Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Self-host Navidrome. Choose any of the clients that you like. Pirate stuff from big bands, buy stuff from smaller bands.
Cons: You'd have to deal with storage and hosting and access from outside your house e.g. with Tailscale. You'd also have to tag incorrectly tagged songs (surprisingly common issue, sometimes pirates tag stuff better than the bands themselves)
Adding Tempo as a mobile app.
Download it via torrent, thats your best option. It takes time to build up a sizable catalog but it helps you can download entire acts discographies one fortuitous swoop here and there
Paying is basically antithetical to privacy, I only do it for the essentials or what i cant otherwise obtain freely
I will usually buy vinyl or cds for artists that I listen to a lot. It has the additional benefit of giving you a hard copy of the data. But yeah, this is unfortunately the way.
Yeah, like support underdogs but be realistic, you cant pay for everything and everyone unless you're unusally well-resourced so respect your own constraints where they exist.
And thats just music, are you planning on remaining internally consistent and limiting the breadth of access you could otherwise have across all the modalities like TV shows, movies, books, courses, audiobooks, etc??
Your consumption does not hurt them, the stuff you would pay for anyway just do that but i think i can live with myself for downloading Pink Flloyd's discog or the complete cartoon series from childhood lol
For sure. Most of my money goes to local artists. If I want to support a music artist, I will usually see them in concert and/or purchase merch. But Ticketmaster is making that difficult these days. I had to have this discussion with my mom regarding amazon kindle.
"AI companies are stealing everything anyway. Get your media while you can, because they don't want it to exist anymore."
I found a comfortable way to listen to music without torrenting. It relies heavily on a private company though, Bandcamp.
I spend $20 a month in albums and other than that listen to their shows and recommendations. I can’t pay for everything so I set a cap per month. I decided not to be 100% in control of what I listen to by listening to their radio shows (usually featuring an interview with an artist).
I’m slowly growing my private music library. Wish I had a friend or two to help. I’m happy to be supporting artists.
For me its a spectrum, making my own judgment for each piece of media.
Copyright laws in the US have changed a lot over the last century, largely due to regulatory capture. The older versions of copyright law are mostly around 14-28 years after creation and those seem fair to me. So I don't feel bad about anything >30 years old.
Another factor is the sliding spectrum between art as an altruistic creative experience versus art as a capitalist product created by gigantic corporations. Heavily monetized art tends to be stuff I enjoy less anyways so this kind of filters itself out. Its all formulaic and trend-chasing, largely the made by the same small group of people and rebranded with different faces. If I do ever want big-budget, mainstream content I don't feel bad about not paying for it.
Sometimes its about convenience. There are a handful of creators still on YouTube that I like, and one of these days I want to get around to setting up yt-dlp and adding their channels to my Jellyfin to get around all the terrible ads of the platform, but I'll probably buy some merch or throw them some money on Patreon or whatever to try to compensate for it. I also prefer to buy CD's and merch from bands at their live shows where a higher % of the proceeds goes to the artist.
Soulseek is my goto
Server (navidrome) + client (feishin, symphonium) + music (soulseek, bandcamp, ripping your old cds) + remote access (tailscale or something else if you're savvy).
Absolutely Feishin for Navidrome behind tailscale. Its so good. Slskd for soulseek with Soularr to auto grab music is awesome also.
Listenbrainz requires you to make what you listen to public as it is part of the open source project. If that is something you are worried about I think there are alternatives to explo that use last.fm but that is closed source as far as I know.
As others have said, buy stuff from small bands on band camp or at shows or something and pirate from whoever you see fit.
EDIT: I also should have noted, this is a self hosted setup that requires a server to be online unless you download your tracks to your client device. If you want a single device alternative, I am not personally sure what to recommend.
Don’t push yourself to switch from ios. It’s extremely unlikely you need to go to graphene to get the kind of privacy you need and familiarity with the system and how you can protect yourself in it is arguably more important.
I have a local music library.
I once uploaded my entire connection of music (ripped from my own CDs or grabbed over the decades) to Google Music, but we know where that went. So I used Amazon Music for a few years, until the service went to shit.
Unwanted tracks in my personal playlists; songs playing out of order; ads despite paying a subscription fee to listen to music I already own.
