have 100s of MB to spare.
I like the direction, but stewarded feels just a little too awkward to type or say to catch on. Perhaps "guide coded"? But it will be really hard to dislodge vibe coded from being generally applied to this concept, I think, in part because it is a catchy little term.
> The Debian Project nevertheless expects that all contributions submitted to Debian, regardless of how and with which tools they were produced, satisfy the same standards of quality, correctness, maintainability, and legal compliance.
Slop text on the homepage does not scream "quality" to me.
Don’t worry. Folks are entirely too concerned about the distinction between human made and LLM made. In a short handful of years, it will be incredibly rare to find something an LLM hasn’t been involved with
Agree, everyone thought I was crazy in 2025 when I was preoccupied with this question about moral 'authorship' in the AI era, but I think the culture will catch up quite soon, whether it likes it or not
I have no doubt that in the future AI code will be superior to human code. But today is not that day, and these projects that have never yet had human eyes on them are mostly shoddy pieces of work.
I rewrite docs myself on my own projects because they read as very LLMish, there's an intermediate stage which feels slightly less bad where I ask it to remove most of the comments, especially LLM signposting ones and then "rewrite any remaining comments and docs in a dry ukgov/gds style" which makes things slighyly less worse.
I'm going to sound harsh here, but please don't take this as criticism of the effort, it's criticism of how it's being portrayed. The quality might for all intents be great and useful.
> But I built this for myself out of frustration with the official client
But you didn't build it. This is akin to me telling an intern to build me a widget and then claiming it was me who built it. Or a construction manager saying they built a skyscraper.
Yes, the intern and the construction crew needs guidance and management, but I can't then go to the management committee and claim ownership of the effort.
> I also wouldn't call this vibe coded either.
You didn't write any of the code or even the documentation for that matter. You guided a code generator that relied on you to guide high level decisions but then did all the implementation on it's own. That's vibe coding.
Any act of making can be treated as product, as craft, or as art. You'll find yourself taking all three stances at different points. Any engineer or artisan or artist can choose to pour their attention and love into any layer of the production process.
I like ceramics. I like wheel throwing. Once upon a time, the pottery wheel was a newfangled technique for rapid and regular production of commodity goods. Same with coil building, same with slip casting, same with standardization of glaze recipes, gas and electric kilns, all of it.
But I know people who choose to quarry and purify their own clay, or to mix their own glazes, or to fire their pieces in a hole in the ground dug by hand with a fire they built by hand. I know people who make dozens of identical copies of just a few forms, after they spend months iterating on carving intricate molds. I know people who will spend a whole season working on a single hand-built bust.
And none of these people have ever, to my knowledge, expressed scorn for any of the others, for focusing on a different step in the process.
No they can't. The construction crew - which includes the manager - can say that they built a skyscraper.
If the construction manager did lay the bricks or did the majority of the work in all aspects, they could claim to have built a building. Otherwise they contributed work, no denying that, but they can't claim credit for building it. Same way that architects can't claim they built the skyscraper, even though they probably spent a lot of effort designing it to specs. To the best of my knowledge, no serious architect claims they "built" the building. They have designed it yes. Same way, the construction manager would claim they have managed the construction.
I admit that the classification is fuzzy, but there's an explosion of vibe coders going about claiming to have built things, whose contribution is basically spending a total of one hour with a prompt and and LLM doing basically all the heavy lifting.
That's not necessarily the case of the author here, but the line has blurred a lot and people very giddily claim credit for much less actual accomplishment than what would've flown in the past.
I think you're being pedantic to the point of losing all credibility. And you're gatekeeping in the worst possible way.
Your argument that using an LLM means you didn't "make" a thing could just as easily be used to say that if you used a framework or a library, you also didn't "make" a thing, because you didn't write all the code yourself and you didn't understand everything.
Would you say the authors of YT-DLP didn't "make" anything because they are a wrapper over FFMPEG and CURL?
If you produce something useful (even just to yourself), you "made" a thing.. It has a purpose, and it's useful. Who cares how you made it or how long it took?
For example I've made plenty of bash scripts over the years that were effectively thin wrappers that combined other tools, but they did something novel and useful that saved me tons of time, and I've shared those as gists or in other ways.
Some of these scripts took me mere minutes to make. I didn't use an LLM to make them, but the "heavy lifting" definitely wasn't in my script. No one ever showed up to berate me and try to tell me that I didn't actually produce anything useful in any of these cases.
So this "in the past" that you imagine where people were held to some bullshit standard for what is accepted as "making" a thing?
That past doesn't really exist, and if does where you are, it sucks.
People do care - lots of people do. Maybe you don’t, and maybe the argument the other poster made wasn’t fair, but you make just as spurious claims when you say „who cares how you made it or how long it took?”
Really? You care about some stranger's work and how they created it?
Pro tip: you shouldn't.
Care about your work if you want, but "caring" about how someone else makes things and how they talk about it is just being a judgemental busybody and again, gatekeeping.
As for my comment, I stand by it.
If I made something genuinely useful, then it should not matter if it took me 5 minutes or 5 days to make it.
You'll never convince me that more time spent making something (all other factors being equal - yes, quality matters) gives it more value or credibility.
Thanks for the tip haha. I am personally divided on it, but it’s more complicated than just quality or output for me.
I will apologize if I came off combative - was in the backseat of a car so may have been a little direct.
I think people care, all for different reasons. You care too - just when it comes to quality as you mentioned (and I’m sure other factors).
In this case many people correctly pointed out that there were clear indications of a lack of direct cognitive effort on behalf of the operator - including code quality, comment / git history, and including copy that he didn’t write. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean the LLM which did most of the work (or not? How can we know without an auditable prompt history) didn’t produce quality work.
When it comes to something that was made in 5 days AI assisted - the idea may be novel, but without a full prompt history it does become difficult to assess quality of cognitive effort on the operator at least.
In any case - it’s hard for me to know what to call the author. And I do think this applies to traditional media as well, so Im definitely not saying it’s all one sided (Bah! AI!)
That's fair, I guess I was really reacting to the narrow gatekeeping-like case the OP was advocating, where time spent/invested - or only doing things a certain way - was correlated to legitimacy and being able to claim you "made" a thing.
OK, clear enough. But that's an unusual definition of "build" that I don't think you should necessarily expect others to share.
The first entry for "build" in the OED is: To construct, put up, erect (a house or other dwelling or building); to construct (a permanent static structure such as a wall, bridge, or architectural feature, a road or railway, etc.). Also: to commission, finance, direct, or oversee the construction of (something of this type).
There's a trend where people go around claiming they built something and just happen to conveniently omit everywhere that everything was "built" using an LLM and the author doesn't even understand what the code does. That's the crux of my objection.
FWIW I agree with your post and perhaps we need a separate name for people who just instructed an LLM to build something, but then took the trouble to understand how the thing actually works.
It seems to me that this is not the case here. The author used LLM to build the whole thing and left it at that. Which is completely fair, I'd do the same if I just wanted to scratch an itch with the minimal amount of effort, but then I wouldn't go around claiming "I built it".
If I take a photo and then use GIMP to edit it, then did I take a photo or just direct my camera at something and then steer my computer to make changes to it? After all, it's not me drawing each pixel manually. It's vibe-photoed!
No. It's vibe-photoed when you use AI models which are trained on countless hours of actual human work. Otherwise you apply deterministic tools at your will and according to your skill level.
Not author. LLM manager, technical producer (if we're borrowing game development language), advanced AI user; not author. Authors are those whose code was used to train LLM(s) you were using while producing this fine piece of software.
I'm saying this having neither positive nor negative emotions. Just clarifying.
One thing I like about Spotify is the recommendations. I like to do what i call “beat digging” which is basically exploring the platform for new artists and tracks?
Should add a full page click through slop warning to each page on the site. Also give credit to the LLM that made it in the "Brought to you by" section at the bottom.
Having used Claude a lot for the past four months, I get exhausted from its style. Every sentence has been buffed and polished and enhanced and it never just plainly says a thing. It's as if you have to eat every meal with every possible flavor enhancer in existence. At one point I will totally lose it if it mentions "smoke test" one more time.
It is also totally not what I want for docstrings in code or Powerpoint drafts, where consistency in language is critical.
Like I said in another thread, everything Claude (Code) writes sounds like it’s congratulating itself of how smart it is. While not actually being that smart.
I believe AI technical prose peaked with Opus 4.6. I still use it (mostly for that purpose) and I think it's legitimately great. I'm hoping they are able to reverse the trends that benchmaxxing and RLAIF have wrought on Claude's non-code output with the future models.
Now that the public anger is growing i really hope Anthropics next models seriously address this. Or for that matter, i hope everyone (OpenAI/etc) starts focusing on this too.
Intelligence is important but it feels as if the LLM is only capable of conveying information while drenching it in vomit.
Interestingly enough, https://fastpotify.rocks/winamp/ shows what I dislike about LLM-generated text: From "The buttons do what they say [...]" to "[...] a different format and are not supported" is just a huge wall of text without any visual guidance.
It's as if the person writing these lines didn't care about the result. One could argue that people not caring about written documentation isn't anything new, but in the past, these documentations also had little text. So they were easier to digest. Now, we get great walls of text that are hard to read. I cannot say that I like that.
What sucks is that clearly the author has prompted the model somehow to generate this text, and this prompt probably contains the actual meat that the model just "expanded on" while adding it's own fluff, and if the author just shared the actual verbatim prompt instead, the documentation would be 90% shorter but also 200% more "informative per character used".
Just share the prompt you used, regardless of how low quality or bad it is, rather than this word spaghetti of 100s of words saying basically nothing, such a waste.
That would actually be a reasonable thing to do with a model that is good at writing though. I'm sure if you used that method on Opus 4.6 you'd get a pretty decent result, because Claude models used to be quite good at that sort of technical synthesis. Asking a model that is bad at technical writing (e.g. Opus/Fable 5) to write your docs is a bad idea.
Ultimately what seems more important that how good the model is at task X vs task Y, seems to be that the human accepting/rejecting/iterating on the text can actually identify "good" from "bad" text, and makes the effort to fix it. Otherwise it doesn't matter much what model you use, it makes boring, bland and bloated prose.
The sad thing is that may not be true. If you use LLMs to write docs and actually read it, you can spend far longer trying to convince the LLM to write in a sane way than to just write it yourself.
Semi related, but i've caught myself nitpicking small things from the code of an LLM only to realize i'm putting in more work trying to convince the LLM to make the code the way i want rather than just modifying it myself lol. It's as if i'm trying to educate it in the ideal way, as if it would learn and not repeat the mistake.. but it rarely does of course.
It seems to me that interacting with LLMs has a large pile of cognitive traps for humans.
I prioritized shipping over carefully crafting docs. I thought nobody would read them and they'd rather enjoy the software. I was wrong. I'll rewrite them.
Then, just do not add text that adds no value. Less is more.
Documentation is first part people see when presented. I personally hate AI written text even though I do agentic engineering a lot as well. Any user facing documentation must be reviewed, if you snoozy by reading it - remove or rewrite.
I do not care about paragraph long comments in code, because I’m not gonna read them, but I still follow my internal guideline and cut all this verbosity to level where it readable using hooks and skills.
So basicly like you said if you care about product do not add placeholders. It’s take away first impression.
Fair enough. But then, how should I enjoy the software, if the documentation to its' usage is buried beyond a whole paragraph? To be clear, I do not judge the usage of AI per se. But you can instruct AI to write a clear manual. It just takes time. :)
I think you got a but too much negativity, from a crowd that became more easily irratated because their AI sensor became very sensitive by e.g. reviewing a lot of AI generated code and comments.
The difference is that the marketing stuff used to be only on corporate websites. Now it's everywhere, because pretty much everybody hates writing, and the "pretty much" can be left off when the writing is a job or some other form of obligation.
> I feel like if you can’t be bothered to write the code, at least document it yourself and write the marketing copy so I know you understand the product.
Do you not understand it?
This person doesn't owe you any work. He's providing a product for free and this is a reasonable enough description of the product.
> Did the LLM generate some amazing rm -rf somewhere, or another blunder that wrecks data I might care about?
I'm pretty sure at this point hand-crafted code is more likely to contain security bugs. The mythical "rm -rf" random LLM insertion is not a real threat. Every time I see stories about this kind of issue, it's almost always preceded by basically prompt poisoning.
> The mythical "rm -rf" random LLM insertion is not a real threat. Every time I see stories about this kind of issue, it's almost always preceded by basically prompt poisoning.
It is real, typically happening when dumber models (haven't personally seen any of the SOTA ones on reasonable thinking/reasoning level do this) try to clean up stuff via bash and forget to assign a variable. Things like "rm -rf sessions/$id" without double-checking $id is actually defined, would do "rm -rf sessions/" and remove the entire directory. Add in more variables in a path like "rm -rf $HOME/projects/$user/$repo/$tmpdir" and the dumb models people think they can use for local coding, promptly removes a lot more than expected.
Not sure how people aren't already running these agents in an environment/sandbox where stuff like this wouldn't matter, locally or not, but some LLMs do truly accidentally delete stuff for people, without "prompt poisoning", I had it happen myself while testing Qwen3.8-27B (BF16) locally just a week or two ago, exactly as described above.
Just recently, Opus 4.8 almost deleted a bunch of important files (I caught the issue before) because it failed to consider that two-way-sync would delete files from my NAS if deleted locally.
Fable has done similar for me because it assumed intent that I wanted permanent deletion after moving folders. The bash script it wrote failed to copy the files and then deleted the originals. Not catastrophic in my case though
> This person doesn't owe you any work. He's providing a product for free
A product being free doesn’t make it exempt from criticism. It’s not about “owing” anybody work.
> and this is a reasonable enough description of the product.
It’s not a great idea to signal a lack of effort, nor is it wrong for users to pick up on that signal. This is the post-llm equivalent to spelling or grammatical errors.
> I'm pretty sure at this point hand-crafted code is more likely to contain security bugs.
LLMs produce code which is fairly ‘locally optimal’, so in good hands they can absolutely be used to build correct software. They also allow those with little to no experience* to cobble something together very quickly and easily while creating a ton of security holes. I think you might be underestimating how common the latter is.
* not to suggest this applies to the OP necessarily. Rather some extra wariness is necessary nowadays since the floor has been lowered so much.
> A product being free doesn’t make it exempt from criticism. It’s not about “owing” anybody work.
You can criticize it but your criticism is hallow
> It’s not a great idea to signal a lack of effort, nor is it wrong for users to pick up on that signal. This is the post-llm equivalent to spelling or grammatical errors.
Why should you put in effort to something that should be effortless? Why should I waste my time writing some inferior copy by hand?
> LLMs produce code which is fairly ‘locally optimal’, so in good hands they can absolutely be used to build correct software.
Humans produce code which is fairly ‘locally optimal’
Also, interesting you use ‘ as a quote rather than '. I notice these quotes are used with LLM generated text, as I can't find this on my keyboard.
> Why should you put in effort to something that should be effortless?
Why should it be effortless?
> Why should I waste my time writing some inferior copy by hand?
Have some faith in yourself :)
If the LLM writing was superior then surely nobody would’ve noticed?
And to the question: because lack of care in one area implies that that the same approach might extend to other areas. Nobody’s forcing you, but it definitely sends a particular message.
> Humans produce code which is fairly ‘locally optimal’
I’m taking this to mean you find the phrasing vague. LLMs are good at avoiding the sort of fine-grained security bugs that you see in some human written code.
> Also, interesting you use ‘ as a quote rather than '. I notice these quotes are used with LLM generated text, as I can't find this on my keyboard.
Funny, but FYI a fair few mobile keyboards use non-ascii punctuation
Not OP but I don’t really care if it was or not. All I know is that I’ve been using the Spotify app 10+ years and it works well. I don’t know if this random app works, and if it hasn’t been supervised I doubt it does.
LLMs seem to have been fine-tuned to use metaphors, presumably because they read like vivid creative writing. The over-use of metaphor in LLM-produced text is exhausting.
Slop code is already hard to tolerate, but any hint of slop in text will immediately make me chuck it into the bin / close the tab, no exceptions. My lifetime is finite, I'm sure as fuck not gonna spend time reading something that a person could not even be arsed to write themselves. I'm only annoyed that it takes sometimes a few seconds, sometimes a few minutes, to detect that I'm actually not reading a person's thoughts but only a machine simulacrum of such.
I highly recommend anybody to take up a similar rule, in any context. Slop in a website? Close. Slop in an email? Bin. Slop in a code comment? Skip.
Your comment has too much intensity as well. Honestly it too looks like slop. I agree with what you said, but nevertheless your writing is likely AI generated here, it’s very obvious.
There is a tribe of people who carve bots out of trees using their hands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dugout_canoe. It stupid to waste time doing something a computer can do reasonably well. IMO
Spotify is in the process of killing the librespot project that this and most third party Spotify players are built on. I think the golden age of music streaming is coming to an end. I’ve migrated to a self hosted library with streaming and radio for discovery. I hope we’ll see many projects in the space flourish. Many, like Navidrome and the whole OpenSubsonic ecosystem, seem to be doing quite well.
Yes! This launched after I left Spotify but I agree it looks neat. I find the three month build expiration concerning, but I also have a low risk tolerance for my music experience.
What makes you think Spotify is killing it? I know they aren't supporting FLAC but otherwise I don't think they're actively trying to stop it as opposed to not really caring if they support it (which is more "We don't care" as opposed to "We have to stop this")
I haven't seen any evidence of Spotify killing librespot. To me the project looks active and works totally fine. I don't have a new Spotify account to verify the claim above.
I suspect wilted-iris is conflating it with the recent changes to the Web APIs: new developer apps can't use all endpoints anymore. In Fastpotify if you add your Client ID I use both an older developer app and your app to keep everything as fast and seamless as possible.
Have a look at the librespot pinned issues, you’ll see the reports from folks experiencing this. You may also be able to find the legal threats they sent out to third party client libraries if you search carefully (many have been redacted.)
Librespot no longer works for new accounts. APIs are being gated off and they’re applying legal pressure to dissuade projects from reverse engineering anything new. At the end of the day, they can turn the tap off anytime they want, whether by technical or legal means. I tired of having so much of my music experience at risk and chose to migrate on my own terms.
They can only turn the tap off because those projects operated in ways that required them to leave it on.
Biggest mistake most librefication projects make is to do their project out in the open where they can easily be subject to legal pressure, then fall into complete disarray the moment that pressure appears. They can't move underground once pressure starts, because everyone already knows who they are.
> Biggest mistake most librefication projects make is to do their project out in the open
That's not it. Most youtube downloaders are not developed in the open and Youtube still breaks them every other week by changing on purpose the way they operate. And, unlike highly obfuscated instructions, studying the network queries used by a simple app does not require expensive reverse engineering efforts from Spotify engineers; essentially, it's the same as developing in the open.
The only case i can think where obfuscation might help would be if the actual Spotify API consumers were servers by the app developers (or some form of obfuscation via residential proxies) and the app developed an entirely different API to/from its servers. But then, you're back to the developers and hosts can receive legal threats, etc...
You propose the open-source community operates behind closed doors like the very software they aim to replace?
I’d argue Spotify has so little to gain by being hostile, that perhaps the lawyers are more expensive than just ignoring these pet projects (which would never gain mass adoption).
If anyone other than me really likes classical music, I thoroughly recommend Hyperion Records. DRM free downloads in your choice of codec, one to two free CDs worth of sampler per month to download (with a jewel case PDF!) and some truly excellent world leading groups and beautiful new music.
Thanks for sharing. I loved buying then downloading cheap samplers from punk and hardcore labels when I was younger. That was part of the culture and that really helped me discover new music and shaping my tastes. This is something that doesn't exist that much anymore and I'm glad to find this initiative. I try to listen to classical music but that's a very difficult world to discover, this will probably help by helping me to focus on few titles instead of jumping in the gigantic and maze-ish pool !
One part of the classical diaspora I think is both under appreciated and undergoing something of a renaissance is that of contemporary choral music. There are many great examples but two I'd like to draw to attention to two of those I have recently sung, and really enjoy:
(1) The works of Ēriks Ešenvalds,[1] a Latvian composer who was a fellow in composition at Trinity College, Cambridge and brought really a large part of the surprisingly rich eastern European singing tradition to the west. I had never heard of the Singing Revolution against the USSR in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania – countries with a wonderful, rich choral tradition where music (and choirs) played a really nonzero part in the downfall of the USSR. All absolutely beautiful and a group I sing with has worked with a lot of composers from this part of the world. Amazing soundscapes with harmonies that are never quite as good in equal temperament as outside it and yet always tonal and beautiful.
(2) Desmond Earley and the choral scholars of Trinity College Dublin – who conjures up a rich sound world of very pure, Irish tones that almost sounds synthetic but is made entirely from human voices and traditional instruments. It is simple to sing but difficult to master. I would highlight Dúlamán, [3] a traditional song about the economic importance of seaweed.
Your comment really brought me back to my first job out of college, I worked for Tower Records (RIP) as a call center customer service rep. Tower was known for being the best place to find rare classical recordings, and I recall the Hyperion label as being well respected. It always fun to talk to our customers that were classical and jazz aficionados.
Would you be willing to share a bit more about this setup? The only thing keeping my on streaming is the fact that its almost impossible to find new music otherwise. I know LastFM exists but it just doesn't click for me the way that streaming does. I like discovering music organically.
I left spotify around two years ago for a self hosted option (I mostly use navidrome+feishin). Music discovery was a concern for me as well, but then I realized that I didn't like the idea of spotify curating which music I discovered. So far, this is what has worked for me:
- Actually listening to the music I have now. I think the art of listening through full albums has slowly died, but there is so much music we're ignoring because we just listen to Artist's top tracks.
- Word of mouth. Asking my friends what they listen to. This is a way that people used to discover music and I've found so much good music this way.
- Bandcamp. Bandcamp is SUCH a good way to discover new music. You can listen to the music in app, there are great articles and you can actually support the artists!
I have pretty much the same setup. The only thing that bothers me with navidrome+feishin is that gapless playback is not working perfectly.
Also, a great resource for discovering new music is the public library. They often have a curated CD section that I then rip into FLAC. I've had great chats with the people in my town's library, and I often pick a totally random CD off the shelves and discover some amazing artists.
Regarding Bandcamp, I find following small labels to be a great way to find new music. Small labels tend to release music of similar style and quality. They often also have deals on bandcamp where you can buy an entire label's discography for crazy cheap, like a hundred or so albums for $50!
While moving from spotify to youtube music a few years ago I bought a vinyl player to listen to full albums and fell for it. Then when I moved to curate and self host my collection with Plex and Plexamp I realized I'm not using the player anymore since I'm using Plexamp to listen to albums. Plexamp is not perfect and not open source unfortunately, but it's a really good non-enshitified product.
I had to migrate away from youtube music since the experience was infuriating me every time. I love making playlists on the go. In youtube music after adding 30 tracks to the play queue, tapping 1 track accidentally deletes the play queue and plays this track. This made me feel bad every time it happened.
I don't see how it is just accepted to lose progress in 2026 as if we're using win95. It feels like 80% of the sw I use provides a caveman UX, not leveraging the tech, leaking implementation details and being constrained by technical reasons. On the other hand, working on Prepbook[0], I realized how hard it is to create the perfect experience and how it's even harder to justify it financially.
I'm doing discovery by talking to people, I love it. Every time I listen to Monolink I recall my co worker that just said "check out monolink" when he heard I love Ott. I love that it makes the experience about connection to people as well.
was a big question mark I had as well. The Clear Channel and iHeart stations are not known for discovery. Now if you find a college station or by some miracle an independent station you can get some new stuff. My favorite local college station is also ad free. They also have an app which I lean on as it's not the strongest transmitter so their coverage is spotty. Maybe there's other indy stations with apps as well??
This radio station is local to the city I live in, and they've been great for music discovery for me, although heavy focus on local artists, but they've put me onto a few international artists as well.
I subscribe to them, have done so for ~10 years I reckon. I don't listen as much as I used to, but I want them to continue existing either way.
