Streaming music

[REPO Man]

I use YouTube, especially since I have YouTube Premium. That way I can skip ads AND download videos for offline enjoyment. I mostly stream pop culture deep dives, Did You Know Gaming videos, creepypasta narrations and pretty much whatever when at my morning job. But mostly I'll stream music when I'm running errands.

[Limewater]

I also buy CDs. I hardly ever stream.
My job is generally pretty mentally taxing, so I can't really listen to music at work too often.
I mostly only listen to music in my garage on a cheap wall-mounted CD player while working out late at night. If I'm working out at more reasonable hours, I'll listen to NPR.
The other time I listen to music is while driving if there is not any interesting news or talk program on. In this case I'll listen to one of the mp3 CDs I made from ripping my collection. I only follow a few bands, so I try to stick to one band per CD.
I did not listen to music until halfway through college.

During yard work, I'll usually listen to audiobooks on my mp3 player. I still really miss the Sansa Clip and Clip+. They were great for audiobooks, and they actually had a discrete setting on the power switch to lock the controls. This is the best control lock option, but I haven't seen it on any players since. They're all based on pressing and holding a key to lock the controls. This is a very poor substitute, because it can be very easy to inadvertently hold that key again and unlock the controls unwittingly. Since tracks in audiobooks are often over an hour, this can be very obnoxious.

[Note]

I also never really got into streaming services. Mostly because I found the advertisements to be a pain, a lot of the music I wanted to listen to I already owned in physical format, or certain artists I liked only had a portion of their discography on streaming.

However, I got a new iPhone a few years ago, and realized I was no longer able to drag and drop MP3s onto the phone to keep some music on the go. For the past few years I had been using YouTube to listen to music on my phone while I was commuting. However, this was really a pain in the neck, as there are ads and I couldn't keep the music going if I went to answer a text or bring up another app. Also, I would accidentally close the app a lot. And while on the subway, my connection would cut out while underground in certain areas. It really wasn't an enjoyable way to experience music.

Thanks to opa for mentioning the VLC app! I had no idea VLC had an iOS app. I set it up tonight and was able to transfer a selection of some of my favorite albums in MP3 format using the wifi feature. I now have a nice library of music to listen to on the go. This is really a game changer for me!

I have a Harmon Kardon Onyx Studio 2 speaker that can connect to a variety of devices via aux cord or bluetooth. The sound quality is great IMO and it can get quite loud for a smaller speaker. I usually play high quality MP3s from my laptop connected to the speaker if I'm doing errands around the house or my partner and I want to check out an album together.

Most of my physical music collection is in CD format, so for many years I would mostly play music on a portable stereo I had with a CD player. I also have a small amount of vinyl records and cassettes. But when my girlfriend moved in to my apartment last year, I packed up a good amount of my things to make space for her belongings, and decided to pack up my CD shelf and most of my CD collection, which is in storage for the time being. I'm fine with this, as I currently do not have a working CD player. I'd like to pick up a portable one that I can hook up to my speaker via aux cord.

[Ziggy]

Sansa Clip and Clip+

I had a SanDisk Sansa e250 that I use to use a some 15 years ago. In fact, I still have it and it works great. But being a little sentimental about it, I wanted to pick up something else to use with my job site radio (as described in my last post). So I purchased a SanDisk Clip since it was so cheap. These new incarnations work OK, but not nearly as well as the old players. For example, with my old e250 I have tons of music sorted into folders (a folder for each band, with sub folders for each album). I can shuffle play all, which plays all music in all folders. With my new Cip, I apparently cannot do that. If I want to shuffle all music, all tracks have to be in the same folder. It's OK when playing music, but makes it super annoying to organize and add/remove stuff. I may want to try and find another mp3 player, but in 2024 there aren't a lot of options. So I thought about picking up an old/used one.

During yard work, I'll usually listen to audiobooks on my mp3 player.

Nice! I always forget about this. When I had a decent work commute, I had Audible for a while and use to listen to books in the car. I canceled my subscription, but I still have access to all of the books I got. I forget that this is an option, now that my commute is different day to day. I gotta try and remember to re-implement ebooks into my life somehow.

However, I got a new iPhone a few years ago, and realized I was no longer able to drag and drop MP3s onto the phone to keep some music on the go.

So this really is a thing? I just recently got my first iPhone, a 13. I have yet to put any music on it. With my mp3 player / job site radio and mp3 CDs in the car, I don't really have a need to just yet. But can you really not just drag and drop music onto the iPhone? That's so freaking annoying!

[Note]

So this really is a thing? I just recently got my first iPhone, a 13. I have yet to put any music on it. With my mp3 player / job site radio and mp3 CDs in the car, I don't really have a need to just yet. But can you really not just drag and drop music onto the iPhone? That's so freaking annoying!

Well, I ran into this issue while using a 2019 Mac laptop with Apple Music and an iPhone 8. In the past, when my Mac computer had iTunes I could use a sync feature to select which songs or albums from my iTunes would get copied to my iPod or iPhone. When the default music application switched to Apple Music on newer Mac computers, it seemed like this feature was removed.

I could be missing something, but I wasn't able to transfer MP3 files the way I used to. I figured, with the popularity in streaming and the company's motivation to have users pay for subscriptions or re-purchase songs specifically on Apple Music, this transfer feature was taken out.

