I’m going insane. I cannot for the life of me find a suitable way to listen to music privately. I’m on iOS, and I don’t know whether to just stick to Apple Music or give up on music in general (I tried, TRIED to go local, but all the apps are shitty). Any way to listen to music and not have your data compromised? Should I just stick to Apple Music and hope that laws change (maybe something like EU’s DMA?)
Edit: Hey all! First of all, thank you so much for all the recommendations! I’ve discovered so many great apps and tools I didn’t even know existed (and it has also brought my hopes up for privacy in general). Even though it’s still not perfect, I’ve been using foobar2000 on iOS, downloading music I find (I’m still using Apple Music for discovery, but will probably stop when my subscription ends this month). For desktop I’m using HyperPipe, which although a little buggy at times is so awesome! One thing I do miss about this system is the lack of lyrics. Apple Music has such a beautiful UI when it comes with lyrics, but you can’t have it all when it comes to privacy it seems. Thanks for the amazing discussion! I’m so far loving Lemmy ;)
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I’ll be honest, the only way to listen to music privately is to download it. (And using an opensource music player)
There are Github repositories with CLI programs to download complete Spotify playlists with Youtube and also download their metadata.
there are also CDs and vinyl 🤷
something brilliant I’ve found with modern vinyl is a lot of them come with a download card so you can get lossless files.
now if they would just fucking advertise which ones that would be great.
Whoa, you can store music on CDs? That’ll save me a lot of bandwidth!
This. There was music before the internet.
I wrote a few scripts to automate this entire process for me:
Any opensource music players for iOS you recommend? I found Flacbox which seems alright (a little buggy but you can’t win them all, can you?)
I just use the Music app. With the privacy protections turned up and Apple Music disabled. All it does is ply my aac files without sending data back to Apple.
I’m not sure that’s totally true. The iOS ecosystem is very intertwined. It’s possible that the Music app isn’t sending data to Apple, but it is likely sharing it with whatever Apple calls the launcher, which likely shares it with Apple (or shares it with Siri or another app, which shares it with Apple).
I use a jellyfin server plus finamp for ios plus totally legal downloaded music that was 100% legally obtained.
+1 for Jellyfin with Finamp (or Fintunes). Also what I use and it’s fabulous.
I don’t think you should expect any privacy on an Apple device
Im on a Jailbroken iPhone with all Apple network requests blocked with AdGuard and no Appleid.
Any way you could share the guide you used?
How to Sideload apps, How to Jailbreak, Jailbreak Megathread. AdGuard Pro .ipa. My Blocklst Lists. The lists are Very aggressive, I suggest you to maintain a Whitelist. For getting apps without an Apple ID, check out some sources, repo’s and telegram channels Here.
Awesome! Thank you!
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Honestly, I’d trust a vanilla iPhone over that hacked together mess you’ve got going there.
You may be right if you are not as concerned about privacy and being able to not rely on the App Store for everything. I can install any app that is not in the App Store. Ex: new encryption laws come out like in the UK and all Matrix clients are removed from the App Store. I can still download them because I don’t rely on the App Store.
Do people not just download music anymore?
I’m 26, and don’t know anyone, myself included, who purchases and downloads music to any significant degree. Essentially everyone I know just uses streaming platforms.
Sounds terrible for privacy.
Respectfully, I think you may be drastically overestimating how much average people care about that.
Well, considering the community this discussion is in…
And, respectfully, the average person doesn’t seem to give much of a fuck about anything other their own base desires most of the time.
Sure. But the question you asked was “Do people not just download music anymore?”, and the answer to that question, which you seemed unaware of, is “Not really, no”.
Do enjoy your highly refined and elevated desires, O noble one.
Part of my job is traveling by air, so I got a $30ish sandisc mp3 player with a 200+gb sd card. I have a bunch of music and sometimes podcasts on there. Saves my phone battery, has zero adsl, and as a bonus it has fm radio for surfing the stations below as they fade in and out every minute or so.
Wow, they got your generation good. I’m over here listening to flac files and mp3s I ripped in 2003.
He didn’t say anything about purchasing…
to be fair, to buy albums off sites like bandcamp, cutting out greedy multinational media conglomerates and give the money to the ppl actually working on it (yeah, i know, fees, welcome to distribution) and getting basically every (losslees/hr) codec in return for “name your price”-conditions makes it questionable to pirate some indie album to save like three bucks.
This is always surprising to me. I can understand streaming video due to their high file sizes, but audio (even FLACs) is a lot smaller in general. The only reason I use spotify sometimes is to discover new stuff.
Have you considered Funk Whale, the Spotify of the Fediverse?
Yeah. Buy it directly from the artist then throw it all into a self hosted service like plex or jellyfin.
If you only need music streaming, then a service like Navidrome may be better.
Fair enough. Ive never used navidrome
There’s also navidrome, if you only want to stream music.
