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rot256 5 hours ago [-]
Spotify is, without doubt, the worst piece of software that I still use on a daily basis. It's incredibly buggy, incredibly slow, and the UI has so many "usability inconsistencies".
I find the Android app particularly bad, just a couple of examples:
- Under a playlist you get a list of suggested songs, the UI element looks like a "regular song", but unlike every other "song" element the user has been trained to recognize, the "swipe right to queue" does not apply to these elements. For some reason.
- When you don't have connectivity, e.g. you walk into a Faraday cage, then the
search tries to reach the internet and won't show you results before it either: 1) does so, 2) times out. Which means you can't browse your local library before some websocket times out. Just show me the local results first?
NothingAboutAny 2 hours ago [-]
It truly has been one of the worst UX experiences and poorly made apps that ever made it to mainstream.
I remember a decade or so ago there being a bunch of buzz about them in software dev because they were a microservice node.js/react stack or something with each UI element or portion of back-end having a separate dev team.
I can vividly remember thinking "oh that's probably why when I change song sometimes the album art doesn't update."
they're living proof your product doesn't even need to be that good you just need to be first to market and not really piss anyone off.
leoedin 1 hours ago [-]
I worked for a startup in 2019 which was really pushing the "Spotify model" of team structure. Apparently it's all about self-organising teams and having no leadership. The fact the technology output of the Spotify model - the Spotify app - seemed to be kind of crap didn't seem to matter. I think the main output of the Spotify team structure was blog posts promoting the Spotify team structure.
voncheese 1 hours ago [-]
Totally agree. They also have some stickiness going for them (at least for me). Now that I've organized my music in Spotify and have my habits in place that deal with the crummy UX, I've gotten numb to the poor UX.
Case in point, I make a daily playlist for running and that UX is frequently changing and often for the worse, but I deal with it because it's a habit that costs me a few seconds maybe a minute per day. The cost of switching to a new thing just feels daunting so I stay.
I also am guilty of enjoying the wrapped summaries at the end of the year :)
cosmic_cheese 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah last I knew the Spotify desktop app loads many dependencies in triplicate or more because each pane is its own independent iframe universe, all so the engineering teams don’t need to talk to each other and they can A/B test incessantly. Inefficient madness.
tormeh 5 hours ago [-]
It's a music player, and it's way too heavy for what it does. Well, it does a lot it doesn't need to, too. Uses 1.5GB of RAM on my laptop atm. Since I only have 16GB on my work laptop that's noticeable. I'd love it if Spotify AB could replace its client with a native Rust one, although using an immediate-mode GUI library like fastpotify does might not be the best option...
Is there any music streaming service with fast native cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows, Android) clients? Because I'd switch. Feel like Spotify's recommendations have taken a nosedive lately, so that wouldn't hold me back too much.
toofy 3 hours ago [-]
> Is there any music streaming service with fast native cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows, Android) clients? Because I'd switch.
i use apple music. love it way more than spotify. i originally got it because their descriptions of albums and their playlists are done by actual music nerds. i use the website on linux since it’s my daily/work driver and their app on my phone and macbook when i use it. the apple music app was fine on windows before i switched to linux entirely. definitely leagues better than itunes was.
have the family plan and i never hear complaints from the family members who use it on android.
i hated how spotify would just remove tracks after id spend time making a playlist and suddenly it would just be gone, like not greyed out, just gone. so irritating.
in terms recommendations, apple is a definitely far better than spotify, but it’s still nothing compared to music store nerds, college radio, or friends. recommendation algorithms from every platform are trash and just can’t compete with other people, at all. go to your local record store, look through the employee recommendations or just talk to them, most of them are working in a music store because they love music (its not for the money lol) and then buy the vinyl, you’ll thank yourself later.
esskay 1 hours ago [-]
Apple music still gets a bit of a bad rap, the first iteration of the desktop and mobile apps for it were god awful. And if you lived outside of the west coast of the US, buffering was a noticable issue as they rather stupidly centralised all streaming out of one location in California for a long time. If you hit skip a handful of times from a UK/EU machine for example that was it, game over, apps locked up and you've gotta force quit.
It's way better now, and the recommendations are pretty good. The app is still crap though (although granted significantly better than Spotify!). Theres some bonkers UX decisions and the mix of Apple Music and iTunes store is piss poor. It's just got some illogical crap going on where depending on where in the interface you right click a song or artist it changes what options you'll get.