If you want to transfer actual MP3 files on your iPhone, I'd recommend the VLC app that opa mentioned earlier in the thread. It works in a similar manner that the old iTunes system worked! I wish I had known about it sooner, but really glad to have figured it out!

[Ziggy]

Well really what I want to do is drag and drop (or copy and paste) which I find to be a lot easier for me than syncing. For example, on Android I can make a folder called "Music" on my phone and put whatever music files in there and play them with whatever music app on the phone. Can I not do this with iPhone?

[REPO Man]

Last iOS device I had was a second-hand first-gen iPod Touch and that definitely wasn't the case.

One thing I LOVE about Android devices is that dragging and dropping files is a thing.

Granted, after switching to YouTube Premium (which I switched to from Amazon Music Unlimited) I don't really keep music on my phone aside from a handful of offline downloads.

[marurun]

My car from 2015 has a CD player but you have to slide the screen down tog etc to the opening. I don’t think I’ve ever used a CD in the thing.

[Golgo 14]

I have SiriusXM subscription for streaming. They have a fairly cheap music only option that gives you 50+ music channels, though you don't get a few of the specialty channels that are focused on one artist. I paid for a year up front and I think it's something like 5 bucks a month. There's about ten channels I like in there and there aren't any ads on the music channels. I just like the feel of a real radio station with good, though not too intrusive djs. Old school radio barely exists anymore, so SiriusXM fills that gap.

Radio Paradise is listener supported through donations, though otherwise free and without ads. They have a handful of channels and I think they have djs on all of them. It's mostly middle-aged white people music, not that there's anything wrong with that.

Other streaming services I like are SomaFM and Radiooooo. SomaFM is another listener supported service without ads. No djs but the music is definitely curated by humans. SomaFM has about 30 stations, most of which are outside the mainstream. Secret Agent is probably my favorite.

Radiooooo is an amazing service that lets you select a decade and a place on the globe, and it'll play music from that time and place. If you ever want to hear 1930s Brazilian music, Radiooooo has you covered. The basic service is free and without ads, though I should probably pay the five bucks a month for an account with a few more features just to support them.

I've never tried Spotify for a few reasons, but it's not appealing to me. Doesn't it mostly play music based on your likes? That could get old quick. Even if you can overcome that, it's still robot radio, which I've been against ever since I saw that episode of WKRP in Cincinnati where a new station tries to poach Venus Flytrap. But I digress.

[Anapan]

I still prefer to have all music in file form. I absolutely cannot stand ads or low bitrate slush-sounding music. I also hate Radio. I don't know how my mom enjoys that mess.

My brother and I spend long road trips to and from jobs revising or adding to our collective music library, tho both of us have personal folders that won't be messed with. I spent a lot of time in 2022 replacing old files I ripped from CD and various old programs like Kazaa, AudioGalaxy and BearShare that were very high quality with better files I extracted off the paid services I subscribe to and official upgrades by buying them off Bandcamp and the like. Our new collection of ~1300 songs is nearly all legit now, and almost all is 320KB/s MP3 with a select few in FLAC.

Thanks to an Android APP I installed into his truck's deck we can easily delete songs that suck quickly off the MicroSD card.
Music Folder Player - Paid version has the Widgets that are necessary on the double-din deck to start and change music easily.

That being said, I pay for a high bandwidth VPN (ExpressVPN) and have an illegitimate paid account on Pandora since 2015 (I'm Canadian and that is not legal here)

Pandora is far beyond even a USA account on Spotify. The Thumbs-up Thumbs-down ability on a station you create and add variation to based on one specific song, artist, genre, or album is amazing. The first song you hear on a station might not be the song you picked, it will always be a song you like, and the ability to add mood now is incredible. Collectively my co-workers have found so many great songs and artists that we never knew.

Spotify is okay, but at least in Canada doesn't have a bunch of mainstream songs, and it's inability to thumbs-down a song and not play shitty songs like that song is a major problem. Everything you try to play on it is based on community-built playlists - the playlists are lacking, and it puts the burden on the listener to make your own playlist from their limited selection. So much work to listen to an album from an artist you like, even a paid account does not make listening easy.

YouTube is okay if you pay for premium, or use one of the Smart or ReVanced apps sideloaded onto your device to avoid ads, but mostly the songs are lower quality than the ones available off the streaming paid services (You can choose HQ encodes in the settings of all of them).

As far as the Amazon Echo in the kitchen goes, I use it to do weight and measurement conversions, and also play music while my hands are covered in food. She's hooked up to Amazon Music, Spotify, and a paid Skill My Media. The voice recognition sucks, but at least I can listen to that song. At least in Canada, a lot of artists opted out of Amazon Music and Spotify. With this skill, I can voice command my few playlists of files easily, or try to get the skill to play some other song off my hard drive.

Finally, gotta thank people who support archive.org by contributing. There are some songs that are not available in file form anywhere but there. I will buy CDs to upgrade my archive, but I really appreciate being able to extract them off an ISO or however I need immediately.

edit: @Ziggy Your mixtape is still in the parent's SUV, and when a screeching millennial autotuned banshee or a horribly annoying commercial with chainsaw noises or bad voice actor in the background comes on, I can just ask if "Ziggy's tape's still there", and the music is agreeable to us all.