Be aware, the quality of their playlists is incredibly variable, but that's part of the charm. I guarantee you'll hear something you haven't heard before... for better or worse.
I would always recommend KEXP. They have a really varied set of shows and setlists, don't seem to be swayed by "we must play the top 40", genuinely care about music, and are super nice if you head into the building in Seattle (which has a public access space, coffee shop, bathrooms, and a SubPop store).
I've had three tours around the place just by telling the folks there that Im there from out of town. To be fair, I might have gotten the tours because I came all the way over from England the times, but it's my favourite place to hang out when I'm in Seattle.
Also Ken is the nicest guy ever, and he introduced me to Larry Mizzel Jr while he was broadcasting live.
Get the app, or use the player on their website, and hive then a try for an hour or do. The app has the ability to "heart" a track while it's playing live, which helps with discovery.
RRR and PBS in Melbourne both stream online and are both fantastic for music discovery. Go the former if you lean indie and the latter if you lean international.
Wow this is amazing. I can't believe shoutcast still exists too!! I have fond memories of hosting a shoutcast stream at very low bandwidth over dialup!
There seems to be a few decent apps in F-droid and lots of stations with no ads and very specific genres like just depressive black metal!
I listen to Flow State, SomaFM, and aggregate from local shows and a few people I follow on social media among other discovery platforms. (I don’t have a favorite yet.)
I found that Spotify was increasingly recommending AI artists and songs I already knew. It surfaced very little outside of my comfort zone and effectively nothing that wasn’t new. There’s a whole world of music out there that Spotify wasn’t showing me.
using nts.live and and fip radio -> https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip at the moment for same purpose. Radio France allows to save liked track names in profile to look up later.
I used to use hypem soo much during the music blog days and had a subscription etc but it seemed to stop working or something so after a while I stopped using it. I will have to check it out again
Call me a boomer but I’ve had a ton of fun with XM radio. I can find new music on Bandcamp but nothing compares to hearing some classic from the 80’s that you would have never thought to put on when you’re driving home after work on a Friday.
> its almost impossible to find new music otherwise
I don't know where this opinion came from (Probably Spotify's PR department) but it's just so weird to me. Do you think people didn't find new music before streaming? It's not impossible, you just have to talk to people.
I don't know about you but spotify discovery feels like the least organic discovery possible. Its so homogeneous and predictable and corporate slop adjacent it makes me cringe just thinking about it.
I've discovered so many great artists through Spotify, and been to many of their shows (which Spotify also helps surface with their "Live Events" feature). I regularly get artists with less than 100k listeners in my Discover Weekly, which I then look up, and find that they did a concert on KEXP, and the comments all proclaiming "I knew good music wasn't dead!".
So I can say for sure that I don't share the slop sentiment. Sure, there's some generic filler every now and then, but any non-cohesive mix, as opposed to a carefully curated album is going to have songs that naturally become "fillers".
Just now, I discovered that Spotify snuck in "The Juan Maclean - Running Back To You (2014)", which is a cover of "Brian Bennet - Solstice (1978)". Neither songs are completely unknown, but they're also not exactly Bruno Mars.
I don't know if this is pure luck or algorithmic rhythm analysis, but for me it's working.
You're right, they can't prevent that, but they can change their APIs in breaking ways enough to make librespot unreliable, to the point it's just not worth it.
I assume that for a long time, Spotify was content to ignore projects like librespot... they didn't help those projects, but didn't harm them either, and generally to keep things stable enough that a project based on librespot basically stayed working, which is why you saw so many OSS tools that used it behind the scenes. It does seem like that balance shifted over the last year, and now librespot is constantly breaking in new and mysterious ways. Some accounts work, others don't. Some tracks play, others don't. The devs did a great job fixing that stuff, but it's a game of whack-a-mole, and Spotify seems to have really upped the frequency of how often they break things. And that's for the lossy decoding, which is functionality that used to be pretty stable. Spotify reached out and (I assume) made some threats that explicitly shut down their work around lossless audio [1].
FYI -- I'm not associated with the librespot project, but I was actively working on a project that relied on it. Eventually I gave up in favor of self hosting, because I want my music to not break all the time. Shame, because I used to like Spotify a lot and now I'm actively looking to move away from it. That's one premium family plan subscription they're gonna lose! I'm sure they'll feel the sting.
Because millions of Spotify-compatible speakers are sold with firmware that will never be upgraded, so they can't ever change the Spotify connect protocol without breaking those devices.
I'm glad they're doing well but I would guess only a tiny fraction of the people who use Spotify would be capable of setting up Navidrome. I tried and went back to Plex. I wish it were otherwise but if something takes more than a few clicks to go from zero to music that leaves 95% of users out! I hope these projects get more accessible though.
Tools for piracy are much better today than they were back in the Napster or grooveshark days. It’s actually kind of shocking to me that we haven’t had a popcorntime moment for music again. Nothing technical is preventing the creation of a perfect decentralized anonymous p2p FLAC streaming platform with plausible deniability.
How would the plausible deniability piece work? If you stream some bytes to someone else, you can't deny doing it. Unless you imagine this working over Tor, idk what the performance of Tor is these days but I never thought it could support such an application.
Music is relatively small. Tor is totally capable of hosting zlibrary without bandwidth restrictions getting in the way.
By plausible deniability I simply meant adopting a similar approach that Stremio has, to keep it on the good side of App Store approval processes. The app itself only allows for creative commons content by default, but with the right incantations it can host anything.
Stremio and other apps like Fusion have gone up and been (reasonably quickly) taken down off the App Store though.
Not really "on the good side" when your main distribution method is "add this app to your account within the first 1-2 weeks of it being in the App Store or never again", or sideloading.
To those of you who might get any ideas from this comment, Soulseek already has a growing problem of people vibe coding "free Spotify" apps that end up hammering a few accounts without giving anything back to the community by hosting. The solution seems to be some combination of automated hosting checks and captchas via PM, which are tiresome to maintain and might just drive more people off from hosting altogether.
I've also canceled my Spotify sub three weeks ago and migrated to Navidrome. I'm still not quite satisfied with the available clients, I'm using Feishin. Fastpotift looks like a nice candidate to extend to support Navidrome.
3. Okay, let's try Meat Puppets' lauded second LP from my backlog... artist is there, but four first LPs aren't. On Spotify and Apple Music.
4. For fun, let's try to find that very obscure kote kei demo, (螺旋 (Rasen) - Hysterical Noi「z」e / Like「M」(1997)). Nothing, of course, but well, I can't even find it on private trackers or SoulSeek (got some mystery mp3s "somewhere").
So, if I were to stoop down to streaming, looks like Spotify/Apple are less worse here.
I use Deezer (in a browser tab, and on my iphone.) It's good, but far from great.
If several artists / bands share the same name, there will be one artist page with all of the artists/bands releases.
The queue management sucks, I can add stuff to the queue, move / remove individual entries. That's it. If I added an album to the queue and want to remove it, I have to click a little cross one time for each track of the album.
Notifications about new releases: great. Except the UI is a tiny dropdown, and hovering over an item removes the little marker signaling it's a new one. It's really difficult to catch up when there are more than 5 new entries.
etc.
Probably for the same reason Twitter killed their API, more control over the experience and to serve ads/cross-promote. More cross-promote for Spotify.
The first Spotify client, the one in Qt was actually really good. Things started going downhill slowly when they integrated Facebook then very fast when they threw everything through the window to rewrite everything in electron.
It wasn't, really. At least not completely. I fully agree on the algorithm - I miss times of scrobbling to Last.fm, which was much better at this. (Spotify always supported scrobbling to Last.fm from their client, surprisingly).
Spotify used to be snappy and worked really well on Linux. I even used it for local libraries, as it was one of the few options that didn't crash on mine.
It was at the beautiful time when we realized web apps can have local storage, Google released that experiment called Chrome to "show public how modern browser can evolve and inspire other browser makers how to progress". We know it ended up in "extinguish the market with it", unfortunately.
But Spotify chose native app approach - they distributed it as packages. Deezer on the other hand, back then (I don't know now) had just native web app that could pull music locally. I think it was an extension of Chrome (?). It also worked perfectly fine on Linux, almost two decades ago.
We are seeing a slow but steady stream of small breaking changes, designed to gradually piss off everyone involved. While avoiding a large breaking change that attracts a load of bad publicity.
Sadly this strategy is the only good idea they've had in years.
> We're going to vibe code the entire enshittified internet to be ours once again.
It’s such a wishful thinking, but no it doesn’t and won’t work this way. Code != useful product. Plus today’s web is all about fabricated content, AI bots, cloudflare challenge walls and all other annoying stuff. The very idea of being able to create something in seconds is already killing internet.
Garbage being created at unprecedented rates does not diminish the fact that LLMs are acting as a positive multiplier for useful tools; this very item being one.
No one in all these years had gone through the effort of replicating the Spotify client with a snappy fast interface for a reason. Everything had been an integration into already existing software, or simpler interfaces, because the effort was not worth it. The equation has changed.
You can look at the glass half full all you want, my glass is overflowing.
This is the best year in all of my 20 years in tech. I'm creating so much stuff and it's all I've ever wanted.
This is the dream of the 2000's, and big tech can't stop us anymore.
I think I'm going to write my own music player soon that behaves exactly like I want it to. Maybe this weekend. Or maybe right after my home automation project. But I can probably squeeze them both in.
> You are creating so much stuff, but most of them are useless garbage that no one cares about.
Are you so sure of that?
One of my projects is at $5M ARR in just six months. I passed $400k in sales this month. It's an open source project.
I'm teaching my wife to code and we're going to make a video game together. Surely you can see the value in that bonding experience? She never would have been interested prior to Claude Code.
I've been writing my own SRS software for drilling typing in Japanese. It's pretty fantastic. Nothing like that existed before I made it. So many needs that went unmet are just being filled.
That's just top of mind. I've been doing a ton.
Nobody likes to tag music the way I like to (multiple scalar quantified dimensions with clustering), so there's literally no music player on the planet in the shape that I want. If I'd wanted to build that before, I'd have to spend opportunity cost over several weekends to start building, plus the ongoing burden of maintenance. That's likely a few months burnt plus fixing things when API integrations break down. Now it's a few hours plus a bug fix here and there.
This is 3D printing for software.
I don't get the negativity. This is all so magical.
I wholeheartedly agree that we’re in a time in tech that is unbelievably enabling and exciting. I’ve learned so much and built so much useful bespoke tools for myself over the past year and it’s only getting better.
I’m quite turned off by just how many grumpy people here have to shit on everything they possibly can.
It was nice to finally read a comment that is unabashedly positive.
FYI on this site, I had to enable WebGL to get it to run in Firefox. Not sure why it requires WebGL specifically I didn't see anything on the pages that seemed to need something like that. They could be losing customers that can't load their site.
I am very interested in your projects. Particularly the music player.
Tagging for Latin America music is basically a cluster fuck of misleading misunderstandings, there's not a single salsa, merengue, son, charanga, or bachata song that has been correctly tagged in any streaming platform o scrobbler. It's like the people using the platforms are deaf to the rhythms. WTF is Latin Jazz doing in a salsa song? Exactly.
If anyone is interested in selfhosting or wants to stop using spotify without losing the discoverabily:
I use explo+slsk+lidarr+navidrome, for access on my phone I use dsub2000 or symfonium but mainly dsub2000.
Explo is the software used for the discovery https://github.com/LumePart/Explo
It automatically downloads daily jams, weekly jams and weekly exploration playlists from your listenbrainz account(free) using youtube, soulseek(with slskd) or lidarr (support was merged very recently).
I also imported all my artists from my spotify account when I migrated which you can do in lidarr with the plugin ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶k̶ ̶ bellow ̶b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶s̶u̶p̶p̶o̶r̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶i̶n̶ ̶l̶i̶d̶a̶r̶r̶.̶
A simpler, lower-tech alternative is to subscribe to Bandcamp newsletters. Infinite discoverability to be had and any purchases made directly support artists.
There are also excellent listener-supported radio stations that are dedicated to nothing but introducing people to really cool music they wouldn't otherwise hear. Examples:
- KEXP (Seattle, WA)
- KCRW (Los Angeles, CA)
- KUTX (Austin, TX)
- WYEP (Pittsburgh, PA)
- So many college radio stations; they still exist and are probably going to see a resurgence now that the youngs are detaching from tech
(Soapbox: I believe that algorithmic music discoverability works for music _you already like and listen to_ but is terrible for music _you haven't heard before but might like_.)
I'd like to add another absolutely great radio Station: "FIP" - France Inter Paris.
It belongs to Radio France has been running since 1971.
Everytime i Tune in i write down song and artist namens because the mix is so great for me. It really is all over the place but with a lot of style. Plus: once every half hour or so you get one of the famous announcers that tell you interesting or funny things. They are all women and a Main reason for FIPs uniqueness. And i don't even understand them :-)
You can listen via the Radio France app or find the link for the stream online.
(In the app there are also additional genre-specific streams of FIP but IMHO the Main one is the most interesting one because of its large variety that still fits together.
I discovered explo too and AI slopped my own solution a while back for the discover weekly from listenbrainz xD (navidrome-listenbrainz-jams on GH) - aside the fact that listenbrainz had technical issues for a bit - does the job for me; maybe I should add support for last.fm playlists as those seems to be more diverse I would say (but less API-friendly)
Thanks for sharing Explo, looks like a good project for discovery, I’m going to check it out!
I’m using a similar setup, with Lidar/Navidrome, but using Subwave for discovery. It works very well for going through your library and playing music like a radio station would, but it won’t recommend anything that’s not already in there.
I used lscr.io/linuxserver/lidarr:nightly, note that the `latest` tag won't work as it's using the `master` branch which doesn't have plugin support yet, so either use the `nightly` tag or the `develop` tag.
Edit: egui is an immediate mode GUI library written in Rust. egui runs natively on , and on the web it is compiled to WebAssembly and rendered with WebGL or WebGPU. Everything you see is rendered as textured triangles. There is no DOM, HTML, JS or CSS. Just Rust.
Devs are constantly making the mistake of falling in love with immediate mode GUIs... because it's convenient for them, the developer. For the user, it's almost always a worse experience as things don't behave in the same way as the rest of the platform they're on.
egui is great for video game debug UI overlays and internal tools, and maybe some specialized graphical tools. Otherwise its quirks are too annoying for general purpose app usage. Sure, you banged out a UI quickly with it, at the expense of your users.
No, it’s fine. It’s the longer term DX that takes a hit. Anything other systems can do, immediate mode can do, because like those systems you can always cache across frames. The same can’t really be said for retained mode. We wrote some about it here: https://tritium.legal/blog/desktop
I clicked on that expecting to see something about the limitations of retained mode, but I didn't see anything. There's a claim about long term retained mode complexity, and a discussion about a winit bug...
* Right off the bat in the login screen, if you resize the window, it flickers
* I logged in. Double clicking the top part of the window doesn't maximize it, like I expect on basically all other windows. I'm using MacOS, btw
* Resizing the main home screen is also a flickery mess. Though I'll give credit, it's a fast flickery mess, because the official spotify app resizes like ass
* Okay, here's one more specific to egui and why I think its approach is not good outside of the app types I listed in my original comment: I type some text in the search bar. Let's say I want to highlight the last word after I've typed it, in order to delete it or type something else. On every other app on my system, I can hold Option + Shift + Left Arrow Key. Or perhaps Cmd + Arrow Keys to move the cursor to the start or end of the line. The egui app just doesn't work, because egui misses so many fine details about text manipulation on a given OS.
* In general, text handling just sucks
* Scrolling doesn't have the inertial bounce when it hits the ends of a scroll action
* It's very easy to create overlapping UI elements by resizing panels and/or the window itself.
Anyway, those are just some of the things from a few minutes of trying this specific app out.
In general, if it's an egui app, I already know there will be weird resizing glitches/flickers, a poor text editing experience, and it will typically not follow the platform's idioms and built-in gestures, scroll physics, behaviors, etc. In this case, the app is decent since it mostly just needs to play music, and you mercifully don't need to interact with it much when it comes to text and such.
But saying "It's a GUI like any other" is like saying "wonderbread is a bread like any other". Maybe it's a curse of knowledge? Similar things happen with coffee. One person says "tastes like coffee" while another can pick out individual flavor notes. Maybe I'm shouting into the void and no one gives a shit anymore, I dunno. But to me, these things matter and are a mark of quality.
If we have LLMs that can shit out whatever code now, why aren't people having them output truly "native" GUIs that use the UI framework of the OS so they can get all the expected behaviors by default?
This seems like more of a complaint about egui's choice to re-implement all the widgets from scratch than its choice to use an immediate mode API. The two are orthogonal. The IMGUI idea has its roots in a community of people that like implementing things from scratch, but you could implement it on top of native widgets if you wanted to.
The choice to re-implement native widgets from scratch is justifiable if the egui devs think they can do better than the native widgets do. It's also nearly required in practice if they want the toolkit to have consistent behavior across multiple platforms (something people have learned the hard way multiple times across multiple different UI libraries).
It's hard to get it right, but that's why the egui devs are writing a library: so that others can benefit from that hard work. Many of the things you pointed out are just bugs, and bugs can be fixed.
> but you could implement it on top of native widgets if you wanted to
Is there an immediate mode GUI API that uses native widgets? I don't think I've ever seen that but would be curious to try it out. Does it work well in practice? If it doesn't exist, then it's kind of a moot point, isn't it?
I sympathize with wanting "consistent behavior across multiple platforms", but that usually just results in "consistently kneecapped behavior across multiple platforms".
You should draw a distinction between “implementing the GUI” and “implementing OS behavior”. Flickering aside egui works mostly fine for the former; the latter falls apart on most non-browser-and-non-toolkit-wrapper approaches because people never stop to handle those things.
E.g your double click on title bar thing sounds less like egui to me and more like somewhere in the stack is missing an AppKit flag.
I was about to come here and say that egui is a terrible choice for web. Everything is rendered in a canvas, so accessibility and extensibility is thrown out of the window. Basic browser functions like pinch-zoom don't work, it has some very wonky visual bugs when resizing the window, interactions have a very noticeable delay, no browser extensions work with this.
This is really not a good solution for web apps, and if you're vibe coding your apps anyway, there isn't any reason not to have a native browser application.
It's the first time I've heard about egui. I'm currently working on a desktop app that uses Tauri, and I realized there's a Tauri plugin that connects the two:
in addition to what other comments pointed out, on the demo ( https://www.egui.rs/#demo ) if you have a sidebar open, there is an offset of approximately the sidebar's width (though not exactly) between the system's mouse pointer position and the web app
Lots of people seem to care about whether a project was built by hand over time by a few committed developers, or if it was vibe-coded in the past week by a single person.
Whether the distinction matters or not, it would be nice for everyone involved if projects falling into the second category were more upfront about that.
I don't think it's needed or a fair ask. Even though project clearly shows one of the contributors as Claude. There are excellent AI assisted software out there and shite software "crafted" by bare fist and knuckles violently banging a mechanical keyboard in a glorious hacker dungeon.
When I commit I either mark it as my own commit if I've read through every line of that commit at least once (not skimmed), pushed back, changed, etc, or put as "ai@<a word I use>" if it was mostly "fine, do it…" or the "whatever… " phase. I never let AI write a single word of documentation or comment. And I made sure Claude removed its attribution the first time I started using it. Besides I was using GLM 5.2 at that time so Claude was not a fit anyway. I don't think they should have that default behaviour.
Yes, a project maintained and built over longer time has a bigger chance of staying relevant, than someone's weekend fun they will abandon once the dopamine hit of "making something" wears off.
Isn't software written by hand more likely to be abandoned due to the extremely costly nature of keeping its development going? Abandonware definitely existed prior to vibe coding. As long as it's open source, now you can pick it up and keep vibe-developing it if you care to, for very little money/effort.
Possibly, but sunk costs fallacy often means it's possible to rely on the maintainer to stick around. I think we all know how disposable LLM-generated code can be. If I wanted to vibe code my own thing, I'd do it my way rather than fork an abandoned project.
What's needed is more of a nexus thing where there's evidence multiple people work together or some long track record of someone scratching a very specific itch. Or if we're all using agents to build the same thing some way for them to team up. It's a sort of proof of life thing and it's difficult to distinguish those from flashes in the pan.
Rather than sunk cost fallacy, I would call it survivorship bias: the projects that someone has consistently worked on over time are a small fraction of the total projects out there, and those that have survived are probably useful to someone (at the very least, their developers).
I'm not sure what decision you're talking about.
My comment just mentions that it would be convenient if disclosure of vibe-coding was more common.
I can look for myself and see that the repo was started a week ago and has had hundreds of commits since, and that the author exclusively talks about ai on twitter. I'd just like it if I could save myself some time, and it would prevent useless discussions in this thread were people argue whether the commit-messages look like ai.
I'll admit to having some bias against vibe coding, but trying to put that aside I think it depends on the purpose of the project. If it attempts to be an improvement over existing software then absolutely yes it would, things like speed, performance, security and reliability are not something I'd trust vibe coding for. If its for doing something novel where the previously mentioned is less of the focus, I can imagine myself looking past that, sure.
Software has finally started to get faster, and I love it.
Pls don't consider this a spam, but if anyone is interested in a fast native Slack client, I'm building one, since Slack themselves don't want to: https://msga.app
It’s not specific to this program, but I lately get this feeling that distributing widely a piece of software that exists for 5 days and saw a dozen releases in that period is stretching the open source trust model.
If this player has true random playing of your songs, instant sell for me. Also, a mobile version would be great, even if I have to do a manual install.
Spotify's "random shuffle" has been broken for years, with a long running thread [1] complaining about it. A lot of the commenters think there is some kind of "artist priority" playing algorithm, with some kind of maximum profit goal or something. But I think it's simpler - if Spotify just plays the same ~20 songs, they save a lot on bandwidth as it can just play from a local store. Who knows the real reason, I just know that it's annoying when I have a 2000+ song playlist and only hear a small percentage of it.
And yes I'm aware last year Spotify announced "fewer repeats" shuffle - but it doesn't work, or isn't sufficient anyway.
The most sickening part of this is that it isn’t actually broken, it’s working exactly how Spotify wants. Spotify thinks we are so stupid we actually want their janky “shuffle” that doesn’t work properly.
Interesting. I've always wanted something like this. The official Spotify player sucks in many ways, but the UI/UX is decent, or at the very least I'm used to it now.
All the other lightweight Spotify clients roll their own UIs in ways that I don't like, so I really appreciate that their LLM has taken the time to clone the UI 1:1.
But now I have to decide if I want someone else's vibecode on my computer. I think not.
I've been slowly trying to stop my spotify usage and replace it with owned audio files.
Mostly I try to use Bandcamp but many artists are not there. Sometimes I just rip the audio from youtube but would prefer a way to buy that gives most of the money to the artist.
I've found that it's actually surprisingly difficult to find a lot of music I like for purchase. Bandcamp is good but there is also 7Digital (both owned by Songtradr), Bleep and Qobuz. 7Digital usually has stuff that won't be on Bandcamp. There are also a few newer alternatives popping up like Ampwall, Subvert, and Mirlo.
My brother recently sent me a new album for my birthday. Very kind. But, it's on vinyl. And I don't have a player.
But it just reinforces thoughts I had before. I had wanted to gift him some music too, but, how? He has a phone. He has a computer. He's not particularly tech savvy. I know I can't ship him a CD, he has nothing that can rip it.
I know you buy an album on Amazon, they let you download the MP3s right away. But, how do I even gift that? Can you even download MP3 to an iPhone? From someplace not Apple? I honestly have no idea.
And it just highlights, to me, the entire (seemingly) difficulty of gifting music today.
Saving everything until Bandcamp Fridays for the ones on Bandcamp, otherwise pretty much Beatport or not buying it at all. Some labels I've listened to for a long time (like Liquicity) I buy the music straight from their store, figure the artist/label gets the most then.
After discovering music I like on YouTube or whatever, I buy albums on Bandcamp and Qobuz if possible, and Amazon as a last resort. Then I host them on my personal Navidrome server to enjoy without involving any big tech.
