Ask Lemmy

I mostly eat soup, or do you drink it?

Is serial a soup? No, its a port.

But why??

Files downloaded from Soulseek and Bandcamp. Supplemented by Metrolist.

flac files + navidrome + tempo app on mobile / supersonic on desktop

Used Spotify until recently, but cancelled my premium subscription after the recent price hike as well as the increasingly prevalent AI content. I'm now trying to build a local library of mp3 files. Not sure if I won't resubscribe to Spotify at some point though, as I find music dicovery quite difficult without it.

A mix of digital (bandcamp/7digital/pulled from CD - 1,132 albums currently) and physical media like records and CDs. Most of it from my ipod or from my computer which is hooked up to my hifi.

Favorite this month? Lots of Dropkick Murphys, Anciients, and Illumina A.D.

I generally use my ears to listen to music.

Seriously though, between Orpheus, Soulseek, and Bancamp I have a large library and I paid for a Plex pass years ago, so I use Plexamp on mobile and PC. Pretty pleased with it, and it even has scrobbling support for last.fm and support in Maloja+Multi-scrobbler.

Usually with my ears.

CD's at Thrift Stores.

Seeker for everything else.

Large commercial Artists Music is downloaded illegally in various ways. Smaller Artists Music I buy via Bandcamp, Quboz or wherever else they offer it.

All Music is stored as Mp3 and Flac in a Filen Cloud from where I pull selected Titels and Albums onto my phone and into a Musicolet Playlist.

Current musical obession: Turkish Psychedelic Jazz

Streaming mostly, with a little vinyl now and then. A little bit of radio but even that's usually streaming over the internet.

Actually, now that I think of it I have a tape I need to run through another tape player to confirm whether the tape is broken, or my tape player is. Bought a Sons of Butcher demo with tracks I haven't seen elsewhere yet (have heard live) at a show a while back, played successfully once and now it doesn't. But I only have one of those kinda shitty vinyl+tape+aux+radio+bluetooth players you see on Amazon around christmas, so it's even odds which is busted.

Vinyl and cds. Mostly vinyl. I do stream albums I consider buying in physical form, just to check out if the expense is worth it to me.

I download the song once using yt-dlp, then I use Musicbrainz Picard to fetch song metadata like author, cover, title, year etc... Then I listen 100% offline in any mp3 player app.

I send my songs encrypted to pCloud free tier (gpg) just to keep a backup somewhere else.

In other words, not a single online service on earth know what I'm listening to.

With my ears

I've been collecting vinyl for close to 20 years now. I didn't mean to but bands and labels were just trying to get rid of them in the mid 2000s so I got a dozen or so free records when preordering CDs. About half of them were not on any other format at the time so I got a record player.

So I mostly listen on that when at home or use volumio as a multi room playback system to stream off qobuz or from a local library on my NAS. I did get into cassettes during the pandemic and do find them rather entertaining.

Favorite band is easy, its Guided by Voices. As for why I can't really say except that they rock. You have to be able to see the brilliant uncut pop gems through the lofi tape hiss. Pretty much all their best stuff sounds like a first take demo tape.

Cassettes! And bandcamp

I download from soulseek, then put it in ~~iTunes~~ Apple Music and sync it to my phone

Download via newpipe/ tubular, buy used CDs. I occasionally also use https://www.music-map.com/ to discover new artists.
Dont really have a favorite artist, but im currently listening to a lot of irie revoltes just because i went to a concert of them semi-recently

Apple Music. If I like it I’ll buy it from places like bandcamp, or acquire it if I can’t buy it.

Mostly stuff I bought from Bandcamp. It's drm free, but for convenience I usually let it stream from the app.

I also have a bunch of mp3s from older purchases I listen to sometimes, but I don't have a media server set up so that's mostly limited to my desktop.

Sometimes I'll pull up a specific track on YouTube, but that's mostly for "do you remember this song?" stuff. Adblock and the "resume playback from lock screen" make it bearable.

Never streaming or radio. I like to choose what I want, and want uninterrupted play (not reliant on internet), when I want, and often prefer stuff where all or most of the album is good, so I listen mostly in order and almost never shuffle.

Mostly mp3's on whatever works for the device. Phone mp3's, USB for game console and car. Sometimes vinyl. Even record the vinyl's sometimes so I can play the vinyl mix anywhere since vinyl's tend to be mixed differently.