2 hours ago [-]
cosmic_cheese 1 hours ago [-]
Apple Music has native clients on macOS and Windows (the latter being a greenfield WinUI app rather than based on iTunes heritage). No native Linux app, but unlike Spotify they actually allow third party clients to exist and even furnish a library for devs to use, and so third party clients like Cider[0] exist on Linux. It also has a web app that can be installed as a PWA.
‘Spotify is a digital music, podcast, and video service that gives you access to millions of songs and other content from creators all over the world.’
I left in the middle of their ‘we do Podcasts’ bs, where they were pushing Joe Rogan hard.
Isn't it just another ad distribution platform? The amount of ads they started to push to paying(!) users recently makes me want to cancel it every day (but I'm also too lazy to seek alternatives).
threethirtytwo 58 minutes ago [-]
I like Joe Rogan. So not yuck for me. But I can understand how if someone you hate is pushed hard by a platform you’d want to leave it.
grepex 34 minutes ago [-]
Agreed. I like Joe Rogan but hate Spotify. For that time period where Rogan was a Spotify exclusive, I didn't listen to his podcast at all.
byroot 2 hours ago [-]
> Uses 1.5GB of RAM on my laptop atm.
That's crazy, I just checked on mine (macOS), it's only ~300MiB, about as much as Apple Mail which is native.
Still a bit much for what I need it for, but tolerable.
shinycode 4 hours ago [-]
Quite annoying when, as we see in the tv show “the playlist” that traces back the story of Spotify, the founder put a huge emphasis on performance to differentiate them from the rest and create the best possible UX…
I switched from Spotify to Amazon Music about 9 months ago, and cancelled Spotify Premium as a result (due to price, not bugs). Amazon Music is so much worse.
1. If you have no connectivity, the app will frequently get stuck in the offline state, playing the spinner indefinitely, even after connectivity has returned. I had similar issues on Spotify, but Amazon Music is so much worse.
2. I had Amazon Music eat my entire cellular plan's data monthly allowance in a day, after it seemingly got stuck in a loop trying to download the same podcast again and again. The podcast is unplayable when it gets in this state, even on perfect Wi-Fi, it just never starts playback. This has happened twice now (incidentally on the same podcast, but different episodes), even after deleting and reinstalling the app entirely.
The second bug is a deal breaker, so I've gone back to Spotify.
unfocused 42 minutes ago [-]
I switched from Amazon music after many years to Spotify, as Amazon's App was just terrible. Never worked well offline in my watch or phone (Apple).
I only went to Spotify because my kids wanted it. The integration for Spotify is still very good, compared to Amazon Music.
shellwizard 1 hours ago [-]
Have they replicated 1:1 Spotify's UX in Amazon music finally? I was a user 7 years ago and their Android app back then sucked, big time.
psygn89 35 minutes ago [-]
I mean, Amazon just sucks in general when it comes to design. I don't understand why Amazon videos (or whatever their purchased streaming app is) doesn't even queue up sequential movies automatically. It'll play the first Harry Potter movie, then skip to the third, fourth, and then the second, etc. It's not just HP , either.
dominotw 3 hours ago [-]
apple music is good if you dont need it to be feature packed.
best value for money if you use youtube is youtube music app that you get from youtube premium.
wombat-man 1 hours ago [-]
It's always been terrible afaik. I don't know why they bother
mogoh 4 hours ago [-]
Why is spotify so popular?
There are different solutions to listen to music.
What does spotify do that almost no one else does?
Is it the music library or something else?
I use youtube music, but I am looking for alternatives (but not spotify for various reasons).
crossroadsguy 2 hours ago [-]
Because as much as the app sucks the everything else is better than everyone else's music app, at least here in India where we have Apple Music as well. Recommendation, organisation, playlist - it feels like Apple Music is doing all that for a different species altogether. Now I already have said how bloated Spotify iOS app is and I still take it any day over Apple Music's native app. Hell, there are flows in Apple Music that has never gonna past a click at certain page whenever I've tried (that's quite a few in times in last few years). Esp. flows around which they try to play with iCloud and social aspects. Hell, I can't even decide what not to see on my Apple Music home screen. Sometimes I've to do few sipes to reach what I am looking for. Even with all the bloat Spotify never tires me like that.