Are compact discs no longer available? I used to rip from those - every album I've ever downloaded and kept I have the CD for. Some bought before the download, many bought after.
But it's been a long time since I've heard anything good enough to purchase.
Looks good, but ran into loading spinners fairly quickly, large playlists kill this, I suspect because the api is not properly respecting the cache headers and is refetching the same information repeatedly and thus getting rate limited. Also
Once that happened I wasn't then sure if issues I'm seeing are from api or the app itself. It's possible this is prioritising the responsiveness of the UI rather than the actual speed of user interactions.
Also the menu bar icon doesn't work for me (on MacOs). I can see it, but it doesn't do anything and there's nothing in the app itself to enable/disable it (though thankfully it does respect cmd+drag to delete).
I might be misremembering, but I swear when Spotify launched it was a big revelation at the time because the client was super fast and playback was almost instantaneous. This was a big deal as other music players like iTunes were bloated.
Obviously streaming was the big selling point, something that iTunes didn’t offer at the time, but I swear the client was written in some native UI framework, along with the C/C++ library.
Or was the spotify UI always just a browser engine skin and the perception of speed was from the playback engine?
What's funny about having to rely on unauthorized clones to provide a fast native UX was that Spotify's original client back in 2008 started out as beautifully light, custom rendered native client.
Few Apps ever had that wow factor the first time I used it, it was so much lighter and more responsive than anything else of the day. I remember being perplexed at how I could search and skip to any part of a song quicker than iTunes could looking at a local library. Everything was latency-free and instantaneous.
We were building a Music Startup at the time, so we investigated how it worked. We we’re very surprised we couldn’t find any evidence of an established UI toolkit. It looked as though they had built their own custom UI renderer and optimized TCP protocol which sent back its metadata in XML. Their traffic looked like it was initially seeded from their own (or CDN) servers (for best latency) and then overtime we would see some P2P traffic on the wire.
Our QT/C++ client had decent performance but was noticeably heavier than Spotify's. I was disappointed to see their native client eventually be abandoned and succumb to become yet another Chromium wrapper. I expect it fell to the pressures of a growing startup adding 100s of developers (without the skill of their original CTO/devs) where a native UI couldn't be updated and re-iterated as fast as a Web App. I wish they maintained 2 desktop clients, and left their native client alone to just be an audio player and push all their new social features to their new flagship CEF app.
It's unfortunate the skill and desire of building fast native UIs are being lost to Electron and CEF wrappers. Seems the larger the organization the more likely they are to build new Web rendered Desktop Apps and we have to rely on unauthorized Indie efforts like this for fast, responsive native UIs.
(The comment is from a 2021 post about another Rust-based Spotify client.)
Ludvig Strigeus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Strigeus?wprov=sfti1 wrote the original client, and fast, lean, native clients was his modus operandi. OpenTTD and uTorrent were both built the same way. I’ve been wondering on and off over the years why Spotify abandoned it. My guess is that it was hard to scale that approach and that a hybrid browser client was easier to scale when there are many different engineering teams working on different parts of the client.
I worked with a few people (tech) that Spotify later hired. Sweden is kind of small.
The calibre went from extremely high to surprisingly average within a decade. Not bad, to be clear, but kinda mid. I think they scaled too quickly and hit the 'bozo effect'.
It was originally native, then native with some web-based bits, and then the web-based bits slowly ate the whole thing. It seems the ease of development with web-tech compared to C++ (also the better font rendering and screen reader support) was just too tempting.
Interestingly the Spotify client was never based on electron but instead arrived independently at the "chromium + web app" architecture at around the same time as Atom did.
Tried using Spotify web client on Safari the other day. Performance was absolutely terrible.
For comparison I was using Apple Music via safari before.
I’m just surprised that such a big company can produce such an awful web experience, guess everyone is just using the native app, but for some that’s not possible
Wow, I was going to say I assume the pic in the top right is of the official Spotify client, which seems confusing, but it seems this actually just looks really like the official client. Which is good but possibly makes it more likely Spotify will come after you.
The UI feels a lot less sluggish than the official client (which in my experience seems to have gotten way worse lately) but in many cases I am just sent to a loading page which ultimately takes a similar amount of time to load the content. So it seems a lot of the slowness is coming from the Spotify server side, it's just that the official client seems to freeze while waiting for a response whereas this doesn't.
Hopefully Spotify don't kill librespot. As I understand it you can basically only use it with Premium accounts, so it's not like they aren't getting paid anyway. If some other provider were to come along and offer access to the same content as Spotify with a stable API that you can use with any client, I would pay more for that than I currently do for Spotify.
As an aside, ncspot is another good and more minimalise Spotify client, which is a TUI.
I recently went through most of the Spotify clients I could find on GitHub, looking for something "lean", including screen real estate.
Most of the GUI apps had something similar to the official app in the maximized window, but none had a good mini-player, something I could put in the corner of an external monitor and control most of the important functions with minimal mouse clicking, including EQ and playlist.
Interestingly this one with its Winamp mode is what I was looking for. Nostaliga is probably playing a part, but it a good UI does not have to be "modern".
I also went through a tour of TUI apps. Lots of interesting work there, but a full TUI with windows was less convenient to navigate, and some of them try to do too much. I wound up using https://github.com/hrkfdn/ncspot because it specifically does not attempt to be a character mode GUI. Almost like a ViMusic.
If you're focused on lightweight, native and fast, I don't think you should use an immediate-mode GUI toolkit. Why does an app like this need to hit a 60fps framerate? It's not a game.
I was surprised to see an immediate mode gui toolkit.
They're great to integrate into a game loop because you control your loop, (and they're a delight to use) but I thought for perf retained mode was the way to go?
Am I missing something? Then again if the bar needing to be beaten is spotify's existing desktop app maybe it doesn't matter?
Egui doesn't do that. But it's written in Rust and only updates when you interact with it so in practice it's way more efficient than I would have expected.
Author here. Two reasons I chose an immediate mode UI framework:
1. Latency. A click paints on the next frame, because it sidesteps the stages of a retained mode UI: there's no dirty-marking, no layout and paint passes scheduled for later, no cached visual state that can be stale.
2. Simplicity. The UI is a plain function of app state. There's no retained tree to keep in sync and no invalidation bugs: mutate the state and the next frame shows it.
Yes, the drawback is that you have to watch what a frame costs, but it doesn't repaint at every frame. It paints on input and you can schedule repaints yourself. Fastpotify sits at zero CPU when idle, asks for a few frames a second while a track plays, and runs at full rate only while you scroll.
My worry with this, like all Spotify clients really, is its dependance on Spotify's, quite litteraly, worst public facing API that is known to exist.
I have been using Spotatui and it's been fast enough, but it would be nice sometimes to have a better 'new music' search experience. I'll give this a try, but if Spotify are hell bent on destroying API users, I fear the project maintainers will have more work than it's worth.
This looks great, I'll give it a try. It seems like most of the comments focus on how this was created, whether it's vibe coded, agent engineered, LLM assisted or however you want to term this.
On one hand, I am sad at the collapse of my craft. I love building things in code, figuring it out from the system design to the last compile. On the other hand, I love how productive I am now. How I can complete tasks faster. As someone mentioned, there is a very larger distance between "I vibed coded it and I don't know how it worked" to "I built it and I used LLMs to assist the process".
It is possible to design a system, and instruct LLMs to write code for you. Task them the actual act of code writing, not feature development. It's not "build me a music player" but "I'm building a music player that works like so, and you will now write me the play button component that will behave like so and so, focusing on this or that, paying attention to x, y and z and avoiding a, b and c".
Although the scope is different but I imagine a similar debate when one didn't need to write machine code anymore...
I think it's cool people are making custom clients. I actually am working on my own client: WaveeMusic (https://github.com/christosk92/WaveeMusic). I decided not to base it on librespot because it still talks to Spotify's old AP audiokey channel. Official clients don't use that path anymore, it already refuses accounts created after ~2023, and Spotify can turn it off whenever they want.
I decided to use the new PlayPlay instead, the DRM path the official apps actually use. That also gets you music videos, and lossless / FLAC (still working on the decode). Also the app is more focused on the native Win11 niche for the folks who like those type of UIs.
I've been thinking recently about buying an AI-capable GPU and using it to reverse-enginner and debloat apps I use every day. It seems like a task that even a dumber AI model could do. Disassemble the app, then either cut the things I don't care about, or just implement it fresh in a correct way.
I don't think models that run on single GPUs are capable of that yet sadly. You still need to spend ~$100k to get an actually good local LLM. Correct me if I'm wrong, local AI guys. It's really hard to get actually numbers on this stuff, but to run e.g. GLM 5.3 Flash as far as I can tell you need one of those super expensive 8 GPU machines.
if i tasked it with "create spotify" I'd need that much.
asking it to "disassemble Spotify and find out the minimal code path needed to play a song" is much more in reach. I don't need it to oneshot it. If it gets stuck, I've read enough disassembled C to figure it out and get it unblocked.
Instead of banging my head against a binary for 5 hours, I'll have my agent bang it's weights for 20 hours, then put in my 1 hour of polish.
My first task would be to fix the Android version of Facebook Messenger. My friends still stick with it because they have iPhones, and that version works fine. I have been putting up with broken image previews for 2 years now. I'll fix that fucking wild pointer they don't care about and make it usable as a chat app. And I'll remove the ads while at that.
If anyone wants a lightweight, GUI, non-slopcoded spotify client I find spotify-qt[1] does the job nicely.
Alas, it wears only the skin of your system QT theme
Just came to say that official client (all its processes combined) uses 1.1Gb of RAM on my macbook air, while this, playing the same track from the same playlist and nothing else, gets only up to 280Mb
I came here to say the opposite. Running on MacOS 15.7 the original Client uses ~200mb and Fastpotify uses ~500mb playing the same song while being substantially slower when navigating music.
EDIT: I forgot about the Spotify Helper processes - taken into account the original spotify needs ~1GB.
However it's still a lot faster than Fastpotify
If you want this experience but don't want Spotify may I suggest my "amp" app - you can get it on tinyjs.app
It's small ~10mb. Yes, takes a bit more memory, but it plays all your local files including rarer things like FLAC + Cue, midi and all the tracker files you could want!
And includes a bunch of viz - and you can write your own too.
It doesn't do Winamp skins; decided I wanted to add more than they could support.
This looks amazing but unfortunately this project is doing free work for Spotify rather than brining competition they need.
The root problem is that the content access is so gatekept. Apple music opens on it's own. Spotify is junk. YouTube music isn't much better. They've all become lazy and need a shake up.
I'm using Qobuz now, they have both downloads and streaming, and apparently pay the artist more than any of the other streaming alternatives. I've found all the music I've looked for there too (including some artists that dropped Spotify). Quite happy with everything except maybe the name ..
I use the Spotify browser UI on my PC because the Windows 11 app is such a joke. However, the browser UI makes my screen go completely black for a second every single time. That's my #1 reason for wanting to try this. Spotify's playlist algorithm is a joke at best, but that's another issue altogether.
Very cool. I'm cloning the repo, just in case it gets taken down. I've been using EGUI, but its biggest problem is that LLMs really struggle with it. There isn't enough good examples of it. This codebase seems to have a lot of good examples, so given this as a reference, one might make a lot of progress much faster.
For me, stock Spotify client on Mac is using ~200MB RAM (no videos / canvas). I probably need to try a leaner build on Fastspotify (built it myself from source), bug the damn thing was using ~350MB RAM. Both RAM counts were based on initial load + playing one song.
have you summed up all the Spotify Helper processes from Chrome? alas its way beyond 200MB. But I just built and ran release build of fastpotify and its also hovering in 500s
These apps and systems have hard quirks built in to make you learn them then find the alternatives jarring so you don’t switch. It’s a retention trick by engineers who know what they’re doing. As many pointed out decent music player/library ux was solved yonks ago.
Other than having abysmal inconsistencies in their UI, ive never had any problems with the native Spotify app. I've been using Spotify for 10 years now and when im on my PC i open the app, either put my Podcast or song and then minimize it. Didnt know people had such issues with the app.
I can’t speak for mobile, but the desktop/web product has been a disaster for years. When Spotify went full Electron a few years back, a bunch of standard macOS keyboard shortcuts stopped working. These issues were on their “support” forum for years before being automatically closed.
For me, it gets the job done, which is mainly managing the hundreds of podcast episodes I am bookmarking (and probably never listen to). Or maybe the iOS version is a bit better than the Android one.
I use youtube music.. It has everything I listen to and more.. Want an obscure college band (Go ZURCHER) ? .. It is there! Want some rare DnB (source direct).. It is there? Want a curated ambient collection? It is there! UX is totally fine on Apple and Android..
I tried switching from Spotify to Youtube Music but the "download for offline" functionality is incredibly broken -- often doesn't recognize that it's on wifi to start downloading, multiple minutes to download an album that Spotify downloads in a few seconds, and for a longer playlist the pause/resume when you go off wifi doesn't work at all.
Love the Winamp feature - but more so that it comes with milkdrop! That is next level.
What would YouTube music support look like? And another random feature request - universal playlist import / export (i.e. take my YouTube playlist and convert it to Spotify and vice versa - Rosetta stone style)
What I've realized is that Spotify is great for discovering new songs. But I'm a grown up and listen to the same hundreds of songs every day anyway. No need to keep paying the taxes.
Carmine is cooking. His work on RubyLLM has been incredible, even going as far as upstreaming important work about fiber usage into Rails Solid Queue so that we reap the Async benefits, which are essential in this LLM age.
I never understood the complaints about Spotify. Apple Music behaved like crap with something as simple as being offline, to me it's always been a no-brainer to use Spotify over anything else.
I use Strawberry as my music player on Linux, which is a native Qt app and has Spotify integration. No need for the spotify app.
Strawberry has great collection support as I own thousands of ripped CDs.
I like the idea of a fast Spotify player, but I can't get over my doubts of LLM code quality when the audio playback stutters even with the 200ms output buffer setting (on macOS).
I'd love to put in some love and effort into a Spotify replacemeny that supports jams. I'd share the app with friends. I needed an excuse to make a cross-platform app anyway.
Like this, but the problem with such immediate mode GUI apps is that they constantly burn 1-2% of CPU when the app is idle. A waste of compute and power.
Fuck Spotify. Even if you don't care about the ethics of Daniel Ek's investments, the platform itself is crap. One of the lowest paying to artists, not paying at all unless they hit a threshold, and the catalogue is filling up with AI slop, which they push on users via 'radio' and 'mix' playlists, so they can pay even less royalties. No, thanks.
I've tested Deezer for half a year. The software quality was horrible.
Had a lot of crashes, it often took many many seconds to change between the songs and often getting stuck, the buffering algorithm was nuts and eating a lot of bandwidth.
Everything on a standard Pixel. Full 5G coverage was available.
Qobuz have the highest per stream payout rate for artists [0], and have the best audio quality of all streaming platforms (better even that Tidal imho). They have desktop, mobile and android auto (and presumably carplay) clients, and an equivalent to Spotify Connect whereby streaming can be switched to a different client.
Downsides are no native client (same webview approach as Spotify), not as strong recommendations (though slowly improving), good but slightly quirkier UI (also slowly improving). For me the trade offs are worthwhile.
Tidal is the last streaming service I use, split between that and a jellyfin+arrs setup coupled with buying music from artists directly.
Fuck Spotify and their rotten leadership. Was amongst the early adopters (2009). I'm sure they won't care for the loss, and I won't miss th when they're gone.
Also, I know it's a bit niche, but Deezer does not have an equivalent of "Spotify Connect" protocol, which means that Network Integrated Amplifiers (like Onkyo A-50), CANNOT implement a player with good UX. Spotify is now king since they introduced lossless quality which is enabled by default in such amplifiers. The benefit is that there is no local streaming (e.g. Bluetooth) and no latency. The data come from Spotify directly to the amplifier and then your speakers.
So, Deezer that had a audiophile target audience, has effectively lost the game.
Nitpicking but those devices do not "benefit lossless by default" after Spotify started offering it.
I was very disapointed that my Yamaha network receiver didn't get an update to support lossless from Spotify Connect.
Tried Tidal? The one gripe I have with it is no remote control, as in using phone to change what's currently playing on the device connected to my sound system, without it thinking I want to start playing on my phone.
The best is to host your own, navidrome is great and easy to set up. But if you really wanna hate on one, it’s Apple Music, believe it or not, they will actually delete ALL your playlists that you made over the years if you stop paying subscription for few weeks or sometime for days, why? Because Apple says fuck you, you are renting and you are not entitled for anything, which also explains why they are now trying to have hardware as a service with their new renting hardware program.. at least spotify doesn’t do that and keep your playlist to export later.
Careful, you'll get downvoted by knee-jerk reactions from people who have absolutely no idea whatsoever about the harm Spotify causes to artists trying to survive in the music industry.
Unfortunately this won't fix the atrocious recommendation system. I really wish these music services could just license Pandora's system. Since Pandora won't add high quality streams, they may as well offer a license to make up for the money they leave on the table monthly.
The most user hostile part about Spotify though, is that you can't just thumbs down a song and never hear it again. Why the fuck would I want you to "not recommend it for 30 days" if I'm telling you I dislike it?
If I didn't lock in a bundle deal years ago that I still can't pass up, I wouldn't use it at all. As of now though, it's relegated to my backup player for when I can't find a song on YT Music or Qobuz.
always thought the spotify ui was really really good, it just has way more features and feels like it is made by a great team that actually uses the app and has input over it's design, vs apple music which is just a normal app that feels like it was made by a committee
I hacked the official client apart to hide some bullshit (like podcasts) and fix bugs that were pissing me off. Shared it exactly once and it stopped working within a month. Bugs were still there too
I have, it's good, but it is not compatible with some of the things I am doing which are quite a bit more foundational/stuctural. The pile of scripts I've accumulated do a pretty good job of resolving easy breakages, listing anything worse, and running a little lap around all of my typical interactions (from another account running in a cloud vm) to diff the network requests so I look normal to them.
This app is a dream come true for me. As a user I'm heavily invested in Spotify but I've grown more and more irritated with their client. Especially the recommendations, which thankfully are largely absent from your client.
Would love a setting to also remove the "Made for you" section, as well as the "Recommended for you" section, both on the home page.
I was using Spicetify to customize the official client to this effect, using CSS.
I've been using Navidrome for a while and love it (long enough to have written an iOS + macOS client). I mount my music from a B2 bucket and use a shell script to sync additions to it. AudioMuse-AI does a great job generating playlists and populating similar artists. There are lyrics plugins, an Apple Music plugin that can populate metadata and on and on. It's a great system and free from the catalogue rot and slop that's been eroding the benefits of streaming for a while now.
hmm I wanted to like this, but for me it's noticeably slower/laggier than the official spotify app, and it's missing common ui features (you can't multi-select and delete from a playlist)
took few sessions to re-slop this to OpenSubsonic (navidrome compat) backend; didn't even looked once at the code, I love and hate the future we live in
The volume of commits is quite crazy. For example, he wrote a +486/-51 commit in 20 minutes (33287cb) with quite dense rust code. That's about 25 changes per minute -- very impressive! The docs also smell of LLM output, for example describing the app as native despite using egui/wgpu.
What about egui and wgpu is not native?
Those are both generally what is considered running something natively. Both even mention running "natively" in their descriptions.
I guess what you mean is "OS-provided controls". In that case, ye that is not what this is.
The website looks great to me, clean and simple, perfect for a project like this. “Not looking like it was made by AI” isn’t something I value for itself in a website, any more than “not looking like it was made with injection molding” is something I would value in a plastic item.
Either it’s good or it isn’t, but it’s not good or bad because of how it was made.
If it was a site made with AI it would be stuffed with way more ad copy, components, UI toggles, and small text. If this was made with AI, they seem to have restrained it from going on the gaudy UI mess of most AI generated sites that are what I like to think of as "Maximalist Minimalist". A hodgepodge of a design library.
Spotify is, without doubt, the worst piece of software that I still use on a daily basis. It's incredibly buggy, incredibly slow, and the UI has so many "usability inconsistencies".
I find the Android app particularly bad, just a couple of examples:
- Under a playlist you get a list of suggested songs, the UI element looks like a "regular song", but unlike every other "song" element the user has been trained to recognize, the "swipe right to queue" does not apply to these elements. For some reason.
- When you don't have connectivity, e.g. you walk into a Faraday cage, then the search tries to reach the internet and won't show you results before it either: 1) does so, 2) times out. Which means you can't browse your local library before some websocket times out. Just show me the local results first?
It truly has been one of the worst UX experiences and poorly made apps that ever made it to mainstream. I remember a decade or so ago there being a bunch of buzz about them in software dev because they were a microservice node.js/react stack or something with each UI element or portion of back-end having a separate dev team. I can vividly remember thinking "oh that's probably why when I change song sometimes the album art doesn't update." they're living proof your product doesn't even need to be that good you just need to be first to market and not really piss anyone off.
I worked for a startup in 2019 which was really pushing the "Spotify model" of team structure. Apparently it's all about self-organising teams and having no leadership. The fact the technology output of the Spotify model - the Spotify app - seemed to be kind of crap didn't seem to matter. I think the main output of the Spotify team structure was blog posts promoting the Spotify team structure.
> Apparently it's all about self-organising teams and having no leadership.
Gross over-simplification. For anyone curious they have videos out there, though they are 10+ years old now so may no longer be accurate, but in 2019-era this was still a thing (company I worked for did it too).[1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvfz4HGtoPc
This video was created in 2014 and was more a description of what they strived for at that point rather than of the full messy reality. Spotify quickly after that grew larger than those ideas would sustain (without changes) and rapidly became more alike any other tech corpo. Certainly around 2019-2020 it was not like in the video by any means. Some structures or names of concepts stayed way longer than the actual practices as described.
(I was active as a coach in Stockholm around this period and know multiple people, both engineers and coaches, who worked at Spotify including Henrik the author of the video.)
The Spotify model is basically just Amazon’s team-owned KPIs and independence, put into a UI so you can really see how much their app is conways law.
This is why all the sections of Amazon.com are barely coherent. AWS does this too but it’s more naturally split and text works better than stateful rich media.
> so you can really see how much their app is conways law
The headache of using the shared playlist "Jam" feature and trying to add a song without playing it directly. There is like a separate queue system for "Jam" and things work differently.
Right now, if you have video clips in Spotify enabled, your lockscreen controls will display 'Artist' - 'Song' - 'Video Available', instead of 'Album Name'. If you disable video all together, it just leaves that area blank instead of displaying the album title.
This has been a thing / issue since 2025. It's pretty clear the video team probably put that in to bump video interactions, then the whole team got put on something else and now this problem is blackholed. The most bizarre to me is: even Spotify's top managers must use their own product when they helicopter to home, right? So they would see this too.
Where is a Jobsian anger for user experience when it is needed. Although in that respect even Apple is in the gutter these days.
Totally agree. They also have some stickiness going for them (at least for me). Now that I've organized my music in Spotify and have my habits in place that deal with the crummy UX, I've gotten numb to the poor UX.
Case in point, I make a daily playlist for running and that UX is frequently changing and often for the worse, but I deal with it because it's a habit that costs me a few seconds maybe a minute per day. The cost of switching to a new thing just feels daunting so I stay.
I also am guilty of enjoying the wrapped summaries at the end of the year :)
I definitely enjoy Wrapped. But also something that keeps me in Spotify is the social aspect. If I want to make a playlist for someone, 95% of people I know use Spotify, so I need to have Spotify.
Yeah this is a good point. They also have a feature that lets you build and mix playlists together with others, not my personal speed but adds to the stickiness.
yes, that + jams are important to me socially
I also enjoyed wrapped, but at some point they made it only viewable in the app. It was previously available in the browser. That was the last time I thought about it.
We used to have a folder full of MP3 files and call that a playlist. Lightweight, works offline, and never changes without your consent.
I'm going back. Storage on phones is so big now. You can have all your music local.
Good point. Regrettably, newer phones have eliminated external SD cards. I preferred upgrading my phone storage on demand and having external card for stuff like MP3s and videos and manually doing large data transfers directly on my computer.