I stream FLAC on Qobuz. Sometimes I listen to CDs. My favourite band is Rush, I love Neil Peart's lyrics along with how great the three of them are at their respective instruments.

A mixture of hard-drive storage and streaming.

Tidal, though I've quit payments so when this month runs out I'll switch to try out Qobuz. Before that I was on Spotify since it was invite-only until a few years ago when I had enough of the CEO Daniel Ek complete disrespect for artists that make him a billionaire. Before that I was sailing the seas for many years. Before that I bought CDs. Before that I bought LPs.

I listen on Deezer. I know, streaming is awful for the musicians but otherwise I would just pirate songs + I freeload on my friends family plan.

Currently I'm obsessing these artists:

• Femtanyl (KATAMARI)
• STOMACH BOOK (Fukouna Girl, Bambi)
• Danny Brown (Copycats, The End)
• FEM&M (Beep Beep Beep)
• Joey & Valence (DROP!!, BUST DOWN)

No streaming. DAP loaded with mp3/flac/m4a/opus from ripped CDs and downloads then I make a few playlists or set random play on the while library.

Generally I stream music using Qobuz because at least its more ethical than Spotify AFAIK, paying their artists better rates and not (yet) bricking their physical products (Car Thing).

I'll otherwise download music using spotdl and my old Spotify playlists, but I don't enjoy pirating myself. I mainly do this for players without internet like my MP3 player and my car's head unit that only works with iPods or mass storage.

I've been getting into records recently but this is a novelty thing for me.

vinyl

Spotify + FLACs ripped from CDs and Bandcamp + Vinyls.

A mix between MP3s, FLACs, and streaming through FOSS frontends to YouTube Music.

Recently bought a DAP (Digital Audio Player) and started downloading to distance myself from Spotify’s increasingly intrusive push of AI-riddled music and podcasts. Large commercial artists are torrented, while smaller bands’ music off of bandcamp and qobuz.

I still have my Spotify account to reference songs that I’ve bookmarked, but since I ended my subscription I no longer use it frequently enough to discover new music as I detest ads. Now I discover new music throughs combination of falling down youtube rabbit holes, and browsing various lemmy communities, /c/eternalplaylist@crazypeople.online (I forget how to link communities. I’m also considering checking out last.fm and other music services like that.

Bands I've been enjoying lately:

• Magdalena Bay
• Night Tapes
• Feng Suave
• Rikas
• The Beths
• The Marias
• Djo

I'm also looking forward to purchasing the new Paper Kites album when it releases in January. :)

CDs I bought, the massive trove of albums I've ripped from friends and library CDs since around 1997 and everything dl'd from Spotify and more recently Tidal (switched not only because ethics and quality - mostly because spotify-dl started breaking up :o) now lives on my home server, backs up once a week and is available to grooving to via Jellyfin over the Net. So much debt of gratitude to Jellyfin for enabling this.

At home I'll plug the phone into a USB Toslink box and play lossless over the speakers; in the car over Bluetooth into car stereo (which has seen a little bespoke work). Headphones I haven't bought into, I'd rather be in the moment with all senses when out and about. Same goes for motorcycle riding, music is too much of a distraction.

New music comes along by following Pitchfork's album reviews. They are pushed out to RSS so that I browse them over morning coffee.

There is no such thing as a favourite band when one really listens to music. I get kicks from still discovering new stuff at a ripe age. One newish band that blew my mind is black midi.

Spotify
Jellyfin
Digitized CDs (in Jellyfin)
Youtube

In that order.

These days, I avoid Spotify, or anything else with their ridiculous advertisements. I used to pay for Spotify but they charge so much for paying so little to the artists that I didn't want to support them anymore. Not to mention that I truly dislike this algorithmic world we live in, where things are "recommended" for me, but it's part of an endless conveyer belt of things being sent my way when I didn't ask for it.

I'm working on getting a record player so I can just intentionally play the music I want. I also like the physicality of it. It feels easier to dive into the artist's vision of the album as a full experience.