lirolero 4 hours ago [-]
I can’t speak for everyone, but for me, it just works. I’ve never had any of the issues people are mentioning in this thread. The app isn’t slow or buggy for me, I’ve never had artists I listen to disappear from my playlists, and I can find pretty much every song I want to listen to. Most people I know use Spotify too, so sharing stuff is just a little more convenient.
dgritsko 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, this is my experience as well. It's mostly fine, and I've been using it nearly every day for years.
stan-ely 2 hours ago [-]
It's just convenient and I don't notice the issues that much for it to be a problem
laurentiurad 2 hours ago [-]
I share the same experience. I use android and I never experienced any bugs or slowness. The Garmin app is also really good.
jeltz 3 hours ago [-]
They have a big library of music from tiny bands and it works well enough. As long as you ignore the music they try to push it just works.
lostlogin 3 hours ago [-]
Music discovery on Spotify used to be great, but I left 5+ years ago so I’m unsure now.
the_sleaze_ 2 hours ago [-]
Spotify has gone downhill in that regard for sure. It floods my pages with "created for you" which is just the same 4-5 artists played in the last few weeks ago kludged together into a playlist. Alongside some of the worst music you could imagine (Payola? Idk..)
Any recommendations anyone has for music discovery I'm all ears. I recently moved away from a town that had a 10/10 radio station and I'm really feeling the TOP-40-only pain.
LollipopYakuza 3 hours ago [-]
Spotify Connect has no real equivalent
hussong 42 minutes ago [-]
I really like qobuz for music, great apps for iOS, Android, and web.
toomuchtodo 2 hours ago [-]
$25/month for 5 users "all you can eat" music library every month is incredibly hard to beat, even if self hosting terabytes of your own music library.
flexagoon 4 hours ago [-]
For me it's mostly the big library and Spotify Jam
threethirtytwo 56 minutes ago [-]
Another reason why they are so popular is that they were first to market. They’ve been good enough that they have not lost first mover advantage that other first movers often lose (MySpace for example)
dominotw 3 hours ago [-]
> What does spotify do that almost no one else does? Is it the music library or something else?
music is tough business to negotiate all the contracts and figure out a business model
hardwaregeek 2 hours ago [-]
It’s a music player that regularly cannot play music. I don’t understand how you get that wrong for so long.
thedanbob 1 hours ago [-]
I ran sound at a friend's wedding recently and unfortunately the music was all on Spotify. Every time I tried to play a specific song from a playlist, "Spotify can't play this item right now" and it would skip to the next one (or the one after that). I ended up having to yt-dlp all the timeline-specific songs.
BetterThanSober 59 minutes ago [-]
Probably due to business/commercial licensing, I'm sure they have separate account for playing music in a public space
thesuitonym 1 hours ago [-]
Because you keep using it. What incentive do they have to change?
toomuchtodo 2 hours ago [-]
They’re profitable and customers keep paying. Incentives->Outcomes.
solarkraft 1 hours ago [-]
> Under a playlist you get a list of suggested songs, the UI element looks like a "regular song", but unlike every other "song" element the user has been trained to recognize, the "swipe right to queue" does not apply to these elements. For some reason.
If I remember correctly, it has a plus on the side to add it to the playlist. Clearly different I guess (and why would you want to listen to a song before adding it to the playlist amirite?). I also love the way you have to refresh a list to get 3 new songs instead of just getting a scrolling list where you can go back.
BatteryMountain 4 hours ago [-]
I've cancelled mine 5 years ago after they keep showing me ganster music and podcasts on my main page, even though I no history of listening or liking such content. So they keep trying to force it into my life. Secondly, they messed up the explorability of artists, playlist and related music. They also removed music from the catalogue, meaning on my playlist there are big memory holes of my favourite music, as they don't even show the artist or song name anymore. They also broke the offline-mode for when I drove my car.. so even if I switched it to offline-mode, music would still not play (after they downloaded and using 10GB+ on my phone). Then they added Joe Rogan and pushed other politics and stuff, more mainstream gangster shit. I just needed a good music player with a good discovery system and decent offline-mode. It used to be very simple. Now its a mess.
So my only path/answer to this was to cancel it. They poisoned the well so efficiently that I will never trust another streaming service again for my lifetime. I hate rewarding bad business practices, businesses pushing their ideologies towards me. No thanks.
lostlogin 3 hours ago [-]
Their Joe Rogan period was baffling. It reminded me of Apple and U2.