I carry my entire music library on my phone in Opus format. Smaller than a similar quality MP3 and good enough for the times I’m likely listening offline (working out, riding transit, on a plane).
Yeah last I knew the Spotify desktop app loads many dependencies in triplicate or more because each pane is its own independent iframe universe, all so the engineering teams don’t need to talk to each other and they can A/B test incessantly. Inefficient madness.
Spotify definitely has a better claim for "mainstream", but Epic's store/game-app takes the cake for me. Stunningly slow and bad.
> your product doesn't even need to be that good you just need to be first to market and not really piss anyone off.
The product is more than the tech stack
> each UI element or portion of back-end having a separate dev team
Really takes shipping your org chart to another level
It's a music player, and it's way too heavy for what it does. Well, it does a lot it doesn't need to, too. Uses 1.5GB of RAM on my laptop atm. Since I only have 16GB on my work laptop that's noticeable. I'd love it if Spotify AB could replace its client with a native Rust one, although using an immediate-mode GUI library like fastpotify does might not be the best option...
Is there any music streaming service with fast native cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows, Android) clients? Because I'd switch. Feel like Spotify's recommendations have taken a nosedive lately, so that wouldn't hold me back too much.
> Is there any music streaming service with fast native cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows, Android) clients? Because I'd switch.
i use apple music. love it way more than spotify. i originally got it because their descriptions of albums and their playlists are done by actual music nerds. i use the website on linux since it’s my daily/work driver and their app on my phone and macbook when i use it. the apple music app was fine on windows before i switched to linux entirely. definitely leagues better than itunes was.
have the family plan and i never hear complaints from the family members who use it on android.
i hated how spotify would just remove tracks after id spend time making a playlist and suddenly it would just be gone, like not greyed out, just gone. so irritating.
in terms recommendations, apple is a definitely far better than spotify, but it’s still nothing compared to music store nerds, college radio, or friends. recommendation algorithms from every platform are trash and just can’t compete with other people, at all. go to your local record store, look through the employee recommendations or just talk to them, most of them are working in a music store because they love music (its not for the money lol) and then buy the vinyl, you’ll thank yourself later.
Apple music still gets a bit of a bad rap, the first iteration of the desktop and mobile apps for it were god awful. And if you lived outside of the west coast of the US, buffering was a noticable issue as they rather stupidly centralised all streaming out of one location in California for a long time. If you hit skip a handful of times from a UK/EU machine for example that was it, game over, apps locked up and you've gotta force quit.
It's way better now, and the recommendations are pretty good. The app is still crap though (although granted significantly better than Spotify!). Theres some bonkers UX decisions and the mix of Apple Music and iTunes store is piss poor. It's just got some illogical crap going on where depending on where in the interface you right click a song or artist it changes what options you'll get.
"...and the recommendations are pretty good"
This is so confusing to me, many people say that, but a year ago my wife and I tried to switch to Apple Music. Bad recommendations were the main reason why it didn't stick for us. Every time my children would listen to some kids songs a few minutes later it would start playing "random" songs.
Maybe it's similar to Apple Maps, it works good for the American market, but once you try it in other countries/languages the quality is not the same.
FWIW I'm UK - they did suck when I first switched a few years back but are significantly better now.
You can disable that behavior in the settings.
It's a terrible default. Period.
Apple Music has native clients on macOS and Windows (the latter being a greenfield WinUI app rather than based on iTunes heritage). No native Linux app, but unlike Spotify they actually allow third party clients to exist and even furnish a library for devs to use, and so third party clients like Cider[0] exist on Linux. It also has a web app that can be installed as a PWA.
[0]: https://cider.sh
> It's a music player
Spotify doesn’t completely agree with that.
‘Spotify is a digital music, podcast, and video service that gives you access to millions of songs and other content from creators all over the world.’
I left in the middle of their ‘we do Podcasts’ bs, where they were pushing Joe Rogan hard.
Yuck.
https://support.spotify.com/nz/article/what-is-spotify/
I like Joe Rogan. So not yuck for me. But I can understand how if someone you hate is pushed hard by a platform you’d want to leave it.
Agreed. I like Joe Rogan but hate Spotify. For that time period where Rogan was a Spotify exclusive, I didn't listen to his podcast at all.
I think a lot of people were in that camp. I'm not going to sign up for a Spotify account to listen to Rogan. I don't really have any problem with him and have found many of his guests interesting. No hate for Spotify either--I have never used the service so I don't really have an opinion about it, but the overhead of creating and maintaining another account and app was not something I was going to do for one podcast.
Why do people like Joe Rogan?
Isn't it just another ad distribution platform? The amount of ads they started to push to paying(!) users recently makes me want to cancel it every day (but I'm also too lazy to seek alternatives).
> The amount of ads they started to push to paying(!) users
I have never in the history of paying for Spotify had an ad play.
I get ads in podcasts. Not sponsored segments that the podcast creator inserted/narrated themselves (like used to happen), but ad served by Spotify itself, injected into the podcast. Easily 5 minutes in 30 min podcast[1], though this varies and I'm sure it is configurable by the podcast publishers.
1. This is not by feel, Spotify leaks it by displaying the original length and then updated one once it loads.
Other platforms do this too like pocketcasts. I assume it's the backend distribution network identifying your IP address and inserting 'relevant' ads. I don't believe it's being added by the podcast app (though for Spotify it may be, don't know)
Spotify (premium) also has preroll video ads.
I use Pocket Casts all the time and have never heard an ad inserted to a podcast.
Try using it abroad in a non English speaking country. You’ll notice the ads because they won’t be in English. This happens to me on Pocket Casts every time I travel.
> Uses 1.5GB of RAM on my laptop atm.
That's crazy, I just checked on mine (macOS), it's only ~300MiB, about as much as Apple Mail which is native.
Still a bit much for what I need it for, but tolerable.
For the monthly price of Spotify, one could rent a VPS and host Navidrome on it. In case you already have spare capacity, then it might be (almost) free.
Quite annoying when, as we see in the tv show “the playlist” that traces back the story of Spotify, the founder put a huge emphasis on performance to differentiate them from the rest and create the best possible UX…
Well it will only get better now that the “Code is no longer a constraint”! AI can just do everything for them now. https://youtu.be/zFslvuvYifQ?si=sEN270fkICYSpaLU
I switched from Spotify to Amazon Music about 9 months ago, and cancelled Spotify Premium as a result (due to price, not bugs). Amazon Music is so much worse.
1. If you have no connectivity, the app will frequently get stuck in the offline state, playing the spinner indefinitely, even after connectivity has returned. I had similar issues on Spotify, but Amazon Music is so much worse. 2. I had Amazon Music eat my entire cellular plan's data monthly allowance in a day, after it seemingly got stuck in a loop trying to download the same podcast again and again. The podcast is unplayable when it gets in this state, even on perfect Wi-Fi, it just never starts playback. This has happened twice now (incidentally on the same podcast, but different episodes), even after deleting and reinstalling the app entirely.
The second bug is a deal breaker, so I've gone back to Spotify.
I canceled Spotify a few months ago have been using a free Amazon music trial. It's staggering how the Amazon interface is just worse in every single way.
Concurrent to this streaming evaluation, I inherited a Sonos system and by the gods is that app pitiful! You would think the premium sound solution that is supposed to "just work" would prioritize UI.
apple music is good if you dont need it to be feature packed.
best value for money if you use youtube is youtube music app that you get from youtube premium.
Have they replicated 1:1 Spotify's UX in Amazon music finally? I was a user 7 years ago and their Android app back then sucked, big time.
I mean, Amazon just sucks in general when it comes to design. I don't understand why Amazon videos (or whatever their purchased streaming app is) doesn't even queue up sequential movies automatically. It'll play the first Harry Potter movie, then skip to the third, fourth, and then the second, etc. It's not just HP , either.
I switched from Amazon music after many years to Spotify, as Amazon's App was just terrible. Never worked well offline in my watch or phone (Apple).
I only went to Spotify because my kids wanted it. The integration for Spotify is still very good, compared to Amazon Music.
It's always been terrible afaik. I don't know why they bother
Why is spotify so popular? There are different solutions to listen to music. What does spotify do that almost no one else does? Is it the music library or something else?
I use youtube music, but I am looking for alternatives (but not spotify for various reasons).
Because as much as the app sucks the everything else is better than everyone else's music app, at least here in India where we have Apple Music as well. Recommendation, organisation, playlist - it feels like Apple Music is doing all that for a different species altogether. Now I already have said how bloated Spotify iOS app is and I still take it any day over Apple Music's native app. Hell, there are flows in Apple Music that has never gonna past a click at certain page whenever I've tried (that's quite a few in times in last few years). Esp. flows around which they try to play with iCloud and social aspects. Hell, I can't even decide what not to see on my Apple Music home screen. Sometimes I've to do few sipes to reach what I am looking for. Even with all the bloat Spotify never tires me like that.
I can’t speak for everyone, but for me, it just works. I’ve never had any of the issues people are mentioning in this thread. The app isn’t slow or buggy for me, I’ve never had artists I listen to disappear from my playlists, and I can find pretty much every song I want to listen to. Most people I know use Spotify too, so sharing stuff is just a little more convenient.
Other people no doubt have legitimate complaints, but using Spotify is barely registering as a problem compared to other applications I have to deal with.
Yeah, this is my experience as well. It's mostly fine, and I've been using it nearly every day for years.
I share the same experience. I use android and I never experienced any bugs or slowness. The Garmin app is also really good.
It's just convenient and I don't notice the issues that much for it to be a problem
$25/month for 5 users "all you can eat" music library every month is incredibly hard to beat, even if self hosting terabytes of your own music library.
I have been on Spotify from almost the beginning, and see zero reasons to switch. The app never bothered me at all - I find the reactions in this thread startling.
I have no issues with Spotify either, but my usage pattern is pretty simple.
I search for the album I want to listen to and then listen to it. Sometimes I search for an artist and then locate the album in their discography and listen to it.
The ‘Jam’ function is fun when you have a group of people listening to music together.
I use the discover weekly / radio / and other discovery features all the time, and still never had a problem. I mostly use apple hardware + osx and ios, however, so perhaps mileage varies on other platforms. It worked fine in Firefox on Linux when I tried, but I didn't push it too hard - usually when I'm at work, I just listen via the phone.
I have absolutely noticed all the complaints and stupid problems with the App on desktop. It constantly breaks in stupid ways. Every few releases, the "Discover Weekly" generated playlist loses the ability to hide/disable songs which is supposed to provide signal to the system to recommend fewer songs you dislike. So of course it barely works even when the UI element is there. 1/4 of the time the discover playlist is exclusively songs Spotify should be able to figure out I do not like at all. But song recommendation hasn't really advanced past what EchoNest demonstrated over a decade ago, and unlike most situations I comment on, I actually did a project to try and make a ML model for music like that and understand why it's difficult.
One time an employee even stated in the support forum that the ability to disable songs on the Discover Weekly playlist was purposely removed! Yet it was back within a year.
Spotify as a service is also pretty shitty. Their catalog has constant churn from whenever they change licensing deals, but they make no effort to point old playlist references to the exact same song under a different database id. It's infuriating, because it means that playlists rot, and often within a year! Every time I look at my saved songs, more are just missing. They colluded with rightsholders to rip off artists even more, and they have been purposely colluding with a company (run by a friend) making "AI Music" to swamp the service with so they can manipulate the royalty pool to pay out even less money to real artists.
I don't switch because the whole "Play songs" feature works just fine, I like the discovery features when they are semi-functional (I even use the AI DJ garbage sometimes, and it works well!), and the alternatives are Youtube (Which I hate but will probably switch to if Google ever succeeds at banning ad blockers from Youtube), and Apple, who's entire theory of business is hostile to me and I don't own any iDevices.
Spotify Connect has no real equivalent
They have a big library of music from tiny bands and it works well enough. As long as you ignore the music they try to push it just works.
I use Youtube also, I subscribe to Premium so that includes music and is ad-free. Never not found a song or artist I was looking for.
I listen to music mainly in the car or maybe as background when I'm cooking or doing other chores. I am not someone who has earbuds in all day or who does focused listening or spends time making playlists or seeking out new artists in my favorite genres. So the playlist management, discovery, etc. features and whether they work well are not really relevant to me. I care that its main functions are easy to use and work, and YouTube music does that.
Music discovery on Spotify used to be great, but I left 5+ years ago so I’m unsure now.
Spotify has gone downhill in that regard for sure. It floods my pages with "created for you" which is just the same 4-5 artists played in the last few weeks ago kludged together into a playlist. Alongside some of the worst music you could imagine (Payola? Idk..)
Any recommendations anyone has for music discovery I'm all ears. I recently moved away from a town that had a 10/10 radio station and I'm really feeling the TOP-40-only pain.
I miss my old Google Music premium account. Those song radio stations had amazing variety. It's incredibly obvious that Spotify plays what you like unless you go out of your way to listen to something new or a new releases playlist but I wish there was a knob I could twist to adjust the temperature of my playlists.
they try to sneak in stuff like payola because they dont have to pay high premiums like taylor swift so its in their interest to move ppl away from top artists into arcane.
Another reason why they are so popular is that they were first to market. They’ve been good enough that they have not lost first mover advantage that other first movers often lose (MySpace for example)
People often cite they were first to market, but isn't the bigger factor that they are backed by all the big music labels?
Why I stay:
1. family plan that I run. my parents and siblings all use it.
2. social. Sharing playlists matters to me, and everyone else uses spotify. This is also important in my romantic pursuits.
3. It has 10+ years of my listening history; the recommendations are decent, and my playlists go that far back.
4. whatever UI issues it has (and I can name a few off the top of my head), I don't find it difficult to use at all, and I'm used to its quirks.
> What does spotify do that almost no one else does? Is it the music library or something else?
music is tough business to negotiate all the contracts and figure out a business model
For me it's mostly the big library and Spotify Jam
I really like qobuz for music, great apps for iOS, Android, and web.
I've cancelled mine 5 years ago after they keep showing me ganster music and podcasts on my main page, even though I no history of listening or liking such content. So they keep trying to force it into my life. Secondly, they messed up the explorability of artists, playlist and related music. They also removed music from the catalogue, meaning on my playlist there are big memory holes of my favourite music, as they don't even show the artist or song name anymore. They also broke the offline-mode for when I drove my car.. so even if I switched it to offline-mode, music would still not play (after they downloaded and using 10GB+ on my phone). Then they added Joe Rogan and pushed other politics and stuff, more mainstream gangster shit. I just needed a good music player with a good discovery system and decent offline-mode. It used to be very simple. Now its a mess.
So my only path/answer to this was to cancel it. They poisoned the well so efficiently that I will never trust another streaming service again for my lifetime. I hate rewarding bad business practices, businesses pushing their ideologies towards me. No thanks.
Their Joe Rogan period was baffling. It reminded me of Apple and U2.
Apple’s boomer surprise when they discovered we don’t all like U2 was hilarious.
The problem with gangster music was a hack I believe. Spotify never admitted it but I have many friends that had that problem. I did not.
It’s a music player that regularly cannot play music. I don’t understand how you get that wrong for so long.
Because you keep using it. What incentive do they have to change?
I ran sound at a friend's wedding recently and unfortunately the music was all on Spotify. Every time I tried to play a specific song from a playlist, "Spotify can't play this item right now" and it would skip to the next one (or the one after that). I ended up having to yt-dlp all the timeline-specific songs.
Probably due to business/commercial licensing, I'm sure they have separate account for playing music in a public space
But how would the App be deciding that? Listening for large crowds? Listening for it's own output from high output speakers?
Spotify will keep the entry in a playlist even after they lose the rights to a song, or worse, keep the rights under a different internal database entry. That's how you get songs that they "Can't play right now", which is a horseshit error message for "Spotify doesn't have this song anymore" but they don't want you to recognize just how much their catalog is constantly rotting and rotating.
They’re profitable and customers keep paying. Incentives->Outcomes.
I canceled my subscription and moved to Apple Music
> Spotify has 777 million monthly active users worldwide, which includes 300 million paying subscribers.
> Generates approximately €4.8 billion ($5.5 billion) in revenue, representing a 14% year-over-year increase, alongside a record gross margin of 33.4%
Oh, I know they are doing fine without me. lol
But if you don’t like what they are doing, vote with your wallet. In this case, there actually are choices, which is nice.
It's actually crazy that a music app struggles to play music many times. By far my worst big app experience.
They’ve left Airplay out of their Mac app for the history of the company and I have no idea why. They have hundreds of engineers. I have airplay running on a raspberry pi since 2019.
The black and neon is truly a not-good choice for a UI. Nevertheless, they persist.
Apple Music has a much better UX. Things like “play next” when you want to play that song next but not clear your other queued up songs are little treats that Spotify took years to catch up to. Many of the other bugs—which people document for them!—go untouched for literally years.
It’s fascinating to me how companies like this ignore easy wins for their users. Have a couple engineers burn down all of those and you’ll win fans (or at least not create enemies.) Take the wins!
The Music app on my macOS Sequoia 15.7.5 has an airplay button on the top right, to the left of the lyrics button.
You should have tried Deezer. I had switched to Spotify because I couldn't tolerate bugs anymore.
This seems a bit harsh. In my experience, it basically works fine for playing music. I haven’t noticed it being particularly slow either. Could it be due to having different hardware, different expectations, something else?
> it basically works fine for playing music
Until you want to play back a playlist in random order over airplay or bluetooth, then the decade old bug with thousands of replies on their forum confirming it surfaces, and it only loops the first 100 songs in the playlist.
The number of bugs in their service that have existed since inception is insane. It's a buggy mess, and the UI & UX is comically poor. Not to mention the resource usage, as someone else pointed out below its incredibly insane that they think it's ok for it to be such a massive resource hog.
Okay! I never do that, though, so it doesn't affect me. This has been a "works on my machine" moment.
i'd love it if spotify split into two companies: - an enterprise platform that just provided a an API to access/play songs and direct the payment to the correct rightsholders - a consumer app that built on top of that to provide the 'spotify' we all have
let a whole ecosystem of music streaming apps take off that cater to different niches of listeners.
each app would be able to differentiation themselves with their UI but also features like recommendations/playlists/etc. And spotify wouldn't see them as competitors because they'd still be getting their cut because they all go through their API.
Rights holders would never allow it. It would be too easy for their enterprise customer to underreport plays.
> Under a playlist you get a list of suggested songs, the UI element looks like a "regular song", but unlike every other "song" element the user has been trained to recognize, the "swipe right to queue" does not apply to these elements. For some reason.
If I remember correctly, it has a plus on the side to add it to the playlist. Clearly different I guess (and why would you want to listen to a song before adding it to the playlist amirite?). I also love the way you have to refresh a list to get 3 new songs instead of just getting a scrolling list where you can go back.
I’ll take it a step further and say I think the current music player-isms UX is just not easy to use and gets in my way of enjoying music…
I think the notion that it's the worst piece of software is a bit of a stretch here. I've used various streaming music players and Spotify has been the best by far. Doesn't mean it's perfect.
I get that not all edge cases (eg swipe gestures) are bullet proof but that doesn't make it terrible software.
It's objectively really bad at a lot things. I've always had the feeling that the music is not even a primary feature of their product.
The last time I used it, I uninstalled once I realized that my kids could watch Logan Paul YouTube videos through the Spotify app. These masquerade as podcasts, but like a Trojan horse they are just vods of YouTube content. And at the time there was literally no way to disable this. No way to either turn off podcasts or specific content through parental controls or otherwise.
I just wanted to give my kids a way to listen to music while reading. I have since switched to our local community radio station.
WinAmp was smaller, faster, and more customizable thirty years ago.
Yes, the Android app is particularly bad. For the past couple of weeks, it's gotten to a point where the app will take 30s to load on my phone. Nothing, not even reinstalling the app fixes this.
> Spotify is, without doubt, the worst piece of software that I still use on a daily basis. It's incredibly buggy, incredibly slow, and the UI has so many "usability inconsistencies".
I left Spotify about a year ago and have tried Tidal, Deezer, Qobuz, and Youtube Music. They all have equally worse UI/UX. The Tidal and Deezer apps on Windows were absolute dogshit and would constantly bug out, randomly stop playing, freeze, take ages to load, etc. YTM's UI is awful, and it does not use your liked/saved songs and albums for its recommendations if your Youtube history is turned off, which isn't explained anywhere that I could find. Just absolutely baffling product design decisions all over the place.
I'm blown away by how much all the big music streaming apps suck. Music player UIs were a solved problem 20 years ago.
More and more now I'm using Bandcamp, Subvert, local music enthusiast Discord servers, and even Reddit to discover new music. It's a giant pain in the ass, but it's still less unpleasant than the apps.
The vast support for Tidal in these discussions is pretty baffling. The whole thing is just an abandoned Jack Dorsey side hustle. Basic things like gapless playback don't work. Playback on dodgy connections is spotty. I have my own fair share complaints of Spotify UX but it actually works as a music player anywhere and everywhere.
Eh, I had plenty of problems with Spotify too. My point was more that they're all pretty shit.
100% Android version/problem.
Both desktop and iOS ones are very good. As much as a hate Electron, Spotify is a pretty good example of good use of E.
This seems a bit harsh. In my experience, it basically works fine for playing music. I’ve not noticed it being slow.
Wow, I'm usually the first to complain about buggy software and bad UX. But I use spotify on android and linux and I have no issues.
Everything works really well?
I can manage playlists, play on one device, control on another etc.
I gave YouTube music a try, mostly for the free premium and I have to say, it's ok. It still hiccups sometimes when I'm on the subway or a plane but I don't miss Spotify.
I do have a more pared down selection of mp3s loaded on my device in case of emergency, but I use it less and less now.
When listening to a podcast on Android, the lock screen skip-15-second buttons are reversed.
I recently started encountering full on crashes on iOS, as well as random freezing. Not to mention whole navigation just feels 'off', like canceling navigation mid animation. Nowadays, non-native apps don't have issues like that.
have you tried apple music app on mac? Apple music is also wrong in so many levels I personally believe teams that work on inside Appple hate it and made so bad intentionally. There is no other explanation.
> - Under a playlist you get a list of suggested songs, the UI element looks like a "regular song", but unlike every other "song" element the user has been trained to recognize, the "swipe right to queue" does not apply to these elements. For some reason.
There's a ton of these inconsistencies. For example, the new releases albums where songs become available over time also do not have it. It's infuriating how inconsistent the UI is sometimes.
Not so long ago they also had two versions of the "swipe right to queue" UI, one with long swipe (the current one), and one with a much shorter one. I preferred the shorter (with the hard break) one because it is much clearer when a song actually gets added to the queue. What often happens when you're adding multiple songs to the queue, if you only swipe a little bit, it is unclear if it was enough to add it to the queue. With one song this isn't a problem because a message with "added to queue" is shown, but for multiple songs, the messages are shown on top of each other.
I switched to YouTube Music and I miss the Spotify UI.
I am a user since the beginning and had premium for almost as long. The state of the app is bad. Crash fest. They pretty much brags about that they slop code it. But was it better before? Let me give you a hall of fame of historical bugs/features.
1. Impossible to purge the play queue. Had to delete every track one by one. 2. Completely broke liked songs years after the feature was launched. 3. They broke offline mode like a billion times. Just download everything again. Especially annoying back in the days when mobile data was expensive. Still does not work like half of the time. 4. Changed to a yellow typeface! I am not even kidding. 5. Included some bittorrent like file sharing in the background.
The number of times I boarded an airplane to find my offline song list empty... I had to completely stop relying on it.
My biggest complaint is the device switching. I pick up my phone and hit play, my laptop starts playing the music
.. which in turn causes my AirPods to connect to my laptop
I have to go manually hunt to connect everything correctly Every. Single. Time.
Another annoyance is the “genres” in your liked songs. They change seemingly at random and when you select a genre eg country it has the most ass backwards way of grouping songs so I’ll get rap songs playing despite having selected folk or whatever
its run by one ceo guy gustav's whims and fancies. he is obviously not a ux expert but every feature in the app needs his "vision"
The whole service is shit, all music you discover is bought to be there, a lot of it is AI.