I have an assorted collection of CD rips, digital downloads and files acquired through ahem other means. At home I have a NAS which keeps those files (99% of them are 44.1/16 FLACs, the rest are also FLACs in other resolutions/bit depths). On my own computer I listen to those files through foobar2000 and on my work one (since it's a bit more limited in what I can install) I use Navidrome and its web player. Hadware-wise I have an ADI-2 DAC FS that powers either an HD 600 or a pair of HS8 speakers. I don't do any mixing/mastering, but I've grown to like neutral-leaning sound. On the go I rely on the same Navidrome instance backing Symfonium running on an Android phone hooked up to a Retro Nano and IE-200. For a very long time I was avoiding Bluetooth, but turns out that this combo, at least with my previous phone, sounds significantly better than the same IEMs hooked directly to the headphone out of the phone (and running a wired DAC was a pain because it was constantly dropping out); my current phone doesn't have a headphone out at all, and generally, even if there's a quality loss over Bluetooth, it would be negligeable in the city noise I usually have to listen in, plus it's cumbersome having a cable attached to my phone when I'm trying to do other stuff with it.

I gave up the idea of having everything offline on the go (although it still is at home); it's not feasible to have to look for a phone with 1 TB of storage, and with the current one I can set up favourites so that at least a section of my library is cached on the phone and not relying on an Internet connection. Other than that it's nice to not rely on any external services or subscriptions - everything is my own equipment managed by me.

As for the CDs I have, they're mostly bought at shows, so hopefully a big chunk of the money goes directly to the artists; I also buy T-shirts and other merch. I also like Bandcamp, especially on Bandcamp Fridays since all the money goes to the artists, but something tells me that they've been trying to compensate through shipping rates - shipping a t-shirt and a CD shouldn't cost more than parts for a complete bike (speaking from experience).

Music-wise, I can't name one single band, but lately I've been into New Model Army (saw them live - they were brilliant), Converge (stoked about the upcoming album), All Them Witches, Tragedy, Aesop Rock.

Currently rip my CDs and then listen on my phone/PC as digital music. I also pirate music from artist I find problematic to avoid supporting them, and pirate old music I used to listen to which I plan to purchase later (not really in the position to buy all the music I've listened for free in my whole life, plus I feel like I've streamed them enough to support them, so I don't feel that guilty). My partner has vinyl records, so sometimes I listen to that, too. Also the ocassional concert when I can afford it, of course, I need that sweet live music.

My current favorite band... Probably Twenty One Pilots? I don't listen to a lot of bands lol, I mostly listen to solo artists, in which case my favorite artist is by far Ren.

I like Twenty One Pilots because they're like everything teen me would've loved. Specially a fan of Self Titled / NPI era. Raw garage-tier songs about your problems with God, and faith overall? Sign me tf in, I've had quite the history with religion.

And I like Ren because of his hard-to-label music style from song to song, while so very clearly being a Ren song, with all of his theatrics, lyricism, life struggles, cynisism, and a splash of religion. I've been following him for a while and it's amazing to see so far he's come.

Speaking of Ren and Twenty One Pilots... They're playing at a festival together next year (REN BARELY PLAYS LIVE)... And I can't fucking attend because it's in another continent. fuck me.

Mostly Spotify, almost 80000 minutes listened this year. Also YouTube premium for full recorded sets, and music on an external drive for content not on Spotify.

Radiohead and Carbon Based Lifeforms are my favorite bands.

I would like to listen in an armchair to cd or vinyl through a modest, though still good, stereo speaker system. But my life doesn’t include space or time for any of that.

So - almost 100% streaming, through earbuds, the car speakers, and/or HomePod. There was a time I was on Oink and then What - what put Apple Music to shame. The staff picks were eclectic and amazing and I learned a lot about new to me music styles.

I don’t like listening to music in the background in general, but dance/electronic music is good for background distraction for workouts and focus. But my preference is for classical music - Bach, Beethoven, etc. - depends on my mood. Sometimes I’m in the mood for Queen or Pink Floyd. I’m never in the mood for pop.

Anymore there are a few songs on yt that I listen to that I haven't downloaded. Otherwise it's mostly all local files on my devices. File type varies.

Otherwise, I have a bunch of CDs that I can either play using my desktop or battery hog of an old Discman. Pros for desktop is I have access to my higher quality bluetooth headphones and can move and do other things whole listening. Pros for the CD player is I have an old pair of 90s in ear Sony headphones that came with it.

Couldn't tell you a particular group for a favorite band right now since I've been listening to a fair bit of 90s ( basically all my CDs ) when it comes to most of the band music I've been listening to.