Apple’s boomer surprise when they discovered we don’t all like U2 was hilarious.
4 hours ago [-]
zipy124 5 hours ago [-]
It's actually crazy that a music app struggles to play music many times. By far my worst big app experience.
wombat-man 1 hours ago [-]
I gave YouTube music a try, mostly for the free premium and I have to say, it's ok. It still hiccups sometimes when I'm on the subway or a plane but I don't miss Spotify.
I do have a more pared down selection of mp3s loaded on my device in case of emergency, but I use it less and less now.
skybrian 1 hours ago [-]
This seems a bit harsh. In my experience, it basically works fine for playing music. I haven’t noticed it being particularly slow either. Could it be due to having different hardware, different expectations, something else?
esskay 1 hours ago [-]
> it basically works fine for playing music
Until you want to play back a playlist in random order over airplay or bluetooth, then the decade old bug with thousands of replies on their forum confirming it surfaces, and it only loops the first 100 songs in the playlist.
The number of bugs in their service that have existed since inception is insane. It's a buggy mess, and the UI & UX is comically poor. Not to mention the resource usage, as someone else pointed out below its incredibly insane that they think it's ok for it to be such a massive resource hog.
foresterre 45 minutes ago [-]
> - Under a playlist you get a list of suggested songs, the UI element looks like a "regular song", but unlike every other "song" element the user has been trained to recognize, the "swipe right to queue" does not apply to these elements. For some reason.
There's a ton of these inconsistencies. For example, the new releases albums where songs become available over time also do not have it. It's infuriating how inconsistent the UI is sometimes.
Not so long ago they also had two versions of the "swipe right to queue" UI, one with long swipe (the current one), and one with a much shorter one. I preferred the shorter (with the hard break) one because it is much clearer when a song actually gets added to the queue. What often happens when you're adding multiple songs to the queue, if you only swipe a little bit, it is unclear if it was enough to add it to the queue. With one song this isn't a problem because a message with "added to queue" is shown, but for multiple songs, the messages are shown on top of each other.
tempesttempo86 2 hours ago [-]
I recently started encountering full on crashes on iOS, as well as random freezing. Not to mention whole navigation just feels 'off', like canceling navigation mid animation. Nowadays, non-native apps don't have issues like that.
parpfish 2 hours ago [-]
i'd love it if spotify split into two companies:
- an enterprise platform that just provided a an API to access/play songs and direct the payment to the correct rightsholders
- a consumer app that built on top of that to provide the 'spotify' we all have
let a whole ecosystem of music streaming apps take off that cater to different niches of listeners.
each app would be able to differentiation themselves with their UI but also features like recommendations/playlists/etc. And spotify wouldn't see them as competitors because they'd still be getting their cut because they all go through their API.
skybrian 1 hours ago [-]
This seems a bit harsh. In my experience, it basically works fine for playing music. I’ve not noticed it being slow.
e40 54 minutes ago [-]
I switched to YouTube Music and I miss the Spotify UI.
NaiveBayesian 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, the Android app is particularly bad. For the past couple of weeks, it's gotten to a point where the app will take 30s to load on my phone. Nothing, not even reinstalling the app fixes this.
duxup 2 hours ago [-]
I’ll take it a step further and say I think the current music player-isms UX is just not easy to use and gets in my way of enjoying music…
kingleopold 2 hours ago [-]
have you tried apple music app on mac? Apple music is also wrong in so many levels I personally believe teams that work on inside Appple hate it and made so bad intentionally. There is no other explanation.
3 hours ago [-]
herbst 30 minutes ago [-]
The whole service is shit, all music you discover is bought to be there, a lot of it is AI.
edgyquant 1 hours ago [-]
Another annoyance is the “genres” in your liked songs. They change seemingly at random and when you select a genre eg country it has the most ass backwards way of grouping songs so I’ll get rap songs playing despite having selected folk or whatever
softwaredoug 3 hours ago [-]
My biggest complaint is the device switching. I pick up my phone and hit play, my laptop starts playing the music
.. which in turn causes my AirPods to connect to my laptop
I have to go manually hunt to connect everything correctly Every. Single. Time.
dominotw 3 hours ago [-]
its run by one ceo guy gustav's whims and fancies. he is obviously not a ux expert but every feature in the app needs his "vision"
alexyoung 7 hours ago [-]
I realise I’m pissing into the wind here, but I find the LLM text on the homepage and docs quite funny/ awkward.
