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Comment by snvzz | Hacker News Reader

So it takes the same space, without being equally useful?

These streaming services are even worse than I thought they'd be.

No way I'm ever giving up my local lossless audio collection.

Your audio collection, which obviously has millions of artists so you can literally listen to anything in the world as soon as you feel like it, with zero seconds of waiting time, and also you can get recommendations of new things to listen to, yeah

I'm tired of people who pretend they don't understand the advantages of a solution. Spotify has revolutionized the way I listen to music and discover new stuff. And I used to have a decent lossless collection I listened to on a FLAC supporting Cowon player. But it's so much better now.

Agreed. A few years back I lost my entire collection, due to a hardware malfunction and a slightly careless backup policy. But even though it was full of potentially great music I had never heard yet, I tended to stick with the familiar.

Since I'm on Spotify, the amount of new music I'm discovering is almost overwhelming. It's hard to keep up with my check playlist, I keep finding interesting new artists through song radio. It's also excellent for finding music in languages I do not speak or can even read. Trying to Google in Cyrillic was a pita.

> So it takes the same space, without being equally useful?

Can you elaborate "equally useful"? The only problem I could see is that you can't play them anywhere but in the app. So what? If you were to copy them around (and most likely share with other people for free) you are violating their ToS (and other legal aspects) anyway.

> No way I'm ever giving up my local lossless audio collection.

Good news: You don't have to. Streaming services are called "streaming" services for a reason. You are apparently not the target audience and that's completely fine.

What do you expect? A streaming service that gives you an "Export/Save as..." feature?

FYI, these exist. They are called DJ pools. (Eg: https://www.zipdj.com) Cost is roughly $35/month

In addition, DJ pools often contain music and extended club mix friendly edits of songs.

Radio tracks that might start off with just vocals might have a "extended club mix" which has a clean 16/32/48 bars of instrumentals before the vocal kicks in. The same for the outro.

There is a place for both. I have most of my favorite albums in FLAC for listening on my home receiver with decent speakers. But I'm not even going to bother with buying every album/song I want to listen to in the car, on mobile, in the office etc. Spotify is great for that. 10-15 euro/month and I have access to a huge collection of songs in good enough quality that syncs playlist across all my devices.

to play devil's advocate, what happens when your lossless audio files (which take up a fair amount of space) no longer all fit on your mobile device? Do you have software to rotate them out? What about when you want to listen to a song that isn't local anymore? Sounds like you need to invent streaming with caching

I have jellyfin[0] installed on my home server, then use finamp[1] on my iphone to listen on the go via streaming and usually download just the playlists to the device, which eventually get rotated.

[0] - https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin

[1] - https://github.com/UnicornsOnLSD/finamp

Kodi+yatse over vpn is an amazingly good and easy to setup Spotify+Netflix for your own collection.

Stream or Download albums/movies from your home server to your phone from anywhere.

Or just go old school, and use something like Icecast from your home server.

Years ago, I used to have a MPD + Icecast setup that streamed audio to my phone over OpenVPN, and it worked flawlessly.

>what happens when your lossless audio files (which take up a fair amount of space) no longer all fit on your mobile device?

A non-issue. I don't take music with me, or listen to music on the go. I'm not glued to a phone's screen either.

Then you're an edge case, which is absolutely fine but you're not Spotify's core audience.

How much of that collection did you pay for?

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