I couldn't disagree more
I realise I’m pissing into the wind here, but I find the LLM text on the homepage and docs quite funny/ awkward.
> “Ctrl+M turns it into a tiny player that wears any classic Winamp 2 skin, spectrum analyser, equalizer, and playlist included. 2000s vibes, pixel for pixel.”
Everything is said with too much intensity, and phrasing that sounds impressive but doesn’t really mean that much. Like “wears any classic Winamp 2 skin” feels so awkward, what’s “wears”? You mean it can use it?
I feel like if you can’t be bothered to write the code, at least document it yourself and write the marketing copy so I know you understand the product. Otherwise how can I trust running it on my computer? Did the LLM generate some amazing rm -rf somewhere, or another blunder that wrecks data I might care about?
Author here.
Yes, the code is generated. Yes, the docs are generated. I agree LLM copy is annoying and will rewrite them myself.
But I built this for myself out of frustration with the official client, and I use it every day, so every bug I find is fixed immediately. I also care about bugs and PRs from other people, as you can see the amount that have been closed on the repo. The only reason I would stop maintaining this is if Spotify kills it.
I also wouldn't call this vibe coded either. Human directed and LLM generated is fairer. It's been an intense 5 days with tons of design decisions and testing on 3 platforms. I think we need a new vocabulary to distinguish it from "author doesn't care". I do.
> Yes, the code is generated. Yes, the docs are generated.
> I also wouldn't call this vibe coded either.
It's vibe-coded. Get over it.
There is a lot of gray area between vibe coding and zero AI. Get over that too.
End of the day this person is solving a good problem and sharing the work. This is what we want.
Also: nagging about the specifics of the README's tone of voice, while the 600-1000MB RAM usage drops to 100-250MB seems a little childish to me.
It's still open source! Just like in the pre-AI era they are welcome to submit a PR and improve it in the way they like it. The main dev seems very open to accepting help.
Those numbers only look good in comparison.
I don't see you publishing something which further reduces the memory footprint?
Given the project is open source, have at it! See if you can help improve it instead of complaining. This is a significant improvement and a cool project!
I run actual Winamp for my music streaming, and windows task manager claims it's using 4.1 MB.
Even that seems pretty high, but whatever, but given y'all are spending hundreds of mbs, I think I'm ok. Yes, spotify has features my subscription music service doesn't have... but the one I use lets me stream with Winamp.
I'm not complaining and it is a cool project (from what I can tell). But I think it's fair to say 200 MB memory usage is a lot without providing source code as a proof. Just by feel when you recall what were computers capable of when they did not have 100s of MB to spare.
I remember when I was scrounging memory sticks to get to 512 mb for my windows xp setup. And I was able to play Unreal: Return to Na Pali[0] on that.
[0] https://unreal.fandom.com/wiki/Unreal_Mission_Pack:_Return_t...
A new term I encountered is “human-stewarded”.
I like the direction, but stewarded feels just a little too awkward to type or say to catch on. Perhaps "guide coded"? But it will be really hard to dislodge vibe coded from being generally applied to this concept, I think, in part because it is a catchy little term.
I came to like "vibe coding". Finding the right vibe in the words with the agent to steer them into the direction you want.
Whether the result is slob, depends on the programmer.
Just like that comment you typed is keyboarded or keypadded. Or did you voice it?
[dead]
> Yes, the code is generated. Yes, the docs are generated. I agree LLM copy is annoying and will rewrite them myself.
I find this kinda funny. Fix the obvious part, better not look at the code.
I would use the phrase "Responsible Use of Generative AI", from https://www.debian.org/vote/2026/vote_002#texte
I wouldn't.
> The Debian Project nevertheless expects that all contributions submitted to Debian, regardless of how and with which tools they were produced, satisfy the same standards of quality, correctness, maintainability, and legal compliance.
Slop text on the homepage does not scream "quality" to me.
The code is worse, somehow. Endless paragraphs of comments that say nothing: https://github.com/crmne/fastpotify/blob/d9aafbf8e0b0c4d2da3...
Wtf? It’s putting its whole chain of thought in comment form, that’s insane.
No wonder people can’t get Claude to stop commenting if this is what it does unrestricted.
> I agree LLM copy is annoying and will rewrite them myself.
Remember when people used to care about making a good first impression?
That hasn’t existed in software generally for like 20 years, to be fair
Don’t worry. Folks are entirely too concerned about the distinction between human made and LLM made. In a short handful of years, it will be incredibly rare to find something an LLM hasn’t been involved with
Agree, everyone thought I was crazy in 2025 when I was preoccupied with this question about moral 'authorship' in the AI era, but I think the culture will catch up quite soon, whether it likes it or not
https://sjsebastian.substack.com/p/thinking-through-the-mach...
I have no doubt that in the future AI code will be superior to human code. But today is not that day, and these projects that have never yet had human eyes on them are mostly shoddy pieces of work.
The official client is very annoying.
I rewrite docs myself on my own projects because they read as very LLMish, there's an intermediate stage which feels slightly less bad where I ask it to remove most of the comments, especially LLM signposting ones and then "rewrite any remaining comments and docs in a dry ukgov/gds style" which makes things slighyly less worse.
I'm going to sound harsh here, but please don't take this as criticism of the effort, it's criticism of how it's being portrayed. The quality might for all intents be great and useful.
> But I built this for myself out of frustration with the official client
But you didn't build it. This is akin to me telling an intern to build me a widget and then claiming it was me who built it. Or a construction manager saying they built a skyscraper.
Yes, the intern and the construction crew needs guidance and management, but I can't then go to the management committee and claim ownership of the effort.
> I also wouldn't call this vibe coded either.
You didn't write any of the code or even the documentation for that matter. You guided a code generator that relied on you to guide high level decisions but then did all the implementation on it's own. That's vibe coding.
This debate is irrelevant. It doesn't matter. Having the idea and the skills to dictate a stable piece of software are all that matter.
There is no point in taking pride in typing out lines of code by hand. The entire world is moving on.
Of course there's a point in it, don't be a boor.
Any act of making can be treated as product, as craft, or as art. You'll find yourself taking all three stances at different points. Any engineer or artisan or artist can choose to pour their attention and love into any layer of the production process.
I like ceramics. I like wheel throwing. Once upon a time, the pottery wheel was a newfangled technique for rapid and regular production of commodity goods. Same with coil building, same with slip casting, same with standardization of glaze recipes, gas and electric kilns, all of it.
But I know people who choose to quarry and purify their own clay, or to mix their own glazes, or to fire their pieces in a hole in the ground dug by hand with a fire they built by hand. I know people who make dozens of identical copies of just a few forms, after they spend months iterating on carving intricate molds. I know people who will spend a whole season working on a single hand-built bust.
And none of these people have ever, to my knowledge, expressed scorn for any of the others, for focusing on a different step in the process.
The problem is not the emittance of code by a statistical black box.
It’s not even knowing how it works or even what it used to achieve the desired result.
You wrote it or not, that’s your code. You are the one responsible. The machine has no brain. Use yours.
That may be, but if I come back to the old project I didn't touch in months, code may as well be written by an alien.
I can return to my 5+ year old code and start hacking in 30 minutes or so. I believe it boils down to documentation and comments.
The construction manager can’t say they built a skyscraper? In that only for someone who personally laid every brick and ran every wire?
No they can't. The construction crew - which includes the manager - can say that they built a skyscraper.
If the construction manager did lay the bricks or did the majority of the work in all aspects, they could claim to have built a building. Otherwise they contributed work, no denying that, but they can't claim credit for building it. Same way that architects can't claim they built the skyscraper, even though they probably spent a lot of effort designing it to specs. To the best of my knowledge, no serious architect claims they "built" the building. They have designed it yes. Same way, the construction manager would claim they have managed the construction.
I admit that the classification is fuzzy, but there's an explosion of vibe coders going about claiming to have built things, whose contribution is basically spending a total of one hour with a prompt and and LLM doing basically all the heavy lifting.
That's not necessarily the case of the author here, but the line has blurred a lot and people very giddily claim credit for much less actual accomplishment than what would've flown in the past.
I think you're being pedantic to the point of losing all credibility. And you're gatekeeping in the worst possible way.
Your argument that using an LLM means you didn't "make" a thing could just as easily be used to say that if you used a framework or a library, you also didn't "make" a thing, because you didn't write all the code yourself and you didn't understand everything.
Would you say the authors of YT-DLP didn't "make" anything because they are a wrapper over FFMPEG and CURL?
If you produce something useful (even just to yourself), you "made" a thing.. It has a purpose, and it's useful. Who cares how you made it or how long it took?
For example I've made plenty of bash scripts over the years that were effectively thin wrappers that combined other tools, but they did something novel and useful that saved me tons of time, and I've shared those as gists or in other ways.
Some of these scripts took me mere minutes to make. I didn't use an LLM to make them, but the "heavy lifting" definitely wasn't in my script. No one ever showed up to berate me and try to tell me that I didn't actually produce anything useful in any of these cases.
So this "in the past" that you imagine where people were held to some bullshit standard for what is accepted as "making" a thing?
That past doesn't really exist, and if does where you are, it sucks.
People do care - lots of people do. Maybe you don’t, and maybe the argument the other poster made wasn’t fair, but you make just as spurious claims when you say „who cares how you made it or how long it took?”
Really? You care about some stranger's work and how they created it?
Pro tip: you shouldn't.
Care about your work if you want, but "caring" about how someone else makes things and how they talk about it is just being a judgemental busybody and again, gatekeeping.
As for my comment, I stand by it.
If I made something genuinely useful, then it should not matter if it took me 5 minutes or 5 days to make it.
You'll never convince me that more time spent making something (all other factors being equal - yes, quality matters) gives it more value or credibility.
Thanks for the tip haha. I am personally divided on it, but it’s more complicated than just quality or output for me.
I will apologize if I came off combative - was in the backseat of a car so may have been a little direct.
I think people care, all for different reasons. You care too - just when it comes to quality as you mentioned (and I’m sure other factors).
In this case many people correctly pointed out that there were clear indications of a lack of direct cognitive effort on behalf of the operator - including code quality, comment / git history, and including copy that he didn’t write. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean the LLM which did most of the work (or not? How can we know without an auditable prompt history) didn’t produce quality work.
When it comes to something that was made in 5 days AI assisted - the idea may be novel, but without a full prompt history it does become difficult to assess quality of cognitive effort on the operator at least.
In any case - it’s hard for me to know what to call the author. And I do think this applies to traditional media as well, so Im definitely not saying it’s all one sided (Bah! AI!)
That's fair, I guess I was really reacting to the narrow gatekeeping-like case the OP was advocating, where time spent/invested - or only doing things a certain way - was correlated to legitimacy and being able to claim you "made" a thing.
OK, clear enough. But that's an unusual definition of "build" that I don't think you should necessarily expect others to share.
The first entry for "build" in the OED is: To construct, put up, erect (a house or other dwelling or building); to construct (a permanent static structure such as a wall, bridge, or architectural feature, a road or railway, etc.). Also: to commission, finance, direct, or oversee the construction of (something of this type).
But they know the plans, and knows people where all the wires are, etc.
With vibe coding you know nothing.
In the original sense of the word, vibe coding means neither reading nor caring about the code: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/
Some would use the term "Agent Engineering" for what OP did.
There's a trend where people go around claiming they built something and just happen to conveniently omit everywhere that everything was "built" using an LLM and the author doesn't even understand what the code does. That's the crux of my objection.
FWIW I agree with your post and perhaps we need a separate name for people who just instructed an LLM to build something, but then took the trouble to understand how the thing actually works.
It seems to me that this is not the case here. The author used LLM to build the whole thing and left it at that. Which is completely fair, I'd do the same if I just wanted to scratch an itch with the minimal amount of effort, but then I wouldn't go around claiming "I built it".
If I take a photo and then use GIMP to edit it, then did I take a photo or just direct my camera at something and then steer my computer to make changes to it? After all, it's not me drawing each pixel manually. It's vibe-photoed!
No. It's vibe-photoed when you use AI models which are trained on countless hours of actual human work. Otherwise you apply deterministic tools at your will and according to your skill level.
Shit take. You’re trying to play the bs semantics game and can’t even pull it off
I agree that "author cares" and "author doesn't care" is a very important distinction.
But to me vibe coded is about reading/editing the code. If all your code modifications are by prompt, it is vibe coded by definition.
>Author here.
Not author. LLM manager, technical producer (if we're borrowing game development language), advanced AI user; not author. Authors are those whose code was used to train LLM(s) you were using while producing this fine piece of software. I'm saying this having neither positive nor negative emotions. Just clarifying.
One thing I like about Spotify is the recommendations. I like to do what i call “beat digging” which is basically exploring the platform for new artists and tracks?
Does this still have that?
The fact than an app like this can be vibe-coded is actually mind-blowing. I'd love to see your prompt history here.
Oh no, that's closed source, lol
Should add a full page click through slop warning to each page on the site. Also give credit to the LLM that made it in the "Brought to you by" section at the bottom.
I'll pick a human-written monstrosity over any "lean" consloption out there any time of day.
Having used Claude a lot for the past four months, I get exhausted from its style. Every sentence has been buffed and polished and enhanced and it never just plainly says a thing. It's as if you have to eat every meal with every possible flavor enhancer in existence. At one point I will totally lose it if it mentions "smoke test" one more time.
It is also totally not what I want for docstrings in code or Powerpoint drafts, where consistency in language is critical.
Like I said in another thread, everything Claude (Code) writes sounds like it’s congratulating itself of how smart it is. While not actually being that smart.
It writes like me when I was 14 and thought I was very smart.
I believe AI technical prose peaked with Opus 4.6. I still use it (mostly for that purpose) and I think it's legitimately great. I'm hoping they are able to reverse the trends that benchmaxxing and RLAIF have wrought on Claude's non-code output with the future models.
Now that the public anger is growing i really hope Anthropics next models seriously address this. Or for that matter, i hope everyone (OpenAI/etc) starts focusing on this too.
Intelligence is important but it feels as if the LLM is only capable of conveying information while drenching it in vomit.
I use Claude daily and I have never heard it say 'Smoke Test' once.
Have a bit of food dropped into the MSG container. Now eat the whole container
Interestingly enough, https://fastpotify.rocks/winamp/ shows what I dislike about LLM-generated text: From "The buttons do what they say [...]" to "[...] a different format and are not supported" is just a huge wall of text without any visual guidance.
It's as if the person writing these lines didn't care about the result. One could argue that people not caring about written documentation isn't anything new, but in the past, these documentations also had little text. So they were easier to digest. Now, we get great walls of text that are hard to read. I cannot say that I like that.
What sucks is that clearly the author has prompted the model somehow to generate this text, and this prompt probably contains the actual meat that the model just "expanded on" while adding it's own fluff, and if the author just shared the actual verbatim prompt instead, the documentation would be 90% shorter but also 200% more "informative per character used".
Just share the prompt you used, regardless of how low quality or bad it is, rather than this word spaghetti of 100s of words saying basically nothing, such a waste.
That isn't going to be very helpful is it?
> can you build a website to promote the app
> can you add a page showing off the winamp mode
Still more useful than what exists now.
That would actually be a reasonable thing to do with a model that is good at writing though. I'm sure if you used that method on Opus 4.6 you'd get a pretty decent result, because Claude models used to be quite good at that sort of technical synthesis. Asking a model that is bad at technical writing (e.g. Opus/Fable 5) to write your docs is a bad idea.
Ultimately what seems more important that how good the model is at task X vs task Y, seems to be that the human accepting/rejecting/iterating on the text can actually identify "good" from "bad" text, and makes the effort to fix it. Otherwise it doesn't matter much what model you use, it makes boring, bland and bloated prose.
It's a weird world where they put less time into writing that doc than you did reading it.
The sad thing is that may not be true. If you use LLMs to write docs and actually read it, you can spend far longer trying to convince the LLM to write in a sane way than to just write it yourself.
Semi related, but i've caught myself nitpicking small things from the code of an LLM only to realize i'm putting in more work trying to convince the LLM to make the code the way i want rather than just modifying it myself lol. It's as if i'm trying to educate it in the ideal way, as if it would learn and not repeat the mistake.. but it rarely does of course.
It seems to me that interacting with LLMs has a large pile of cognitive traps for humans.
I prioritized shipping over carefully crafting docs. I thought nobody would read them and they'd rather enjoy the software. I was wrong. I'll rewrite them.
Then, just do not add text that adds no value. Less is more.
Documentation is first part people see when presented. I personally hate AI written text even though I do agentic engineering a lot as well. Any user facing documentation must be reviewed, if you snoozy by reading it - remove or rewrite.
I do not care about paragraph long comments in code, because I’m not gonna read them, but I still follow my internal guideline and cut all this verbosity to level where it readable using hooks and skills.
So basicly like you said if you care about product do not add placeholders. It’s take away first impression.
Fair enough. But then, how should I enjoy the software, if the documentation to its' usage is buried beyond a whole paragraph? To be clear, I do not judge the usage of AI per se. But you can instruct AI to write a clear manual. It just takes time. :)
I think you got a but too much negativity, from a crowd that became more easily irratated because their AI sensor became very sensitive by e.g. reviewing a lot of AI generated code and comments.
Not running code from someone who has so little self awareness that they publish documentation like this tbh.
Doesn't matter if it's open source.
I never thought ubiquitous human-written marketing wank was any better.
The difference is that the marketing stuff used to be only on corporate websites. Now it's everywhere, because pretty much everybody hates writing, and the "pretty much" can be left off when the writing is a job or some other form of obligation.
> I feel like if you can’t be bothered to write the code, at least document it yourself and write the marketing copy so I know you understand the product.
Do you not understand it?
This person doesn't owe you any work. He's providing a product for free and this is a reasonable enough description of the product.
> Did the LLM generate some amazing rm -rf somewhere, or another blunder that wrecks data I might care about?
I'm pretty sure at this point hand-crafted code is more likely to contain security bugs. The mythical "rm -rf" random LLM insertion is not a real threat. Every time I see stories about this kind of issue, it's almost always preceded by basically prompt poisoning.
> The mythical "rm -rf" random LLM insertion is not a real threat. Every time I see stories about this kind of issue, it's almost always preceded by basically prompt poisoning.
It is real, typically happening when dumber models (haven't personally seen any of the SOTA ones on reasonable thinking/reasoning level do this) try to clean up stuff via bash and forget to assign a variable. Things like "rm -rf sessions/$id" without double-checking $id is actually defined, would do "rm -rf sessions/" and remove the entire directory. Add in more variables in a path like "rm -rf $HOME/projects/$user/$repo/$tmpdir" and the dumb models people think they can use for local coding, promptly removes a lot more than expected.
Not sure how people aren't already running these agents in an environment/sandbox where stuff like this wouldn't matter, locally or not, but some LLMs do truly accidentally delete stuff for people, without "prompt poisoning", I had it happen myself while testing Qwen3.8-27B (BF16) locally just a week or two ago, exactly as described above.
Just recently, Opus 4.8 almost deleted a bunch of important files (I caught the issue before) because it failed to consider that two-way-sync would delete files from my NAS if deleted locally.
Fable has done similar for me because it assumed intent that I wanted permanent deletion after moving folders. The bash script it wrote failed to copy the files and then deleted the originals. Not catastrophic in my case though
> This person doesn't owe you any work. He's providing a product for free
A product being free doesn’t make it exempt from criticism. It’s not about “owing” anybody work.
> and this is a reasonable enough description of the product.
It’s not a great idea to signal a lack of effort, nor is it wrong for users to pick up on that signal. This is the post-llm equivalent to spelling or grammatical errors.
> I'm pretty sure at this point hand-crafted code is more likely to contain security bugs.
LLMs produce code which is fairly ‘locally optimal’, so in good hands they can absolutely be used to build correct software. They also allow those with little to no experience* to cobble something together very quickly and easily while creating a ton of security holes. I think you might be underestimating how common the latter is.
* not to suggest this applies to the OP necessarily. Rather some extra wariness is necessary nowadays since the floor has been lowered so much.
> A product being free doesn’t make it exempt from criticism. It’s not about “owing” anybody work.
You can criticize it but your criticism is hallow
> It’s not a great idea to signal a lack of effort, nor is it wrong for users to pick up on that signal. This is the post-llm equivalent to spelling or grammatical errors.
Why should you put in effort to something that should be effortless? Why should I waste my time writing some inferior copy by hand?
> LLMs produce code which is fairly ‘locally optimal’, so in good hands they can absolutely be used to build correct software.
Humans produce code which is fairly ‘locally optimal’
Also, interesting you use ‘ as a quote rather than '. I notice these quotes are used with LLM generated text, as I can't find this on my keyboard.
> Why should you put in effort to something that should be effortless?
Why should it be effortless?
> Why should I waste my time writing some inferior copy by hand?
Have some faith in yourself :) If the LLM writing was superior then surely nobody would’ve noticed?
And to the question: because lack of care in one area implies that that the same approach might extend to other areas. Nobody’s forcing you, but it definitely sends a particular message.
> Humans produce code which is fairly ‘locally optimal’
I’m taking this to mean you find the phrasing vague. LLMs are good at avoiding the sort of fine-grained security bugs that you see in some human written code.
> Also, interesting you use ‘ as a quote rather than '. I notice these quotes are used with LLM generated text, as I can't find this on my keyboard.
Funny, but FYI a fair few mobile keyboards use non-ascii punctuation
If it can transform into Winamp I don't care if the code is LLM generated, typed by infinite monkeys or found in some ancient scrolls.
Jokes aside, how can you be sure that the official Spotify app (or any app, or Windows) was not written by a LLM without supervision?
Not OP but I don’t really care if it was or not. All I know is that I’ve been using the Spotify app 10+ years and it works well. I don’t know if this random app works, and if it hasn’t been supervised I doubt it does.
Gave it a quick try today, it works pretty well and is noticeably faster than the official app.
The official Spotify app has some skin in the game. Random dudes self promotion project, not so much.
I suspect the official app would actually be more consistent and not as bad to use if it was generated by an LLM.
I too enjoy wearing the RealPlayer skin of the 90's. Makes me look very chic.
If the last twenty years of horror movies have taught me anything it is that maybe you can't be a real player, but you can always wear their skin!
LLMs seem to have been fine-tuned to use metaphors, presumably because they read like vivid creative writing. The over-use of metaphor in LLM-produced text is exhausting.
Slop code is already hard to tolerate, but any hint of slop in text will immediately make me chuck it into the bin / close the tab, no exceptions. My lifetime is finite, I'm sure as fuck not gonna spend time reading something that a person could not even be arsed to write themselves. I'm only annoyed that it takes sometimes a few seconds, sometimes a few minutes, to detect that I'm actually not reading a person's thoughts but only a machine simulacrum of such.
I highly recommend anybody to take up a similar rule, in any context. Slop in a website? Close. Slop in an email? Bin. Slop in a code comment? Skip.
Uncanny valley. LLMs are great at producing text that reads almost right.
Did the landing page text get updated? Didn’t click as ai generated to me.
> class BuffaloBill
Your comment has too much intensity as well. Honestly it too looks like slop. I agree with what you said, but nevertheless your writing is likely AI generated here, it’s very obvious.
There is a tribe of people who carve bots out of trees using their hands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dugout_canoe. It stupid to waste time doing something a computer can do reasonably well. IMO
Icymi, "carving bots out of trees" is a wonderful and apposite autocorrect. There's layers to this thing, man!
Generally speaking, it's carving bots out of the environment, trees included, for sure.
Spotify is in the process of killing the librespot project that this and most third party Spotify players are built on. I think the golden age of music streaming is coming to an end. I’ve migrated to a self hosted library with streaming and radio for discovery. I hope we’ll see many projects in the space flourish. Many, like Navidrome and the whole OpenSubsonic ecosystem, seem to be doing quite well.
It seems like there's an official alternative to librespot now: https://developer.spotify.com/blog/2026-08-13-introducing-sp...
Yes! This launched after I left Spotify but I agree it looks neat. I find the three month build expiration concerning, but I also have a low risk tolerance for my music experience.