> “Ctrl+M turns it into a tiny player that wears any classic Winamp 2 skin, spectrum analyser, equalizer, and playlist included. 2000s vibes, pixel for pixel.”
Everything is said with too much intensity, and phrasing that sounds impressive but doesn’t really mean that much. Like “wears any classic Winamp 2 skin” feels so awkward, what’s “wears”? You mean it can use it?
I feel like if you can’t be bothered to write the code, at least document it yourself and write the marketing copy so I know you understand the product. Otherwise how can I trust running it on my computer? Did the LLM generate some amazing rm -rf somewhere, or another blunder that wrecks data I might care about?
earcar 6 hours ago [-]
Author here.
Yes, the code is generated. Yes, the docs are generated. I agree LLM copy is annoying and will rewrite them myself.
But I built this for myself out of frustration with the official client, and I use it every day, so every bug I find is fixed immediately. I also care about bugs and PRs from other people, as you can see the amount that have been closed on the repo. The only reason I would stop maintaining this is if Spotify kills it.
I also wouldn't call this vibe coded either. Human directed and LLM generated is fairer. It's been an intense 5 days with tons of design decisions and testing on 3 platforms. I think we need a new vocabulary to distinguish it from "author doesn't care". I do.
zestyping 4 hours ago [-]
> Yes, the code is generated. Yes, the docs are generated.
> I also wouldn't call this vibe coded either.
It's vibe-coded. Get over it.
bentt 3 hours ago [-]
There is a lot of gray area between vibe coding and zero AI. Get over that too.
End of the day this person is solving a good problem and sharing the work. This is what we want.
flossly 3 hours ago [-]
Also: nagging about the specifics of the README's tone of voice, while the 600-1000MB RAM usage drops to 100-250MB seems a little childish to me.
It's still open source! Just like in the pre-AI era they are welcome to submit a PR and improve it in the way they like it. The main dev seems very open to accepting help.
rplnt 1 hours ago [-]
Those numbers only look good in comparison.
darkwizard42 34 minutes ago [-]
I don't see you publishing something which further reduces the memory footprint?
Given the project is open source, have at it! See if you can help improve it instead of complaining. This is a significant improvement and a cool project!
rplnt 15 minutes ago [-]
I'm not complaining and it is a cool project (from what I can tell). But I think it's fair to say 200 MB memory usage is a lot without providing source code as a proof. Just by feel when you recall what were computers capable of when they did not have 100s of MB to spare.
andrei_says_ 1 hours ago [-]
A new term I encountered is “human-stewarded”.
sandinmyjoints 52 minutes ago [-]
I like the direction, but stewarded feels just a little too awkward to type or say to catch on. Perhaps "guide coded"? But it will be really hard to dislodge vibe coded from being generally applied to this concept, I think, in part because it is a catchy little term.
crossroadsguy 2 hours ago [-]
Just like that comment you typed is keyboarded or keypadded. Or did you voice it?
stiltzkin 33 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
rplnt 1 hours ago [-]
> Yes, the code is generated. Yes, the docs are generated. I agree LLM copy is annoying and will rewrite them myself.
I find this kinda funny. Fix the obvious part, better not look at the code.
thesuitonym 1 hours ago [-]
> I agree LLM copy is annoying and will rewrite them myself.
Remember when people used to care about making a good first impression?
wolttam 2 hours ago [-]
Don’t worry. Folks are entirely too concerned about the distinction between human made and LLM made. In a short handful of years, it will be incredibly rare to find something an LLM hasn’t been involved with
SteveVitali 1 hours ago [-]
Agree, everyone thought I was crazy in 2025 when I was preoccupied with this question about moral 'authorship' in the AI era, but I think the culture will catch up quite soon, whether it likes it or not
> The Debian Project nevertheless expects that all contributions submitted to Debian, regardless of how and with which tools they were produced, satisfy the same standards of quality, correctness, maintainability, and legal compliance.
Slop text on the homepage does not scream "quality" to me.
/// Rule: every block leaves exactly as long as it arrived, whatever
/// is being held back, or the output would run short.