The frustration with the entire copyright and, "rights holders" scene led me to turn away from buying anything but physical media at local music ships.
I have never used the arr tools, but if I was starting from scratch, I probably would. For now, when I want a few new tracks, I use yt-dlp or fire up jackett and find it.
Eta: frustrations
Op answer the following:
How do you usually listen to music? Not “I put on my headphones, fire up Winamp and go” but “I use curated playlists from Spotify” or “i listen to whole albums on youtube”.
What does private mean to you? What do you consider not private?
Although I would appreciate recommendation feed that's private I know that's impossible.
I basically download songs anytime I get a recommendation or hear it somewhere. I usually listen for a while or add to a playlist. Very simple use case.
Private means I know and things I choose know what I listen to and others don't. I would also preferably like ownership of my music. I would consider not private something that uses my data for anything except necessities(no algo no selling)
I know this sounds stupid and pedantic, but what do you mean by ownership?
Where or how do you download?
E: recommendation isn’t off the table, you’ll just have to go about it in an unconventional way.
Ownership as in its a file on my device, no DRM or whatever shit people have on files nowadays.
I download either bandcamp or sometimes from yt music.
I've been enjoying using Finamp for my Jellyfin server, although you will need a proxy if you want to use it outside of your home network. I'm paying $7 a month (it used to be $5 😭) for a VPS that's running Pangolin tunneled to my home server running Jellyfin. It's basically my own private Spotify/Netflix/Audible. There are also free options like Nginx for the proxy.
Pros:
Cons:
If you wanna save a little cash there’s a website called lowendbox that aggregates cheap vps deals. I try to keep mine under 10/11 bucks a year.
Dont really need a proxy for remote access. Tailscale is better and very secure and easy to setup.
Personally I prefer being able to just give someone a link without getting them to download and use a VPN. That's why I went with Pangolin since it essentially functions as both.
What is Pangolin? My searxng just shows results for the animal.
Might have to type "Pangolin software" but it essentially functions as a reverse proxy as well as a VPN to hide your home network IP when paired with a VPS.
If yt-dlp/Newpipe still works over a VPN then Spotube with ListenBrainz plugin is an option, but it's extremely buggy and they're working on a rewrite afaik. Or use another YT Music client, or download your music and use an offline player. If you have the time and resources to self-host that's also an option of course.
I’m willing to pay just not on agregious amount of money.
Me too. I wanna support the artists I like.
I've used Bandcamp before. I was able to sign up anonymously and use a masked credit card to pay for music. Sure I could pirate it. But I feel like that's a dick move, esp for smaller bands I like a lot.
Playing music privately, that's the trivial part! A million ways to do that, without sending any info to anyone, either at home or on the go.
The real problem is getting the music
Is have a Spotify playlist of some 7000+ songs I want to have but finding each one individually is a nightmare. Are there ways to just put the list into some arr system and have it automatically torrented or pulled from Usenet or something like that?
Lidarr with Soularr for Slskd(Soulseek)
I use Navidrome with Feishin on GNU/Linux and it works well. Furthermore, you can also check out Soulseek (Nicotine+ on GNU/Linux).
Download the shit I want, stick it on a USB key and plug it into my car. The old magics.
If you're talking about ambient music then you have things like Navidrome or Jellyfin that can stream music throughout your house.
Ad hoc, on device streaming: I use PipePipe, choose a YT music playlist and just...play in radio mode. There are better options (like InnerTune) but those tend to crap out when YT futzes with their back end / aren't updated as frequently as PipePipe.
I also have an iRiver MP3 player (about size of a box of matches) that's awesome.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Jellyfin+SoulSeek does a great job for me. Absolutely free.
Hugston Media Pro, comes with thousands tv and radio channels worldwide (with bookmarks), updated newsfeed (minute/hour/day), local music player for your downloaded songs/videos.
If enough users are interested I can make it opensource :)
I am planning to get a dedicated audio player at some point this year. An modded iPod classic 5th or 6th gen with Rockbox. It's offline, and you get so much more flexibility once you mod it, you can't really go wrong. It's a bit of an upfront cost though but a worthy investment.
The android app I use for music is Musicolet. It's offline and has a lot of really nice customization options. Also free.