What makes you think Spotify is killing it? I know they aren't supporting FLAC but otherwise I don't think they're actively trying to stop it as opposed to not really caring if they support it (which is more "We don't care" as opposed to "We have to stop this")
Author here.
I haven't seen any evidence of Spotify killing librespot. To me the project looks active and works totally fine. I don't have a new Spotify account to verify the claim above.
I suspect wilted-iris is conflating it with the recent changes to the Web APIs: new developer apps can't use all endpoints anymore. In Fastpotify if you add your Client ID I use both an older developer app and your app to keep everything as fast and seamless as possible.
Have a look at the librespot pinned issues, you’ll see the reports from folks experiencing this. You may also be able to find the legal threats they sent out to third party client libraries if you search carefully (many have been redacted.)
Librespot no longer works for new accounts. APIs are being gated off and they’re applying legal pressure to dissuade projects from reverse engineering anything new. At the end of the day, they can turn the tap off anytime they want, whether by technical or legal means. I tired of having so much of my music experience at risk and chose to migrate on my own terms.
They can only turn the tap off because those projects operated in ways that required them to leave it on.
Biggest mistake most librefication projects make is to do their project out in the open where they can easily be subject to legal pressure, then fall into complete disarray the moment that pressure appears. They can't move underground once pressure starts, because everyone already knows who they are.
> Biggest mistake most librefication projects make is to do their project out in the open
That's not it. Most youtube downloaders are not developed in the open and Youtube still breaks them every other week by changing on purpose the way they operate. And, unlike highly obfuscated instructions, studying the network queries used by a simple app does not require expensive reverse engineering efforts from Spotify engineers; essentially, it's the same as developing in the open.
The only case i can think where obfuscation might help would be if the actual Spotify API consumers were servers by the app developers (or some form of obfuscation via residential proxies) and the app developed an entirely different API to/from its servers. But then, you're back to the developers and hosts can receive legal threats, etc...
Bit of an unfair take.
You propose the open-source community operates behind closed doors like the very software they aim to replace?
I’d argue Spotify has so little to gain by being hostile, that perhaps the lawyers are more expensive than just ignoring these pet projects (which would never gain mass adoption).
> the lawyers are more expensive than just ignoring these pet projects
The lawyers are more expensive than happy customers staying customers because they can enjoy the client they prefer, that's for sure.
> the lawyers are more expensive than just ignoring these pet projects
Tell that to Nintendo
If anyone other than me really likes classical music, I thoroughly recommend Hyperion Records. DRM free downloads in your choice of codec, one to two free CDs worth of sampler per month to download (with a jewel case PDF!) and some truly excellent world leading groups and beautiful new music.
Thanks for sharing. I loved buying then downloading cheap samplers from punk and hardcore labels when I was younger. That was part of the culture and that really helped me discover new music and shaping my tastes. This is something that doesn't exist that much anymore and I'm glad to find this initiative. I try to listen to classical music but that's a very difficult world to discover, this will probably help by helping me to focus on few titles instead of jumping in the gigantic and maze-ish pool !
I really enjoyed this comment – thank you.
One part of the classical diaspora I think is both under appreciated and undergoing something of a renaissance is that of contemporary choral music. There are many great examples but two I'd like to draw to attention to two of those I have recently sung, and really enjoy:
(1) The works of Ēriks Ešenvalds,[1] a Latvian composer who was a fellow in composition at Trinity College, Cambridge and brought really a large part of the surprisingly rich eastern European singing tradition to the west. I had never heard of the Singing Revolution against the USSR in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania – countries with a wonderful, rich choral tradition where music (and choirs) played a really nonzero part in the downfall of the USSR. All absolutely beautiful and a group I sing with has worked with a lot of composers from this part of the world. Amazing soundscapes with harmonies that are never quite as good in equal temperament as outside it and yet always tonal and beautiful.
(2) Desmond Earley and the choral scholars of Trinity College Dublin – who conjures up a rich sound world of very pure, Irish tones that almost sounds synthetic but is made entirely from human voices and traditional instruments. It is simple to sing but difficult to master. I would highlight Dúlamán, [3] a traditional song about the economic importance of seaweed.
[1] https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_HYP202607B – track 6 (the whole lot is free!) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing_Revolution [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iRfI1ezYjA&list=RD3iRfI1ezY... – this was a sampler from hyperion too and I have the whole lot legally as flac.
Your comment really brought me back to my first job out of college, I worked for Tower Records (RIP) as a call center customer service rep. Tower was known for being the best place to find rare classical recordings, and I recall the Hyperion label as being well respected. It always fun to talk to our customers that were classical and jazz aficionados.
I think they've archived all the old Linn Records stuff, which is excellent.
Thank you for sharing!
> radio for discovery
Would you be willing to share a bit more about this setup? The only thing keeping my on streaming is the fact that its almost impossible to find new music otherwise. I know LastFM exists but it just doesn't click for me the way that streaming does. I like discovering music organically.
I left spotify around two years ago for a self hosted option (I mostly use navidrome+feishin). Music discovery was a concern for me as well, but then I realized that I didn't like the idea of spotify curating which music I discovered. So far, this is what has worked for me:
- Actually listening to the music I have now. I think the art of listening through full albums has slowly died, but there is so much music we're ignoring because we just listen to Artist's top tracks.
- Word of mouth. Asking my friends what they listen to. This is a way that people used to discover music and I've found so much good music this way.
- Bandcamp. Bandcamp is SUCH a good way to discover new music. You can listen to the music in app, there are great articles and you can actually support the artists!
I have pretty much the same setup. The only thing that bothers me with navidrome+feishin is that gapless playback is not working perfectly.
Also, a great resource for discovering new music is the public library. They often have a curated CD section that I then rip into FLAC. I've had great chats with the people in my town's library, and I often pick a totally random CD off the shelves and discover some amazing artists.
Mostly I listen to web radios, not always in a language that I master (hello Japanese). And Shazam plus Spotify is still a killing combo, for me.
Regarding Bandcamp, I find following small labels to be a great way to find new music. Small labels tend to release music of similar style and quality. They often also have deals on bandcamp where you can buy an entire label's discography for crazy cheap, like a hundred or so albums for $50!
While moving from spotify to youtube music a few years ago I bought a vinyl player to listen to full albums and fell for it. Then when I moved to curate and self host my collection with Plex and Plexamp I realized I'm not using the player anymore since I'm using Plexamp to listen to albums. Plexamp is not perfect and not open source unfortunately, but it's a really good non-enshitified product.
I had to migrate away from youtube music since the experience was infuriating me every time. I love making playlists on the go. In youtube music after adding 30 tracks to the play queue, tapping 1 track accidentally deletes the play queue and plays this track. This made me feel bad every time it happened.
I don't see how it is just accepted to lose progress in 2026 as if we're using win95. It feels like 80% of the sw I use provides a caveman UX, not leveraging the tech, leaking implementation details and being constrained by technical reasons. On the other hand, working on Prepbook[0], I realized how hard it is to create the perfect experience and how it's even harder to justify it financially.
I'm doing discovery by talking to people, I love it. Every time I listen to Monolink I recall my co worker that just said "check out monolink" when he heard I love Ott. I love that it makes the experience about connection to people as well.
[0] https://prepbook.app
Epic bought bandcamp many moons ago. Did they enshittify it or is it still going strong?
Epic actually sold Bandcamp 3 years ago. I only started using it lately so I can't say how it was before, but I think it's still good.
https://pitchfork.com/news/epic-games-sells-bandcamp-amid-la...
Unfortunately bandcamp laid off virtually all of their engineers a month or so back: https://www.hypebot.com/new-bandcamp-layoffs-why-artists-are...
So, not enshittified, but either abandoned or headed for ensloppification.
Did they only recently release access to a new streaming API or did I dream that (again)?
I've been using it sporadically over the past 10+ years and have not noticed any major changes, at least for my limited use.
Thanks, I did some digging. My biggest issue is Andrew Jervis not running Bandcamp Weekly anymore. I loved that show :(
> radio for discovery
was a big question mark I had as well. The Clear Channel and iHeart stations are not known for discovery. Now if you find a college station or by some miracle an independent station you can get some new stuff. My favorite local college station is also ad free. They also have an app which I lean on as it's not the strongest transmitter so their coverage is spotty. Maybe there's other indy stations with apps as well??
This radio station is local to the city I live in, and they've been great for music discovery for me, although heavy focus on local artists, but they've put me onto a few international artists as well.
https://threedradio.com/
I subscribe to them, have done so for ~10 years I reckon. I don't listen as much as I used to, but I want them to continue existing either way.
Be aware, the quality of their playlists is incredibly variable, but that's part of the charm. I guarantee you'll hear something you haven't heard before... for better or worse.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zHR0HMFY60 (with 2 minutes of silence at the start to, presumably, avoid auto-copyright claims).
Public radio is great, NPR and the member stations have some great streaming channels. KEXP and KCRW are two favs
I believe there are! I consistently hear good things about KEXP and FIP but I haven’t listened to either extensively.
I listen to a lot of SomaFM (free, https://somafm.com/) and the Flow State radio-podcast (paid, https://www.flowstate.fm/).
I would always recommend KEXP. They have a really varied set of shows and setlists, don't seem to be swayed by "we must play the top 40", genuinely care about music, and are super nice if you head into the building in Seattle (which has a public access space, coffee shop, bathrooms, and a SubPop store).
I've had three tours around the place just by telling the folks there that Im there from out of town. To be fair, I might have gotten the tours because I came all the way over from England the times, but it's my favourite place to hang out when I'm in Seattle.
Also Ken is the nicest guy ever, and he introduced me to Larry Mizzel Jr while he was broadcasting live.
Get the app, or use the player on their website, and hive then a try for an hour or do. The app has the ability to "heart" a track while it's playing live, which helps with discovery.
RRR and PBS in Melbourne both stream online and are both fantastic for music discovery. Go the former if you lean indie and the latter if you lean international.
Internet radio is still going strong: https://www.radio-browser.info/
Wow this is amazing. I can't believe shoutcast still exists too!! I have fond memories of hosting a shoutcast stream at very low bandwidth over dialup!
There seems to be a few decent apps in F-droid and lots of stations with no ads and very specific genres like just depressive black metal!
Technobase.fm was my gateway drug to EDM when all I otherwise had access to was rock and roll and country.
There used to be Neradio as well, but they died like a decade ago.
I listen to Flow State, SomaFM, and aggregate from local shows and a few people I follow on social media among other discovery platforms. (I don’t have a favorite yet.)
I found that Spotify was increasingly recommending AI artists and songs I already knew. It surfaced very little outside of my comfort zone and effectively nothing that wasn’t new. There’s a whole world of music out there that Spotify wasn’t showing me.
I stopped listening to Pandora well over a decade ago because its algorithm eventually decided that I only liked 12 songs in the whole world.
using nts.live and and fip radio -> https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip at the moment for same purpose. Radio France allows to save liked track names in profile to look up later.
In addition to those two bangers, BBC6 and RNE also have shows to discover new musics. PS: RadioParadise is also a safe place for good music.
I use https://radioparadise.com for this, since more than 20 years.
Hype machine used to be so good for this. I haven't used it for a long time but it looks like it is still going in some fashion.
I used to use hypem soo much during the music blog days and had a subscription etc but it seemed to stop working or something so after a while I stopped using it. I will have to check it out again
There is nothing better plexamp but unfortunately after plex raised their prices it might not be worth it for most
Call me a boomer but I’ve had a ton of fun with XM radio. I can find new music on Bandcamp but nothing compares to hearing some classic from the 80’s that you would have never thought to put on when you’re driving home after work on a Friday.
I just listen to NTS most of the time.
nts is all fire until a dj plays mp3 bitcrunched track that just hurts your ears
> its almost impossible to find new music otherwise
I don't know where this opinion came from (Probably Spotify's PR department) but it's just so weird to me. Do you think people didn't find new music before streaming? It's not impossible, you just have to talk to people.
I don't know about you but spotify discovery feels like the least organic discovery possible. Its so homogeneous and predictable and corporate slop adjacent it makes me cringe just thinking about it.
I've discovered so many great artists through Spotify, and been to many of their shows (which Spotify also helps surface with their "Live Events" feature). I regularly get artists with less than 100k listeners in my Discover Weekly, which I then look up, and find that they did a concert on KEXP, and the comments all proclaiming "I knew good music wasn't dead!".
So I can say for sure that I don't share the slop sentiment. Sure, there's some generic filler every now and then, but any non-cohesive mix, as opposed to a carefully curated album is going to have songs that naturally become "fillers".
Just now, I discovered that Spotify snuck in "The Juan Maclean - Running Back To You (2014)", which is a cover of "Brian Bennet - Solstice (1978)". Neither songs are completely unknown, but they're also not exactly Bruno Mars.
I don't know if this is pure luck or algorithmic rhythm analysis, but for me it's working.
> Spotify is in the process of killing the librespot project
How could they possibly do that? They cannot prevent people or AI from reverse engineering their APIs.
You're right, they can't prevent that, but they can change their APIs in breaking ways enough to make librespot unreliable, to the point it's just not worth it.
I assume that for a long time, Spotify was content to ignore projects like librespot... they didn't help those projects, but didn't harm them either, and generally to keep things stable enough that a project based on librespot basically stayed working, which is why you saw so many OSS tools that used it behind the scenes. It does seem like that balance shifted over the last year, and now librespot is constantly breaking in new and mysterious ways. Some accounts work, others don't. Some tracks play, others don't. The devs did a great job fixing that stuff, but it's a game of whack-a-mole, and Spotify seems to have really upped the frequency of how often they break things. And that's for the lossy decoding, which is functionality that used to be pretty stable. Spotify reached out and (I assume) made some threats that explicitly shut down their work around lossless audio [1].
FYI -- I'm not associated with the librespot project, but I was actively working on a project that relied on it. Eventually I gave up in favor of self hosting, because I want my music to not break all the time. Shame, because I used to like Spotify a lot and now I'm actively looking to move away from it. That's one premium family plan subscription they're gonna lose! I'm sure they'll feel the sting.
[1] https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/issues/1583#issue...
Depends on how much they care. They can take down repos containing any keys, or use heuristics to block clients.
Technically no, but they can just ban you. It would not be impossible to detect.
Anthropic can prevent people from using their models with the subscription plan outside Claude Code, why couldn't Spotify?
Because millions of Spotify-compatible speakers are sold with firmware that will never be upgraded, so they can't ever change the Spotify connect protocol without breaking those devices.
... and no company ever broke backwards-compatible support.
I'd say it's a good thing they are not (?)
DMCA has entered the chat.
I'm glad they're doing well but I would guess only a tiny fraction of the people who use Spotify would be capable of setting up Navidrome. I tried and went back to Plex. I wish it were otherwise but if something takes more than a few clicks to go from zero to music that leaves 95% of users out! I hope these projects get more accessible though.
Tools for piracy are much better today than they were back in the Napster or grooveshark days. It’s actually kind of shocking to me that we haven’t had a popcorntime moment for music again. Nothing technical is preventing the creation of a perfect decentralized anonymous p2p FLAC streaming platform with plausible deniability.
How would the plausible deniability piece work? If you stream some bytes to someone else, you can't deny doing it. Unless you imagine this working over Tor, idk what the performance of Tor is these days but I never thought it could support such an application.
Music is relatively small. Tor is totally capable of hosting zlibrary without bandwidth restrictions getting in the way.
By plausible deniability I simply meant adopting a similar approach that Stremio has, to keep it on the good side of App Store approval processes. The app itself only allows for creative commons content by default, but with the right incantations it can host anything.
Stremio and other apps like Fusion have gone up and been (reasonably quickly) taken down off the App Store though.
Not really "on the good side" when your main distribution method is "add this app to your account within the first 1-2 weeks of it being in the App Store or never again", or sideloading.
Have you heard of Soulseek? It's an active p2p music sharing platform.
To those of you who might get any ideas from this comment, Soulseek already has a growing problem of people vibe coding "free Spotify" apps that end up hammering a few accounts without giving anything back to the community by hosting. The solution seems to be some combination of automated hosting checks and captchas via PM, which are tiresome to maintain and might just drive more people off from hosting altogether.
I've also canceled my Spotify sub three weeks ago and migrated to Navidrome. I'm still not quite satisfied with the available clients, I'm using Feishin. Fastpotift looks like a nice candidate to extend to support Navidrome.
> I think the golden age of music streaming is coming to an end
There was a world before Spotify. Though the music labels didn’t much like that world we can easily go back to it.
> There was a world before Spotify
There was, and it was definitely not "the golden age of music streaming".
I feel I am in the golden age of music streaming right now. Just use Deezer instead of Spotify.
Perfect quality and it great selection.
I have a free Deezer account from my family. Shit is extremely barren. Some examples:
1. (already posted on HN) Wanted to try Midori's early stuff, but no "1st" EP nor "2nd" LP. Not on Spotify nor Apple Music either.
Only yesterday:
2. Looking at Bleach (the Japanese hardcore punk/noise rock band): nothing and they aren't extremely obscure or anything (https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/bleach-4). They're on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/artist/5gRsPZZNgrkagQnDlyFZUC) but missing two LPs; on Apple Music too (https://music.apple.com/us/artist/bleach/74570682) and one more LP available.
3. Okay, let's try Meat Puppets' lauded second LP from my backlog... artist is there, but four first LPs aren't. On Spotify and Apple Music.
4. For fun, let's try to find that very obscure kote kei demo, (螺旋 (Rasen) - Hysterical Noi「z」e / Like「M」(1997)). Nothing, of course, but well, I can't even find it on private trackers or SoulSeek (got some mystery mp3s "somewhere").
So, if I were to stoop down to streaming, looks like Spotify/Apple are less worse here.
This is actually informative, thanks.
In my case, some music I want is unavailable, some releases from Discos Fuentes of Salsa Brava from the 1970s.
But, in this case, they are also unavailable from Tidal, Spotify, etc...
I use Deezer (in a browser tab, and on my iphone.) It's good, but far from great.
If several artists / bands share the same name, there will be one artist page with all of the artists/bands releases. The queue management sucks, I can add stuff to the queue, move / remove individual entries. That's it. If I added an album to the queue and want to remove it, I have to click a little cross one time for each track of the album. Notifications about new releases: great. Except the UI is a tiny dropdown, and hovering over an item removes the little marker signaling it's a new one. It's really difficult to catch up when there are more than 5 new entries. etc.
I pay for Deezer but I've never used the app. I download the music I want in FLAC using deemix.
Hey, don't spoil the party. I knew that. Many others also.
Now the dzr developers will break the functionality. On purpose.
I used to use Tidal, until they patched something, and now FLAC is impossible to obtain from Tidal. Hopefully it still works tomorrow, sheesh.
Mate, it's been several years. They know.
That Tidal change was very recent.
>I think the golden age of music streaming is coming to an end.
Already ended for me. They killed the plan I was on, and then started sending me begging emails to sign up for a new, more expensive one.
But once I experienced their platform with ads, I just stopped using it entirely.
Why are they killing librespot?
Probably for the same reason Twitter killed their API, more control over the experience and to serve ads/cross-promote. More cross-promote for Spotify.
Spoiler: Spotify has always been terrible. The golden age of music streaming was Zune pass where you could stream and download 10 songs/mo.
And arguably Pandora always had a better radio algorithm than Spotify.
The first Spotify client, the one in Qt was actually really good. Things started going downhill slowly when they integrated Facebook then very fast when they threw everything through the window to rewrite everything in electron.
the first spotify client was plain win32
> Spotify has always been terrible.
It wasn't, really. At least not completely. I fully agree on the algorithm - I miss times of scrobbling to Last.fm, which was much better at this. (Spotify always supported scrobbling to Last.fm from their client, surprisingly).
Spotify used to be snappy and worked really well on Linux. I even used it for local libraries, as it was one of the few options that didn't crash on mine.
It was at the beautiful time when we realized web apps can have local storage, Google released that experiment called Chrome to "show public how modern browser can evolve and inspire other browser makers how to progress". We know it ended up in "extinguish the market with it", unfortunately.
But Spotify chose native app approach - they distributed it as packages. Deezer on the other hand, back then (I don't know now) had just native web app that could pull music locally. I think it was an extension of Chrome (?). It also worked perfectly fine on Linux, almost two decades ago.
We had a lot of decent options back then.
Scrobbling to Last.fm isn’t music streaming.
It's music discovery. And last.fm does it well, always have.
But the topic is music streaming golden age, not music discovery golden age.
CIUT has some great shows and most are available online. University of Toronto.
What do you use to stream your local content? Using plex at the moment.
> Spotify is in the process of killing the librespot project
Source?
https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/issues/1649
Also, https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/issues/1737
We are seeing a slow but steady stream of small breaking changes, designed to gradually piss off everyone involved. While avoiding a large breaking change that attracts a load of bad publicity.
Sadly this strategy is the only good idea they've had in years.
Thanks, but don't see how this Issue backs that up.
Not sure what you call it, but new accounts are no longer able to use librespot.
> I think the golden age of music streaming is coming to an end.
It's just getting started.
We're going to vibe code the entire enshittified internet to be ours once again.
The dream of the 90's and 00's is alive again. The indie web is going to become unstoppable.
We can build anything of size and scale with the limited spare energy we have now. Every product will be reborn without big tech tendrils.
> We're going to vibe code the entire enshittified internet to be ours once again.
It’s such a wishful thinking, but no it doesn’t and won’t work this way. Code != useful product. Plus today’s web is all about fabricated content, AI bots, cloudflare challenge walls and all other annoying stuff. The very idea of being able to create something in seconds is already killing internet.
Garbage being created at unprecedented rates does not diminish the fact that LLMs are acting as a positive multiplier for useful tools; this very item being one.
No one in all these years had gone through the effort of replicating the Spotify client with a snappy fast interface for a reason. Everything had been an integration into already existing software, or simpler interfaces, because the effort was not worth it. The equation has changed.
who said anything about internet
You can look at the glass half full all you want, my glass is overflowing.
This is the best year in all of my 20 years in tech. I'm creating so much stuff and it's all I've ever wanted.
This is the dream of the 2000's, and big tech can't stop us anymore.
I think I'm going to write my own music player soon that behaves exactly like I want it to. Maybe this weekend. Or maybe right after my home automation project. But I can probably squeeze them both in.
It's like Christmas every day now.
Buddy, it’s the same big tech gave you this opportunity. You are creating so much stuff, but most of them are useless garbage that no one cares about.
> You are creating so much stuff, but most of them are useless garbage that no one cares about.
Are you so sure of that?
One of my projects is at $5M ARR in just six months. I passed $400k in sales this month. It's an open source project.
I'm teaching my wife to code and we're going to make a video game together. Surely you can see the value in that bonding experience? She never would have been interested prior to Claude Code.
I've been writing my own SRS software for drilling typing in Japanese. It's pretty fantastic. Nothing like that existed before I made it. So many needs that went unmet are just being filled.
That's just top of mind. I've been doing a ton.
Nobody likes to tag music the way I like to (multiple scalar quantified dimensions with clustering), so there's literally no music player on the planet in the shape that I want. If I'd wanted to build that before, I'd have to spend opportunity cost over several weekends to start building, plus the ongoing burden of maintenance. That's likely a few months burnt plus fixing things when API integrations break down. Now it's a few hours plus a bug fix here and there.
This is 3D printing for software.
I don't get the negativity. This is all so magical.
I wholeheartedly agree that we’re in a time in tech that is unbelievably enabling and exciting. I’ve learned so much and built so much useful bespoke tools for myself over the past year and it’s only getting better.
I’m quite turned off by just how many grumpy people here have to shit on everything they possibly can.
It was nice to finally read a comment that is unabashedly positive.
Links to your $5M ARR FOSS? And is that Annualized Run Rate or Annual Recurring Revenue? I'm guessing the former.
> One of my projects is at $5M ARR in just six months. I passed $400k in sales this month. It's an open source project.
If it's the former ARR, then how are you at $5M if it took you six months to get to $400k? $5M/12 = $416,666.6666666667
Which correct me if I'm misunderstanding (I do frequently) but that means your best average sales month was ~$400k, not 6 months to reach $400k.