Uhm yeah, that is "literally what" territory.
5 hours ago [-]
stuaxo 4 hours ago [-]
The official client is very annoying.
I rewrite docs myself on my own projects because they read as very LLMish, there's an intermediate stage which feels slightly less bad where I ask it to remove most of the comments, especially LLM signposting ones and then "rewrite any remaining comments and docs in a dry ukgov/gds style" which makes things slighyly less worse.
threethirtytwo 53 minutes ago [-]
One thing I like about Spotify is the recommendations. I like to do what i call “beat digging” which is basically exploring the platform for new artists and tracks?
Does this still have that?
RunSet 4 hours ago [-]
Should add a full page click through slop warning to each page on the site. Also give credit to the LLM that made it in the "Brought to you by" section at the bottom.
vovavili 3 hours ago [-]
The fact than an app like this can be vibe-coded is actually mind-blowing. I'd love to see your prompt history here.
wartywhoa23 2 hours ago [-]
Oh no, that's closed source, lol
short_sells_poo 5 hours ago [-]
I'm going to sound harsh here, but please don't take this as criticism of the effort, it's criticism of how it's being portrayed. The quality might for all intents be great and useful.
> But I built this for myself out of frustration with the official client
But you didn't build it. This is akin to me telling an intern to build me a widget and then claiming it was me who built it. Or a construction manager saying they built a skyscraper.
Yes, the intern and the construction crew needs guidance and management, but I can't then go to the management committee and claim ownership of the effort.
> I also wouldn't call this vibe coded either.
You didn't write any of the code or even the documentation for that matter. You guided a code generator that relied on you to guide high level decisions but then did all the implementation on it's own. That's vibe coding.
wmichelin 4 hours ago [-]
This debate is irrelevant. It doesn't matter. Having the idea and the skills to dictate a stable piece of software are all that matter.
There is no point in taking pride in typing out lines of code by hand. The entire world is moving on.
jephs 3 hours ago [-]
Of course there's a point in it, don't be a boor.
Any act of making can be treated as product, as craft, or as art. You'll find yourself taking all three stances at different points. Any engineer or artisan or artist can choose to pour their attention and love into any layer of the production process.
I like ceramics. I like wheel throwing. Once upon a time, the pottery wheel was a newfangled technique for rapid and regular production of commodity goods. Same with coil building, same with slip casting, same with standardization of glaze recipes, gas and electric kilns, all of it.
But I know people who choose to quarry and purify their own clay, or to mix their own glazes, or to fire their pieces in a hole in the ground dug by hand with a fire they built by hand. I know people who make dozens of identical copies of just a few forms, after they spend months iterating on carving intricate molds. I know people who will spend a whole season working on a single hand-built bust.
And none of these people have ever, to my knowledge, expressed scorn for any of the others, for focusing on a different step in the process.
bayindirh 4 hours ago [-]
The problem is not the emittance of code by a statistical black box.
It’s not even knowing how it works or even what it used to achieve the desired result.
You wrote it or not, that’s your code. You are the one responsible. The machine has no brain. Use yours.
Citizen_Lame 2 hours ago [-]
That may be, but if I come back to the old project I didn't touch in months, code may as well be written by an alien.
bayindirh 22 minutes ago [-]
I can return to my 5+ year old code and start hacking in 30 minutes or so. I believe it boils down to documentation and comments.
eli 4 hours ago [-]
The construction manager can’t say they built a skyscraper? In that only for someone who personally laid every brick and ran every wire?
short_sells_poo 3 hours ago [-]
No they can't. The construction crew - which includes the manager - can say that they built a skyscraper.
If the construction manager did lay the bricks or did the majority of the work in all aspects, they could claim to have built a building. Otherwise they contributed work, no denying that, but they can't claim credit for building it. Same way that architects can't claim they built the skyscraper, even though they probably spent a lot of effort designing it to specs. To the best of my knowledge, no serious architect claims they "built" the building. They have designed it yes. Same way, the construction manager would claim they have managed the construction.
I admit that the classification is fuzzy, but there's an explosion of vibe coders going about claiming to have built things, whose contribution is basically spending a total of one hour with a prompt and and LLM doing basically all the heavy lifting.
That's not necessarily the case of the author here, but the line has blurred a lot and people very giddily claim credit for much less actual accomplishment than what would've flown in the past.
bayindirh 4 hours ago [-]
But they know the plans, and knows people where all the wires are, etc.