Have a copy of all your music and use syncthing if apple allows it that is. Otherwise get a deegoogled android running grapheneOS
Getting/syncing music isn’t really a major problem for me, a decent audio player (with minimal features such as a queue and a decent UI) is what I’m trying to find.
VLC?
I feel like all the answers are so far beyond what I do. Basically VPN to Invidio.us, record with Audio Hijack, put on my phone, and play on VLC. Curious what all the elite privateers think?
Why vpn you invidio.us? Why not directly? Invidio.us acts as the middleman to yt anyway, right?
E: autocorrect correction.
@01189998819991197253 @ForestOrca the gateway to the middleman to yt
but if you don’t trust the instance, then you vpn to it :undefined:You’re right. I assumed trust in the instance, but should never assume that. Of course, by using a vpn, you’re assuming it is trustworthy. I guess you gotta trust someone somewhere, at least enough to hop to the next stone.
Why record with an app? Some invidious insurances allow downloading. There’s a drop-down menu on the video page.
If you want something on Android, check out ViMusic. It uses YouTube Music as a back-end and can recommend stuff based on what you listen. It also supports offline playback. On desktop, you can use Hyperpipe. It also uses YouTube Music as its back-end.
If you want ultimate privacy, then download your favorite songs and use VLC or self host them and stream it from there.
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If you want a streaming service, you could try HyperPipe. It’s an alternative frontend to YT Music. There’s also BeatBump, but it doesn’t really work.
If you wanted to go local (which I recommend), have you tried foobar2000? It’s proprietary, but I trust it and it does its job very well. No ads, no data collection at all, and it plays just about every audio format you’ll normally come across (apart from MIDI files). You can also customise it with skins, sync over FTP, and play internet radio streams.
First of all, I love this thread as I keep finding new stuff I’ve never heard about. HyperPipe is awesome and it eases my anxiety that there are still private options for music. For foobar, the iOS app is pretty snappy, though it’s missing a queue feature. A feature as simple as that is kind of a deal breaker for me. Any hope that there’ll be future updates to the iOS app?
MP3 files that you own. They can never take them away from you, and you don’t have to pay every month for them.
Guess I’ll be the one to ask. Why do you want music privacy?
Yea of all the things to keep private, my music listening habits isn’t one of them. Tbh the algorithms give me good recommendations
The companies that aggregate data and find patterns in them can probably predict a lot about you from your music listening habits, when they correlate it with data about other people, or even about yourself. The power of profiling isn’t in any specific data but in the patterns that emerge when you gather a lot of diverse data about a lot of people.
Listening habits will tell them about your routine, including where you are, when, and when you have time to listen to music (so, therefore, when you don’t). If you don’t ever listen to music between 8pm and 10pm, for example, it may indicate that you have children to put to bed. If you listen mostly between 12am and 5am it may indicate that you work a nightshift. If you listen between 8 and 9 and again between 5 and 6, you’re probably a commuter. When you listen on a computer and when on mobile will tell them something too. And these are only the obvious patterns that I can think of off the top of my head. AI systems running on big data are designed to find patterns humans don’t notice.
And of course the styles of music you listen to will be readily correlated with demographic profiles. When you feed data into AI systems designed to find patterns people can’t spot, you’ll find the most unlikely data reveals things about people that they’d never imagine you could know.
Given this, it’s entirely possible that your music listening telemetry could eventually influence your credit score, your insurance premiums, your qualification for security clearances or your employability. You don’t know where the data ends up, or with what other data it’s correlated. This is why it’s desirable in general to keep data private if it’s not needed to provide the service.
You assume to know what kind of information is leaking when you use these apps.
How did you come to have these proprietary information?Unless you have proof otherwise - I’m going to assume that they have access to: My location, my ip, typing speed and common spelling mistakes, IMEI identifiers , installed social media apps…
Now all it takes to make an online profile about you is just one more app or website that leaks the same kind of information
I still buy CDs. And back then up to play in my truck. And rip them.
I still think OWNING media is a good idea. No privacy issues at all.
Most of the stuff I listen to isn’t mainstream and the band are on Bandcamp. It’s great being able to buy the FLAC version right away.
https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/bandcamp-fridays-update
it’s worth noting that the first friday of each month they usually forgo their cut so more money goes to the artists.
Always this, never let physical copies die. They can’t revoke shit legally bought and personally archived
Vinyl has gotten so big at this point (and is also extremely profitable relative to streaming), that it’s not in any danger at all.
Vinyl is damn expensive.
Hence it being extremely profitable.
You’re not wrong.
I self host Ampache and have Sublime Music on my desktop and Substreamer on my Android device.
You know you can use the Apple Music app for local files right?
Setup a Koel instance at a host of your choice. Upload your music to it and stream from that. See https://koel.dev/
This looks really promising, thanks!