Presumably https://getartcraft.com/, after some light stalking.
FYI on this site, I had to enable WebGL to get it to run in Firefox. Not sure why it requires WebGL specifically I didn't see anything on the pages that seemed to need something like that. They could be losing customers that can't load their site.
More details:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49500019
"Controllable AI for artists".
"AI for artists", Carl!
I am very interested in your projects. Particularly the music player.
Tagging for Latin America music is basically a cluster fuck of misleading misunderstandings, there's not a single salsa, merengue, son, charanga, or bachata song that has been correctly tagged in any streaming platform o scrobbler. It's like the people using the platforms are deaf to the rhythms. WTF is Latin Jazz doing in a salsa song? Exactly.
Well, happy for ya.
If anyone is interested in selfhosting or wants to stop using spotify without losing the discoverabily:
I use explo+slsk+lidarr+navidrome, for access on my phone I use dsub2000 or symfonium but mainly dsub2000.
Explo is the software used for the discovery https://github.com/LumePart/Explo It automatically downloads daily jams, weekly jams and weekly exploration playlists from your listenbrainz account(free) using youtube, soulseek(with slskd) or lidarr (support was merged very recently).
I also imported all my artists from my spotify account when I migrated which you can do in lidarr with the plugin ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶k̶ ̶ bellow ̶b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶s̶u̶p̶p̶o̶r̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶i̶n̶ ̶l̶i̶d̶a̶r̶r̶.̶
plugin: https://github.com/TypNull/Tubifarry
̶f̶o̶r̶k̶ ̶d̶o̶c̶k̶e̶r̶ ̶i̶m̶a̶g̶e̶:̶ ̶g̶h̶c̶r̶.̶i̶o̶/̶l̶i̶n̶u̶x̶s̶e̶r̶v̶e̶r̶-̶l̶a̶b̶s̶/̶p̶r̶a̶r̶r̶:̶l̶i̶d̶a̶r̶r̶-̶p̶l̶u̶g̶i̶n̶s̶
docker image: lscr.io/linuxserver/lidarr:nightly
This plugin is also needed for downloading songs with slsk in lidarr.
A simpler, lower-tech alternative is to subscribe to Bandcamp newsletters. Infinite discoverability to be had and any purchases made directly support artists.
There are also excellent listener-supported radio stations that are dedicated to nothing but introducing people to really cool music they wouldn't otherwise hear. Examples:
- KEXP (Seattle, WA)
- KCRW (Los Angeles, CA)
- KUTX (Austin, TX)
- WYEP (Pittsburgh, PA)
- So many college radio stations; they still exist and are probably going to see a resurgence now that the youngs are detaching from tech
(Soapbox: I believe that algorithmic music discoverability works for music _you already like and listen to_ but is terrible for music _you haven't heard before but might like_.)
I'd like to add another absolutely great radio Station: "FIP" - France Inter Paris. It belongs to Radio France has been running since 1971. Everytime i Tune in i write down song and artist namens because the mix is so great for me. It really is all over the place but with a lot of style. Plus: once every half hour or so you get one of the famous announcers that tell you interesting or funny things. They are all women and a Main reason for FIPs uniqueness. And i don't even understand them :-) You can listen via the Radio France app or find the link for the stream online. (In the app there are also additional genre-specific streams of FIP but IMHO the Main one is the most interesting one because of its large variety that still fits together.
https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip
I've heard great stuff about FIP. I usually listen to Concerts Radio France at night. Excellent classical programming.
I discovered explo too and AI slopped my own solution a while back for the discover weekly from listenbrainz xD (navidrome-listenbrainz-jams on GH) - aside the fact that listenbrainz had technical issues for a bit - does the job for me; maybe I should add support for last.fm playlists as those seems to be more diverse I would say (but less API-friendly)
Thanks for sharing Explo, looks like a good project for discovery, I’m going to check it out!
I’m using a similar setup, with Lidar/Navidrome, but using Subwave for discovery. It works very well for going through your library and playing music like a radio station would, but it won’t recommend anything that’s not already in there.
I'm using a similar setup with soularr, and I just need to import my playlists from Spotify, but I'd rather not use a fork of lidarr.
Hi, Actually it's not a fork it's the docker image for the plugin branch.
Sorry I set this up quite a long while ago and didn't remember correctly.
And it seems to have been merged so the plugin branch is not needed anymore, see: https://github.com/Lidarr/Lidarr/pull/1829
So the official image would work.
edit:
I just migrated and I can confirm it works.
I used lscr.io/linuxserver/lidarr:nightly, note that the `latest` tag won't work as it's using the `master` branch which doesn't have plugin support yet, so either use the `nightly` tag or the `develop` tag.
See: https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-lidarr/#version-ta...
you've listed eight different software doodads I'd need to accomplish what my one Spotify app that gives me access to everything I need for $15 does.
Is there a way to get Music Assistant fit into this nicely?
I do not use Music Assistant.
As Music Assistant supports subsonic (https://www.music-assistant.io/music-providers/subsonic/) and Navidrome expose a subsonic endpoint it should be possible (https://www.navidrome.org/docs/developers/subsonic-api/).
Thanks!
I think the key call out with this is how cool egui is (the Rust GUI library it uses). Check out their website: https://www.egui.rs/
The demos are very good: https://www.egui.rs/#clock
Edit: egui is an immediate mode GUI library written in Rust. egui runs natively on , and on the web it is compiled to WebAssembly and rendered with WebGL or WebGPU. Everything you see is rendered as textured triangles. There is no DOM, HTML, JS or CSS. Just Rust.
Devs are constantly making the mistake of falling in love with immediate mode GUIs... because it's convenient for them, the developer. For the user, it's almost always a worse experience as things don't behave in the same way as the rest of the platform they're on.
egui is great for video game debug UI overlays and internal tools, and maybe some specialized graphical tools. Otherwise its quirks are too annoying for general purpose app usage. Sure, you banged out a UI quickly with it, at the expense of your users.
No, it’s fine. It’s the longer term DX that takes a hit. Anything other systems can do, immediate mode can do, because like those systems you can always cache across frames. The same can’t really be said for retained mode. We wrote some about it here: https://tritium.legal/blog/desktop
I clicked on that expecting to see something about the limitations of retained mode, but I didn't see anything. There's a claim about long term retained mode complexity, and a discussion about a winit bug...
Can you list your exact complaints? It's a GUI like any other.
Alright I downloaded the thing, just for you.
* Right off the bat in the login screen, if you resize the window, it flickers
* I logged in. Double clicking the top part of the window doesn't maximize it, like I expect on basically all other windows. I'm using MacOS, btw
* Resizing the main home screen is also a flickery mess. Though I'll give credit, it's a fast flickery mess, because the official spotify app resizes like ass
* Okay, here's one more specific to egui and why I think its approach is not good outside of the app types I listed in my original comment: I type some text in the search bar. Let's say I want to highlight the last word after I've typed it, in order to delete it or type something else. On every other app on my system, I can hold Option + Shift + Left Arrow Key. Or perhaps Cmd + Arrow Keys to move the cursor to the start or end of the line. The egui app just doesn't work, because egui misses so many fine details about text manipulation on a given OS.
* In general, text handling just sucks
* Scrolling doesn't have the inertial bounce when it hits the ends of a scroll action
* It's very easy to create overlapping UI elements by resizing panels and/or the window itself.
Anyway, those are just some of the things from a few minutes of trying this specific app out.
In general, if it's an egui app, I already know there will be weird resizing glitches/flickers, a poor text editing experience, and it will typically not follow the platform's idioms and built-in gestures, scroll physics, behaviors, etc. In this case, the app is decent since it mostly just needs to play music, and you mercifully don't need to interact with it much when it comes to text and such.
But saying "It's a GUI like any other" is like saying "wonderbread is a bread like any other". Maybe it's a curse of knowledge? Similar things happen with coffee. One person says "tastes like coffee" while another can pick out individual flavor notes. Maybe I'm shouting into the void and no one gives a shit anymore, I dunno. But to me, these things matter and are a mark of quality.
If we have LLMs that can shit out whatever code now, why aren't people having them output truly "native" GUIs that use the UI framework of the OS so they can get all the expected behaviors by default?
This seems like more of a complaint about egui's choice to re-implement all the widgets from scratch than its choice to use an immediate mode API. The two are orthogonal. The IMGUI idea has its roots in a community of people that like implementing things from scratch, but you could implement it on top of native widgets if you wanted to.
The choice to re-implement native widgets from scratch is justifiable if the egui devs think they can do better than the native widgets do. It's also nearly required in practice if they want the toolkit to have consistent behavior across multiple platforms (something people have learned the hard way multiple times across multiple different UI libraries).
It's hard to get it right, but that's why the egui devs are writing a library: so that others can benefit from that hard work. Many of the things you pointed out are just bugs, and bugs can be fixed.
> but you could implement it on top of native widgets if you wanted to
Is there an immediate mode GUI API that uses native widgets? I don't think I've ever seen that but would be curious to try it out. Does it work well in practice? If it doesn't exist, then it's kind of a moot point, isn't it?
I sympathize with wanting "consistent behavior across multiple platforms", but that usually just results in "consistently kneecapped behavior across multiple platforms".
You should draw a distinction between “implementing the GUI” and “implementing OS behavior”. Flickering aside egui works mostly fine for the former; the latter falls apart on most non-browser-and-non-toolkit-wrapper approaches because people never stop to handle those things.
E.g your double click on title bar thing sounds less like egui to me and more like somewhere in the stack is missing an AppKit flag.
[dead]
I was about to come here and say that egui is a terrible choice for web. Everything is rendered in a canvas, so accessibility and extensibility is thrown out of the window. Basic browser functions like pinch-zoom don't work, it has some very wonky visual bugs when resizing the window, interactions have a very noticeable delay, no browser extensions work with this.
This is really not a good solution for web apps, and if you're vibe coding your apps anyway, there isn't any reason not to have a native browser application.
> Everything you see is rendered as textured triangles. There is no DOM, HTML, JS or CSS. Just Rust.
So that's why text selection doesn't work.
This feels like it would be an accessibility nightmare?
But maybe it could be cool for doing some advanced animations or rendering games or something.
The anti-aliasing is broken, it doesn't apply gamma correction
Did you look at it recently? Until a few months ago text was a blurry mess but it seems like they've mostly fixed it now.
It's the first time I've heard about egui. I'm currently working on a desktop app that uses Tauri, and I realized there's a Tauri plugin that connects the two:
https://crates.io/crates/tauri-egui
Maybe I’ll use it in my next project, the demos are good!
on Firefox and Windows, it's a disaster
in addition to what other comments pointed out, on the demo ( https://www.egui.rs/#demo ) if you have a sidebar open, there is an offset of approximately the sidebar's width (though not exactly) between the system's mouse pointer position and the web app
Lots of people seem to care about whether a project was built by hand over time by a few committed developers, or if it was vibe-coded in the past week by a single person.
Whether the distinction matters or not, it would be nice for everyone involved if projects falling into the second category were more upfront about that.
I don't think it's needed or a fair ask. Even though project clearly shows one of the contributors as Claude. There are excellent AI assisted software out there and shite software "crafted" by bare fist and knuckles violently banging a mechanical keyboard in a glorious hacker dungeon.
When I commit I either mark it as my own commit if I've read through every line of that commit at least once (not skimmed), pushed back, changed, etc, or put as "ai@<a word I use>" if it was mostly "fine, do it…" or the "whatever… " phase. I never let AI write a single word of documentation or comment. And I made sure Claude removed its attribution the first time I started using it. Besides I was using GLM 5.2 at that time so Claude was not a fit anyway. I don't think they should have that default behaviour.
As a matter of interest, would seeing a full disclosure that vibe coding was used sway your decision one way or the other?
Yes, a project maintained and built over longer time has a bigger chance of staying relevant, than someone's weekend fun they will abandon once the dopamine hit of "making something" wears off.
Isn't software written by hand more likely to be abandoned due to the extremely costly nature of keeping its development going? Abandonware definitely existed prior to vibe coding. As long as it's open source, now you can pick it up and keep vibe-developing it if you care to, for very little money/effort.
Possibly, but sunk costs fallacy often means it's possible to rely on the maintainer to stick around. I think we all know how disposable LLM-generated code can be. If I wanted to vibe code my own thing, I'd do it my way rather than fork an abandoned project.
What's needed is more of a nexus thing where there's evidence multiple people work together or some long track record of someone scratching a very specific itch. Or if we're all using agents to build the same thing some way for them to team up. It's a sort of proof of life thing and it's difficult to distinguish those from flashes in the pan.
Rather than sunk cost fallacy, I would call it survivorship bias: the projects that someone has consistently worked on over time are a small fraction of the total projects out there, and those that have survived are probably useful to someone (at the very least, their developers).
I'm not sure what decision you're talking about. My comment just mentions that it would be convenient if disclosure of vibe-coding was more common.
I can look for myself and see that the repo was started a week ago and has had hundreds of commits since, and that the author exclusively talks about ai on twitter. I'd just like it if I could save myself some time, and it would prevent useless discussions in this thread were people argue whether the commit-messages look like ai.
Due to security and future updates, yes.
I'll admit to having some bias against vibe coding, but trying to put that aside I think it depends on the purpose of the project. If it attempts to be an improvement over existing software then absolutely yes it would, things like speed, performance, security and reliability are not something I'd trust vibe coding for. If its for doing something novel where the previously mentioned is less of the focus, I can imagine myself looking past that, sure.
It would save time from having to figure out that myself.
Software has finally started to get faster, and I love it. Pls don't consider this a spam, but if anyone is interested in a fast native Slack client, I'm building one, since Slack themselves don't want to: https://msga.app
Make MSTeams Great Again when? Amazing work btw.
Teams was never great to start with
I just looked through the slop Readme file, it looks like teams is supported.
Yes, Teams is supported, but since their API is really poor compared to Slack, the support is pretty limited.
Just tried your slack client, it has all the features I need and it is super smooth and lightweight, thanks!
Love it.
I did the same for Postman/Bruno.
Winamp feature is great but so random, and I love how it's listed as if it's a usual feature expected from any music player.
Hoping for a future in which people complain about missing basic functionality like winamp mode being missing in their music player of choice!
Let me start: I was going to recommend foobar2000 with the spotify plugin but the lack of a winamp mode must be a dealbreaker for many!
I get around the lack of such a mode by still using winamp!
It’s not specific to this program, but I lately get this feeling that distributing widely a piece of software that exists for 5 days and saw a dozen releases in that period is stretching the open source trust model.
Think of something nerds will like (like this!), package malware, distribute, profit. That's the idea, right?
Spotify used to use Qt for its desktop client. Good times.
Good times. The old Spotify client was native and fast. I miss that. The new one is heavy and clunky.
This is actually wrong, it was never QT. It was however not built with web technologies back in the day
Did it really? I remember that Wimp used Adobe Air and Deezer used Flash.
If this player has true random playing of your songs, instant sell for me. Also, a mobile version would be great, even if I have to do a manual install.
Spotify's "random shuffle" has been broken for years, with a long running thread [1] complaining about it. A lot of the commenters think there is some kind of "artist priority" playing algorithm, with some kind of maximum profit goal or something. But I think it's simpler - if Spotify just plays the same ~20 songs, they save a lot on bandwidth as it can just play from a local store. Who knows the real reason, I just know that it's annoying when I have a 2000+ song playlist and only hear a small percentage of it.
And yes I'm aware last year Spotify announced "fewer repeats" shuffle - but it doesn't work, or isn't sufficient anyway.
[1] https://community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/All-Platf...
The most sickening part of this is that it isn’t actually broken, it’s working exactly how Spotify wants. Spotify thinks we are so stupid we actually want their janky “shuffle” that doesn’t work properly.
It is a shame that Spotify have not made their Dear ImGui-based version available: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/3075#issuecomment-60...
Interesting. I've always wanted something like this. The official Spotify player sucks in many ways, but the UI/UX is decent, or at the very least I'm used to it now.
All the other lightweight Spotify clients roll their own UIs in ways that I don't like, so I really appreciate that their LLM has taken the time to clone the UI 1:1.
But now I have to decide if I want someone else's vibecode on my computer. I think not.
What do you all use to buy music these days?
I've been slowly trying to stop my spotify usage and replace it with owned audio files.
Mostly I try to use Bandcamp but many artists are not there. Sometimes I just rip the audio from youtube but would prefer a way to buy that gives most of the money to the artist.
I've found that it's actually surprisingly difficult to find a lot of music I like for purchase. Bandcamp is good but there is also 7Digital (both owned by Songtradr), Bleep and Qobuz. 7Digital usually has stuff that won't be on Bandcamp. There are also a few newer alternatives popping up like Ampwall, Subvert, and Mirlo.
A bigger question.
How do you all GIFT music these days?
My brother recently sent me a new album for my birthday. Very kind. But, it's on vinyl. And I don't have a player.
But it just reinforces thoughts I had before. I had wanted to gift him some music too, but, how? He has a phone. He has a computer. He's not particularly tech savvy. I know I can't ship him a CD, he has nothing that can rip it.
I know you buy an album on Amazon, they let you download the MP3s right away. But, how do I even gift that? Can you even download MP3 to an iPhone? From someplace not Apple? I honestly have no idea.
And it just highlights, to me, the entire (seemingly) difficulty of gifting music today.
Me, I still buy CDs and rip them.
Saving everything until Bandcamp Fridays for the ones on Bandcamp, otherwise pretty much Beatport or not buying it at all. Some labels I've listened to for a long time (like Liquicity) I buy the music straight from their store, figure the artist/label gets the most then.
I don't stream and buy all my music (aside from radio etc), I get music from:
- Bandcamp (for new music)
- Second hand CDs for charity shops and discogs (for older music)
- Quoboz / Amazon (for new music not on bandcamp or something specific I can't find elsewhere)
After discovering music I like on YouTube or whatever, I buy albums on Bandcamp and Qobuz if possible, and Amazon as a last resort. Then I host them on my personal Navidrome server to enjoy without involving any big tech.
Bandcamp, and I have on several occasions emailed the band directly and asked if I could purchase directly from them.
Are compact discs no longer available? I used to rip from those - every album I've ever downloaded and kept I have the CD for. Some bought before the download, many bought after.
But it's been a long time since I've heard anything good enough to purchase.
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Fuck it! I sail away under the flag of jolly rogers...harrrrrr!!!
My personal tier list is:
- Bandcamp
- CD
- 7digital
I host the media on a Jellyfin server and use offline playlists on my phone with Finamp for Android, works quite well for me!
I go to the weekly flea market and sometimes find something that interests me
i also prefer bandcamp but since nobody has mentioned it yet, there is also beatport
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Looks good, but ran into loading spinners fairly quickly, large playlists kill this, I suspect because the api is not properly respecting the cache headers and is refetching the same information repeatedly and thus getting rate limited. Also
Once that happened I wasn't then sure if issues I'm seeing are from api or the app itself. It's possible this is prioritising the responsiveness of the UI rather than the actual speed of user interactions.
Also the menu bar icon doesn't work for me (on MacOs). I can see it, but it doesn't do anything and there's nothing in the app itself to enable/disable it (though thankfully it does respect cmd+drag to delete).
Also doesn't seem to remember player position between app openings
I might be misremembering, but I swear when Spotify launched it was a big revelation at the time because the client was super fast and playback was almost instantaneous. This was a big deal as other music players like iTunes were bloated.
Obviously streaming was the big selling point, something that iTunes didn’t offer at the time, but I swear the client was written in some native UI framework, along with the C/C++ library.
Or was the spotify UI always just a browser engine skin and the perception of speed was from the playback engine?
Anyway, cool to see projects like this
You're remembering correctly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28203654
What's funny about having to rely on unauthorized clones to provide a fast native UX was that Spotify's original client back in 2008 started out as beautifully light, custom rendered native client.
Few Apps ever had that wow factor the first time I used it, it was so much lighter and more responsive than anything else of the day. I remember being perplexed at how I could search and skip to any part of a song quicker than iTunes could looking at a local library. Everything was latency-free and instantaneous.
We were building a Music Startup at the time, so we investigated how it worked. We we’re very surprised we couldn’t find any evidence of an established UI toolkit. It looked as though they had built their own custom UI renderer and optimized TCP protocol which sent back its metadata in XML. Their traffic looked like it was initially seeded from their own (or CDN) servers (for best latency) and then overtime we would see some P2P traffic on the wire.
Our QT/C++ client had decent performance but was noticeably heavier than Spotify's. I was disappointed to see their native client eventually be abandoned and succumb to become yet another Chromium wrapper. I expect it fell to the pressures of a growing startup adding 100s of developers (without the skill of their original CTO/devs) where a native UI couldn't be updated and re-iterated as fast as a Web App. I wish they maintained 2 desktop clients, and left their native client alone to just be an audio player and push all their new social features to their new flagship CEF app.
It's unfortunate the skill and desire of building fast native UIs are being lost to Electron and CEF wrappers. Seems the larger the organization the more likely they are to build new Web rendered Desktop Apps and we have to rely on unauthorized Indie efforts like this for fast, responsive native UIs.
(The comment is from a 2021 post about another Rust-based Spotify client.)
Ludvig Strigeus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Strigeus?wprov=sfti1 wrote the original client, and fast, lean, native clients was his modus operandi. OpenTTD and uTorrent were both built the same way. I’ve been wondering on and off over the years why Spotify abandoned it. My guess is that it was hard to scale that approach and that a hybrid browser client was easier to scale when there are many different engineering teams working on different parts of the client.
I worked with a few people (tech) that Spotify later hired. Sweden is kind of small.
The calibre went from extremely high to surprisingly average within a decade. Not bad, to be clear, but kinda mid. I think they scaled too quickly and hit the 'bozo effect'.
Yes, anecdotal.
I found a talk with some history of the Spotify client's transition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UsnX5X_DF0
It was originally native, then native with some web-based bits, and then the web-based bits slowly ate the whole thing. It seems the ease of development with web-tech compared to C++ (also the better font rendering and screen reader support) was just too tempting.
Interestingly the Spotify client was never based on electron but instead arrived independently at the "chromium + web app" architecture at around the same time as Atom did.
Tried using Spotify web client on Safari the other day. Performance was absolutely terrible.
For comparison I was using Apple Music via safari before.
I’m just surprised that such a big company can produce such an awful web experience, guess everyone is just using the native app, but for some that’s not possible
The only problem with macOS Spotify, in my opinion, is audio thread isn't isolated to system performance and it can drop audio frames under load.
Yes, it's Electron and it's a full browser under the hood, but given the complexity of the UI, it's a fair trade-off.
I'd love to see some like headless Spotify client on macOS.
Wow, I was going to say I assume the pic in the top right is of the official Spotify client, which seems confusing, but it seems this actually just looks really like the official client. Which is good but possibly makes it more likely Spotify will come after you.
The UI feels a lot less sluggish than the official client (which in my experience seems to have gotten way worse lately) but in many cases I am just sent to a loading page which ultimately takes a similar amount of time to load the content. So it seems a lot of the slowness is coming from the Spotify server side, it's just that the official client seems to freeze while waiting for a response whereas this doesn't.
Hopefully Spotify don't kill librespot. As I understand it you can basically only use it with Premium accounts, so it's not like they aren't getting paid anyway. If some other provider were to come along and offer access to the same content as Spotify with a stable API that you can use with any client, I would pay more for that than I currently do for Spotify.
As an aside, ncspot is another good and more minimalise Spotify client, which is a TUI.
That name is horrible.
Potify sounds like a toddler is learning to take a dump. And well, putting "fast" in front of it doesn't impress either in that case.
Potify, the scientifically proven way to get toddlers potty trained, with wearables, app support and an AI coach.
I recently went through most of the Spotify clients I could find on GitHub, looking for something "lean", including screen real estate.
Most of the GUI apps had something similar to the official app in the maximized window, but none had a good mini-player, something I could put in the corner of an external monitor and control most of the important functions with minimal mouse clicking, including EQ and playlist.
