this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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Personally I could never get into the whole Spotify and Pandora thing. I want to listen to what I want to listen to and when I want to listen to it, without ridiculous restrictions and rules. YouTube has honestly been the far better choice for music for me.
Having a collection of music in files that I own has been my go-to for years. Currently VLC says I have 701 hours of music in files on my phone. That's only 29.2 days worth.
Man, I had around 10 gigs of vintage mp3s that is created since the days of Limewire/Napster. Uploaded it all to Google Music and lost track of the external I'd had the collection stored on. Whatever, it's all in the cloud now.
Then it wasn't.
I really, Really, need to back up all of my Gdocs, just in case that service ceases to be.
(I wonder if ancient crunchy low bitrate mp3s will be an aesthetic, the way that dusty vinyl or worn out tapes are?)
https://wildergardenaudio.com/maim/
You might want to check music.youtube.com, I still have my (GMusic) uploaded collection available there, I cannot upload new, but what was there still is. Just mentioning it in case you are still looking for your music.
That said, yes, downloading (pirating or not) and setting a home music server seems to be the best option.
It's not necessarily your music though, it's the closest that they found in their library sometimes. I have tons of tracks that I uploaded the explicit copy of to gmusic but my library downloads only had the censored/radio version.
Found that out the hard way after a drive crash a few years back. Have spent a bit of time reacquiring the stuff I cared about.
Wow! You are right, I completely forgot about that. You can listen to your music still, but it is true that is not a good way for rebuilding your collection 😟
That's why I have it uploaded to a cloud service but I have the entire collection backed up on my phone, 3 computers and a few miscellaneous SD cards.
I used to do that and I do still have a lot of music from that time on my computer, but somewhere along the line I stopped downloading music and just started listening to it on YouTube whenever I thought of something in particular.
It's mostly the discovery aspect, it's easy to find new and emerging artists through these services, and they make playing that music very convenient. YouTube does have some of it with YouTube music but I've not found the algorithm to be as good as Spotify or Tidal
I used to use and praise Spotify and their algorithm, but I was starting to find that it would insist on playing the same 20 or 50 songs regardless of the playlist I was trying to generate music suggestions from. I read a rumor somewhere that it was a way to decrease the load on their servers and rely more on the cached songs already on the device, and got sick of that enough to switch to Pandora after over 10 years of Spotify
I recommend looking at song mixes over the daily mixes, that's what I use on tidal too and it's a lot better at mixing things up
Same for me, I got tired of the same artists being played over and over. I've switched to Deezer who does a much better job. I will probably switch to Qobuz soon.
I tried Tidal, and now I'm on Pandora. The 'radio' feature of Pandora more closely matches the way I want to listen to music (I feel like playing this, stay in this mood, but vary the artists), but I'm disappointed by the android app. I should also try Qobuz, maybe even Deezer, but the real pain point is that I have literally thousands of playlists on Spotify. I can pay TuneMyMusic again, I guess
I had no trouble transferring my playlists to Deezer, but I only had dozens of them.
What issues are you having with the mobile app?
They're not issues so much as nit-picks.
On the now playing screen, I try to swipe the album image to skip (like Spotify) but it doesn't. Yes, the skip button is right there, but when driving it's needlessly distracting to have to find the small button.
There's no obvious way to see your play history when it's on auto play or radio.
You can start a station from a single song, and you can add song variety to a single-song station, and you can let a playlist end and it will autoplay songs, but you can't create a station from a playlist directly. These seem like the same function but are treated differently.
You can 'collect' or '👍' a song from radio/autoplay, and it's implied that it influences the station to do the latter, but all the 👍 songs go to their own playlist and sometimes a 'songs you liked from this station' playlist separate from the station and sometimes in the station page. It can unintuitive.
There's no API so there's no way for TuneMyMusic to import my playlists from Spotify.
Adding a song to a playlist often fails the first time, I can mash it but it doesn't go, but if I back out and add it again it works.
Some of these can be chalked up to user error, I haven't gotten used to the paradigm change, but the app still feels rigid and "less polished". Like I said, nitpicks.
You can import your liked songs fyi but yeah I didn't see anything about playlists or liked artists
Pandora is sadly not available in NL and if I saw it correctly Pandora is also America which does mean that it will turn to shit somewhere in the future.