Interestingly this one with its Winamp mode is what I was looking for. Nostaliga is probably playing a part, but it a good UI does not have to be "modern".
I also went through a tour of TUI apps. Lots of interesting work there, but a full TUI with windows was less convenient to navigate, and some of them try to do too much. I wound up using https://github.com/hrkfdn/ncspot because it specifically does not attempt to be a character mode GUI. Almost like a ViMusic.
If you're focused on lightweight, native and fast, I don't think you should use an immediate-mode GUI toolkit. Why does an app like this need to hit a 60fps framerate? It's not a game.
I was surprised to see an immediate mode gui toolkit.
They're great to integrate into a game loop because you control your loop, (and they're a delight to use) but I thought for perf retained mode was the way to go?
Am I missing something? Then again if the bar needing to be beaten is spotify's existing desktop app maybe it doesn't matter?
Most immediate mode does a scene graph diff so it's not that bad
I have a custom IM GUIs based ide thing in C++ that uses like .2% of my 10yo CPU.
Egui doesn't do that. But it's written in Rust and only updates when you interact with it so in practice it's way more efficient than I would have expected.
as a side note I absolutely hated writing UIs in egui. It is a really nice framework, but the iteration times were painful.
Author here. Two reasons I chose an immediate mode UI framework:
1. Latency. A click paints on the next frame, because it sidesteps the stages of a retained mode UI: there's no dirty-marking, no layout and paint passes scheduled for later, no cached visual state that can be stale.
2. Simplicity. The UI is a plain function of app state. There's no retained tree to keep in sync and no invalidation bugs: mutate the state and the next frame shows it.
Yes, the drawback is that you have to watch what a frame costs, but it doesn't repaint at every frame. It paints on input and you can schedule repaints yourself. Fastpotify sits at zero CPU when idle, asks for a few frames a second while a track plays, and runs at full rate only while you scroll.
“Claude, why did you use an immediate mode framework?”
I had the same urge recently, I got tired of huge RAM use. It looks much less cool, but it suits my needs.
Built a native Spotify player with Rust and GPUI: https://github.com/infomiho/cadence
https://fastpotify.rocks/winamp/ what a great feature!
I've been using Slint as UI toolkit for Rust and so far liked it, coming as I am from the Qt/QML world.
However, at the beginning I had to choose between Slint[1] and egui[2] (which this project uses)
[1]: https://slint.dev/
[2]: https://www.egui.rs/
Anyone has experience in both and is able to drop some thoughts on their strengths & weaknesses for mid-to-large projects?
Suddenly I couldn't resolve fastpotify.rocks in DNS. Quad9 is now blocking this domain for some reason.
https://quad9.net/result/?url=fastpotify.rocks#domain-tester
ThreatStop lists the following info:
Severity Level: 5 of 5 Confidence Level: 5 of 5 Risk Level: 4 of 5
I assume this is a false positive, but who can be sure in this day and age...
This is cool. A few small thoughts:
- would love to be able to disable podcasts / anything non music related. it's my #1 gripe with the official Spotify client today.
- Winamp buttons shouldn't remain "pressed" in that play state
- Winamp doesn't like being stuck to one edge of the screen, after putting there and interacting it will often jump inward a bit
- Winamp could use the EQ in collapsed mode
- Would be nice for Winamp to remember its position (i think it grabs the NW corner of the large player every time?
My worry with this, like all Spotify clients really, is its dependance on Spotify's, quite litteraly, worst public facing API that is known to exist.
I have been using Spotatui and it's been fast enough, but it would be nice sometimes to have a better 'new music' search experience. I'll give this a try, but if Spotify are hell bent on destroying API users, I fear the project maintainers will have more work than it's worth.
This looks great, I'll give it a try. It seems like most of the comments focus on how this was created, whether it's vibe coded, agent engineered, LLM assisted or however you want to term this. On one hand, I am sad at the collapse of my craft. I love building things in code, figuring it out from the system design to the last compile. On the other hand, I love how productive I am now. How I can complete tasks faster. As someone mentioned, there is a very larger distance between "I vibed coded it and I don't know how it worked" to "I built it and I used LLMs to assist the process". It is possible to design a system, and instruct LLMs to write code for you. Task them the actual act of code writing, not feature development. It's not "build me a music player" but "I'm building a music player that works like so, and you will now write me the play button component that will behave like so and so, focusing on this or that, paying attention to x, y and z and avoiding a, b and c".
Although the scope is different but I imagine a similar debate when one didn't need to write machine code anymore...
Spotify on Ubuntu one day stopped outputting audio and never again could I get it to work. How do you screw up the one thing your app needs to do?!
To give you an idea of the kinds of Engineering decisions going on at Spotify, they do thousands of deploys per day and are PROUD of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-E24t0YM2g
Must be one of THE WORST engineering orgs running right now.
This may be a low effort comment but I just wanted to say that there was a missed opportunity to call this project Spotifast.
I think it's cool people are making custom clients. I actually am working on my own client: WaveeMusic (https://github.com/christosk92/WaveeMusic). I decided not to base it on librespot because it still talks to Spotify's old AP audiokey channel. Official clients don't use that path anymore, it already refuses accounts created after ~2023, and Spotify can turn it off whenever they want.
I decided to use the new PlayPlay instead, the DRM path the official apps actually use. That also gets you music videos, and lossless / FLAC (still working on the decode). Also the app is more focused on the native Win11 niche for the folks who like those type of UIs.
I've been thinking recently about buying an AI-capable GPU and using it to reverse-enginner and debloat apps I use every day. It seems like a task that even a dumber AI model could do. Disassemble the app, then either cut the things I don't care about, or just implement it fresh in a correct way.
I don't think models that run on single GPUs are capable of that yet sadly. You still need to spend ~$100k to get an actually good local LLM. Correct me if I'm wrong, local AI guys. It's really hard to get actually numbers on this stuff, but to run e.g. GLM 5.3 Flash as far as I can tell you need one of those super expensive 8 GPU machines.
if i tasked it with "create spotify" I'd need that much.
asking it to "disassemble Spotify and find out the minimal code path needed to play a song" is much more in reach. I don't need it to oneshot it. If it gets stuck, I've read enough disassembled C to figure it out and get it unblocked.
Instead of banging my head against a binary for 5 hours, I'll have my agent bang it's weights for 20 hours, then put in my 1 hour of polish.
My first task would be to fix the Android version of Facebook Messenger. My friends still stick with it because they have iPhones, and that version works fine. I have been putting up with broken image previews for 2 years now. I'll fix that fucking wild pointer they don't care about and make it usable as a chat app. And I'll remove the ads while at that.
Qwen 3.8 will do it, but it will probably require 72 hours or more.
Aye, and those 8GPU machines are expensive. Powering 2x GPU for GLM is eye watering expense, £5k a month.
I don't really get the comments about Spotify having a terrible UX, works fine for me.
It uses 300 MB of RAM on my MacBook. Saving 50MB of RAM in exchange for losing the ability to play lossless files isn't a trade I want to make.
Cool project though, will keep an eye on it.
If anyone wants a lightweight, GUI, non-slopcoded spotify client I find spotify-qt[1] does the job nicely. Alas, it wears only the skin of your system QT theme
[1] https://github.com/kraxarn/spotify-qt
Just came to say that official client (all its processes combined) uses 1.1Gb of RAM on my macbook air, while this, playing the same track from the same playlist and nothing else, gets only up to 280Mb
That's an improvement for sure, but 280MB also seems like a lot.
Because the official client is an electron app.
I came here to say the opposite. Running on MacOS 15.7 the original Client uses ~200mb and Fastpotify uses ~500mb playing the same song while being substantially slower when navigating music.
EDIT: I forgot about the Spotify Helper processes - taken into account the original spotify needs ~1GB. However it's still a lot faster than Fastpotify
If you want this experience but don't want Spotify may I suggest my "amp" app - you can get it on tinyjs.app
It's small ~10mb. Yes, takes a bit more memory, but it plays all your local files including rarer things like FLAC + Cue, midi and all the tracker files you could want!
And includes a bunch of viz - and you can write your own too.
It doesn't do Winamp skins; decided I wanted to add more than they could support.
This looks amazing but unfortunately this project is doing free work for Spotify rather than brining competition they need. The root problem is that the content access is so gatekept. Apple music opens on it's own. Spotify is junk. YouTube music isn't much better. They've all become lazy and need a shake up.
Go easy on Spotify, they don't have much budget left after paying ungodly sums of money for exclusive contracts with nazi-enablers.
I'm using Qobuz now, they have both downloads and streaming, and apparently pay the artist more than any of the other streaming alternatives. I've found all the music I've looked for there too (including some artists that dropped Spotify). Quite happy with everything except maybe the name ..
I use the Spotify browser UI on my PC because the Windows 11 app is such a joke. However, the browser UI makes my screen go completely black for a second every single time. That's my #1 reason for wanting to try this. Spotify's playlist algorithm is a joke at best, but that's another issue altogether.
Very cool. I'm cloning the repo, just in case it gets taken down. I've been using EGUI, but its biggest problem is that LLMs really struggle with it. There isn't enough good examples of it. This codebase seems to have a lot of good examples, so given this as a reference, one might make a lot of progress much faster.
For me, stock Spotify client on Mac is using ~200MB RAM (no videos / canvas). I probably need to try a leaner build on Fastspotify (built it myself from source), bug the damn thing was using ~350MB RAM. Both RAM counts were based on initial load + playing one song.
have you summed up all the Spotify Helper processes from Chrome? alas its way beyond 200MB. But I just built and ran release build of fastpotify and its also hovering in 500s
These apps and systems have hard quirks built in to make you learn them then find the alternatives jarring so you don’t switch. It’s a retention trick by engineers who know what they’re doing. As many pointed out decent music player/library ux was solved yonks ago.
Other than having abysmal inconsistencies in their UI, ive never had any problems with the native Spotify app. I've been using Spotify for 10 years now and when im on my PC i open the app, either put my Podcast or song and then minimize it. Didnt know people had such issues with the app.
I can’t speak for mobile, but the desktop/web product has been a disaster for years. When Spotify went full Electron a few years back, a bunch of standard macOS keyboard shortcuts stopped working. These issues were on their “support” forum for years before being automatically closed.
For me, it gets the job done, which is mainly managing the hundreds of podcast episodes I am bookmarking (and probably never listen to). Or maybe the iOS version is a bit better than the Android one.
I use youtube music.. It has everything I listen to and more.. Want an obscure college band (Go ZURCHER) ? .. It is there! Want some rare DnB (source direct).. It is there? Want a curated ambient collection? It is there! UX is totally fine on Apple and Android..
I tried switching from Spotify to Youtube Music but the "download for offline" functionality is incredibly broken -- often doesn't recognize that it's on wifi to start downloading, multiple minutes to download an album that Spotify downloads in a few seconds, and for a longer playlist the pause/resume when you go off wifi doesn't work at all.
Love the Winamp feature - but more so that it comes with milkdrop! That is next level.
What would YouTube music support look like? And another random feature request - universal playlist import / export (i.e. take my YouTube playlist and convert it to Spotify and vice versa - Rosetta stone style)
Too bad this requires a Premium subscription, can't use this without one.
I've stopped using Spotify for 2 years now.
What I've realized is that Spotify is great for discovering new songs. But I'm a grown up and listen to the same hundreds of songs every day anyway. No need to keep paying the taxes.
Carmine is cooking. His work on RubyLLM has been incredible, even going as far as upstreaming important work about fiber usage into Rails Solid Queue so that we reap the Async benefits, which are essential in this LLM age.
One of the things I liked the least about spotify is typing in a song name, and then getting a infinite list of every song named like that.
I want the song to be a starting point, like Last.fm radio was, I almost never want to listen to every version of it.
I never understood the complaints about Spotify. Apple Music behaved like crap with something as simple as being offline, to me it's always been a no-brainer to use Spotify over anything else.
I use Strawberry as my music player on Linux, which is a native Qt app and has Spotify integration. No need for the spotify app. Strawberry has great collection support as I own thousands of ripped CDs.
I just looked at Strawberry. Spotify is done via a GStreamer plug-in. It looks like you have to compile it yourself.
I like the idea of a fast Spotify player, but I can't get over my doubts of LLM code quality when the audio playback stutters even with the 200ms output buffer setting (on macOS).
I'd love to put in some love and effort into a Spotify replacemeny that supports jams. I'd share the app with friends. I needed an excuse to make a cross-platform app anyway.
Like this, but the problem with such immediate mode GUI apps is that they constantly burn 1-2% of CPU when the app is idle. A waste of compute and power.
That seems like the kind of name that's gonna earn you a C&D.
Very promising, but works poorly. Playlists load in ~10s, app crashed after a few minutes. Vibe-coded low-quality app.
Took a very long time to get it to sign in and play on my local machine... we'll see if it's worth switching from the official client.
Fuck Spotify. Even if you don't care about the ethics of Daniel Ek's investments, the platform itself is crap. One of the lowest paying to artists, not paying at all unless they hit a threshold, and the catalogue is filling up with AI slop, which they push on users via 'radio' and 'mix' playlists, so they can pay even less royalties. No, thanks.
I've tested Deezer for half a year. The software quality was horrible.
Had a lot of crashes, it often took many many seconds to change between the songs and often getting stuck, the buffering algorithm was nuts and eating a lot of bandwidth.
Everything on a standard Pixel. Full 5G coverage was available.
Alternatives?
Qobuz have the highest per stream payout rate for artists [0], and have the best audio quality of all streaming platforms (better even that Tidal imho). They have desktop, mobile and android auto (and presumably carplay) clients, and an equivalent to Spotify Connect whereby streaming can be switched to a different client.
Downsides are no native client (same webview approach as Spotify), not as strong recommendations (though slowly improving), good but slightly quirkier UI (also slowly improving). For me the trade offs are worthwhile.
[0] eg. https://resources.onestowatch.com/ethical-music-streaming-pl...
I've been happy with Qobuz as well. I use the third party open source QBZ client on Linux desktop.
Tidal is the last streaming service I use, split between that and a jellyfin+arrs setup coupled with buying music from artists directly.
Fuck Spotify and their rotten leadership. Was amongst the early adopters (2009). I'm sure they won't care for the loss, and I won't miss th when they're gone.
Seriously tried Tidal. Gave up on it because of the software quality.
Also, I know it's a bit niche, but Deezer does not have an equivalent of "Spotify Connect" protocol, which means that Network Integrated Amplifiers (like Onkyo A-50), CANNOT implement a player with good UX. Spotify is now king since they introduced lossless quality which is enabled by default in such amplifiers. The benefit is that there is no local streaming (e.g. Bluetooth) and no latency. The data come from Spotify directly to the amplifier and then your speakers.
So, Deezer that had a audiophile target audience, has effectively lost the game.
Nitpicking but those devices do not "benefit lossless by default" after Spotify started offering it. I was very disapointed that my Yamaha network receiver didn't get an update to support lossless from Spotify Connect.
:exploding-head:
>The benefit is that there is no local streaming (e.g. Bluetooth)
how is a lack of an offline, standard, widely supported option a benefit?
I didn't say this is not supported. But it's not as good as streaming from Spotify directly to the amp, and the media decoding happens locally.
Adding the Bluetooth layer adds more layers of encoding/decoding, and generally speaking it has narrower bandwidth.
Tried Tidal? The one gripe I have with it is no remote control, as in using phone to change what's currently playing on the device connected to my sound system, without it thinking I want to start playing on my phone.
Apple Music pays artists better, too.
The best is to host your own, navidrome is great and easy to set up. But if you really wanna hate on one, it’s Apple Music, believe it or not, they will actually delete ALL your playlists that you made over the years if you stop paying subscription for few weeks or sometime for days, why? Because Apple says fuck you, you are renting and you are not entitled for anything, which also explains why they are now trying to have hardware as a service with their new renting hardware program.. at least spotify doesn’t do that and keep your playlist to export later.
I left when they forced podcasts into my music app and never looked back
Careful, you'll get downvoted by knee-jerk reactions from people who have absolutely no idea whatsoever about the harm Spotify causes to artists trying to survive in the music industry.
I already did ;)
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Cant seem to get milkdrop to work on the binary installed via cask on arm macOS. Everything else feels very snappy and fun
Unfortunately this won't fix the atrocious recommendation system. I really wish these music services could just license Pandora's system. Since Pandora won't add high quality streams, they may as well offer a license to make up for the money they leave on the table monthly.
The most user hostile part about Spotify though, is that you can't just thumbs down a song and never hear it again. Why the fuck would I want you to "not recommend it for 30 days" if I'm telling you I dislike it?
If I didn't lock in a bundle deal years ago that I still can't pass up, I wouldn't use it at all. As of now though, it's relegated to my backup player for when I can't find a song on YT Music or Qobuz.
I would pay reasonable money for a similar native MS Teams client. I now run teams on a separate laptop to avoid it killing my main work machine.
To play your local music: https://yunomusica.com/
Kudos, I have been carrying exactly this on my personal “to do” projects list for quite some time. Looks really nice!
Would be great if it could get included in Flathub, without it, I'd rather have an AppImage than a Flatpak file I think
It's hard to think of a name worse then "spotify" itself, but fast "fastpotify" may be it.
Nice to see fastpotify framed this way — I'd been circling the same idea without the right words.
It supports WinAmp skins too… Dare I say it?
It really whips the llama's ass?
Not helpful for Linux users, but FYI both the Windows and Mac Apple Music clients are native apps.
I would welcome a mobile counterpart to this, if it is even possible. The iOS app is even worse.
always thought the spotify ui was really really good, it just has way more features and feels like it is made by a great team that actually uses the app and has input over it's design, vs apple music which is just a normal app that feels like it was made by a committee
I used `cargo install --path . --locked` to install (had an error when compiling `librespot`)
I find spotify to be more bloated now than iTunes was when apple pulled the plug on it.
Looks neat, i hope the librespot issues from the initial days don't come up here
I hacked the official client apart to hide some bullshit (like podcasts) and fix bugs that were pissing me off. Shared it exactly once and it stopped working within a month. Bugs were still there too
I stopped sharing after that.
Have you seen Spicetify[0]? It allows for this kind of stuff and seems to be a lot more stable than doing it all manually.
[0] https://spicetify.app/
I have, it's good, but it is not compatible with some of the things I am doing which are quite a bit more foundational/stuctural. The pile of scripts I've accumulated do a pretty good job of resolving easy breakages, listing anything worse, and running a little lap around all of my typical interactions (from another account running in a cloud vm) to diff the network requests so I look normal to them.
Doesn't appear to find Nest speakers :(
I'd use it otherwise, this is great.
I wish someone would do this for Apple Music. Their app is dreadful!
But can my daughter, who has a Managed Account, use this?
Please make an android port Please god I will pay
It’s relied on librespot so cannot work with free account.
if you want to discover new music, have a look at nts.live
It uses 495mb on my machine, slightly false claims
need this for android. on average, it takes genuinely about five minutes to open—I think it reindexes my entire micro sd card every time.
Doesn't play but looks just like the original.
The classic skins are bringing me back. Well done.
oh wow, Ive been waiting for this for years, its insane we run entire browsers just to play music. Very excited to try this out
You had me at Winamp
Winamp was peak.
Time to leave electron amid the ram crisis
When I saw the Winamp skin I had to hold to not cry
whether vibe coded (which it is) or not - this is free work for a corporation.
that could hardly care less for it's users / customers.
oh my god. The WinAMP mode is awesome! Probably been waiting for this to be available on macOS for 20 years.
Author here. Happy to answer any questions!
This app is a dream come true for me. As a user I'm heavily invested in Spotify but I've grown more and more irritated with their client. Especially the recommendations, which thankfully are largely absent from your client.
Would love a setting to also remove the "Made for you" section, as well as the "Recommended for you" section, both on the home page.
I was using Spicetify to customize the official client to this effect, using CSS.
I was curious about the choice of an immediate mode rather than retained GUI toolkit.
Could you speak a little more about the trade-offs and decisions there w.r.t. performance.
(Nice work btw, seems very interesting!)
C.f. this comment[0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49519099
Thanks for the link, I responded there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49519723
Per another comment, is it true that you trick people wanting to view your code on GitHub, into starring your repo?
No. The "Star" button on the website is a simple link to the repo.
I takes several seconds to load the Queue, what's happening there?
correction: it took several seconds to load the queue the first time.
nice that it supports ARM Linux! This is a major gap with the official Spotify desktop app
I've been using Navidrome for a while and love it (long enough to have written an iOS + macOS client). I mount my music from a B2 bucket and use a shell script to sync additions to it. AudioMuse-AI does a great job generating playlists and populating similar artists. There are lyrics plugins, an Apple Music plugin that can populate metadata and on and on. It's a great system and free from the catalogue rot and slop that's been eroding the benefits of streaming for a while now.
> It starts in well under a second and typically uses 100–250 MB of RAM.
Hmm, a music player now use much RAM :/
Fastslopify
Serious question: down the road, what's the point of such a UI? (Don't get me wrong, I really like and enjoy it!)
My spouse, for example, doesn't interact with her clock app anymore—she just talks to it.
Wouldn't many programs just use a local LLM to perform whatever is needed?
As one more option -> https://github.com/Spotifyd/spotifyd
I've been using it for a while, shows up as a speaker, and uses around 25-40MB of RAM.
There's also this as an official solution: https://developer.spotify.com/blog/2026-08-13-introducing-sp...
hmm I wanted to like this, but for me it's noticeably slower/laggier than the official spotify app, and it's missing common ui features (you can't multi-select and delete from a playlist)
Saw it's Rust, closed immediately.
Now we just need an iOS app that doesn't offer you a choice of speakers on every open and you can just hit play as you intended
took few sessions to re-slop this to OpenSubsonic (navidrome compat) backend; didn't even looked once at the code, I love and hate the future we live in
thanks again for sharing!
Cool project. Building it on Fedora is another story.
Vibe coded or not, Spotify is a disgusting company for artists, however fast or fancy it's made.
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Another site tricking users willing to look at the code into starring the repo instead.
How desperate do you need to be to resort to this?
I had to read the comment a few times. Do you mean "starring" instead of "starting"?
Yes sorry, fixed. Thanks!
No. The "Star" button is a simple link to the repo.
I stand corrected, and I'm glad i was wrong.
Without looking at the codebase I am pretty sure it’s a vibe coded rust app, because this is what today’s most programmers understand about software.
the commits are very fine grained and the text is unusually not AI.
I mean you can beat AI to do anything nowadays, but this looks not that bad
I'd argue nobody writes such long commit messages this consistently. I'm VERY sure this is fully AI generated.
The volume of commits is quite crazy. For example, he wrote a +486/-51 commit in 20 minutes (33287cb) with quite dense rust code. That's about 25 changes per minute -- very impressive! The docs also smell of LLM output, for example describing the app as native despite using egui/wgpu.
But hey, he's here, we can just ask him! @earcar
What about egui and wgpu is not native? Those are both generally what is considered running something natively. Both even mention running "natively" in their descriptions.
I guess what you mean is "OS-provided controls". In that case, ye that is not what this is.
and?
That's boring, and unmaintainable.
until someone comes up with a non vibe coded one ill be happy having at least a fast option
It's working way better than original client. What does it say about Spotify devs?
It takes five minutes to make a website look less obviously AI-generated.
It takes five seconds to scroll to the bottom and see that it's a Jekyll theme before posting a negative comment
Surely they're referring to the llm-isms in the text?
A Jekyll theme from the same person as this project, yes.
The website looks great to me, clean and simple, perfect for a project like this. “Not looking like it was made by AI” isn’t something I value for itself in a website, any more than “not looking like it was made with injection molding” is something I would value in a plastic item.
Either it’s good or it isn’t, but it’s not good or bad because of how it was made.
> “not looking like it was made with injection molding”
Aside machining POM, what else is there. Injection molding tend to be great.
If it was a site made with AI it would be stuffed with way more ad copy, components, UI toggles, and small text. If this was made with AI, they seem to have restrained it from going on the gaudy UI mess of most AI generated sites that are what I like to think of as "Maximalist Minimalist". A hodgepodge of a design library.