With vibe coding you know nothing.
janilowski 2 hours ago [-]
If I take a photo and then use GIMP to edit it, then did I take a photo or just direct my camera at something and then steer my computer to make changes to it? After all, it's not me drawing each pixel manually. It's vibe-photoed!
wartywhoa23 2 hours ago [-]
No. It's vibe-photoed when you use AI models which are trained on countless hours of actual human work. Otherwise you apply deterministic tools at your will and according to your skill level.
Some would use the term "Agent Engineering" for what OP did.
short_sells_poo 3 hours ago [-]
There's a trend where people go around claiming they built something and just happen to conveniently omit everywhere that everything was "built" using an LLM and the author doesn't even understand what the code does. That's the crux of my objection.
FWIW I agree with your post and perhaps we need a separate name for people who just instructed an LLM to build something, but then took the trouble to understand how the thing actually works.
It seems to me that this is not the case here. The author used LLM to build the whole thing and left it at that. Which is completely fair, I'd do the same if I just wanted to scratch an itch with the minimal amount of effort, but then I wouldn't go around claiming "I built it".
wartywhoa23 4 hours ago [-]
I'll pick a human-written monstrosity over any "lean" consloption out there any time of day.
PatronBernard 6 hours ago [-]
Having used Claude a lot for the past four months, I get exhausted from its style. Every sentence has been buffed and polished and enhanced and it never just plainly says a thing. It's as if you have to eat every meal with every possible flavor enhancer in existence. At one point I will totally lose it if it mentions "smoke test" one more time.
It is also totally not what I want for docstrings in code or Powerpoint drafts, where consistency in language is critical.
Sharlin 3 hours ago [-]
Like I said in another thread, everything Claude (Code) writes sounds like it’s congratulating itself of how smart it is. While not actually being that smart.
jeltz 3 hours ago [-]
It writes like me when I was 14 and thought I was very smart.
km144 1 hours ago [-]
I believe AI technical prose peaked with Opus 4.6. I still use it (mostly for that purpose) and I think it's legitimately great. I'm hoping they are able to reverse the trends that benchmaxxing and RLAIF have wrought on Claude's non-code output with the future models.
k3liutZu 4 hours ago [-]
Have a bit of food dropped into the MSG container. Now eat the whole container
MrGilbert 7 hours ago [-]
Interestingly enough, https://fastpotify.rocks/winamp/ shows what I dislike about LLM-generated text: From "The buttons do what they say [...]" to "[...] a different format and are not supported" is just a huge wall of text without any visual guidance.
It's as if the person writing these lines didn't care about the result. One could argue that people not caring about written documentation isn't anything new, but in the past, these documentations also had little text. So they were easier to digest. Now, we get great walls of text that are hard to read. I cannot say that I like that.
embedding-shape 6 hours ago [-]
What sucks is that clearly the author has prompted the model somehow to generate this text, and this prompt probably contains the actual meat that the model just "expanded on" while adding it's own fluff, and if the author just shared the actual verbatim prompt instead, the documentation would be 90% shorter but also 200% more "informative per character used".
Just share the prompt you used, regardless of how low quality or bad it is, rather than this word spaghetti of 100s of words saying basically nothing, such a waste.
km144 1 hours ago [-]
That would actually be a reasonable thing to do with a model that is good at writing though. I'm sure if you used that method on Opus 4.6 you'd get a pretty decent result, because Claude models used to be quite good at that sort of technical synthesis. Asking a model that is bad at technical writing (e.g. Opus/Fable 5) to write your docs is a bad idea.
sceptic123 5 hours ago [-]
That isn't going to be very helpful is it?
> can you build a website to promote the app
> can you add a page showing off the winamp mode
jeltz 3 hours ago [-]
Still more useful than what exists now.
moritonal 5 hours ago [-]
It's a weird world where they put less time into writing that doc than you did reading it.
earcar 5 hours ago [-]
I prioritized shipping over carefully crafting docs. I thought nobody would read them and they'd rather enjoy the software. I was wrong. I'll rewrite them.
tepmoc 3 hours ago [-]
Then, just do not add text that adds no value. Less is more.
Documentation is first part people see when presented. I personally hate AI written text even though I do agentic engineering a lot as well. Any user facing documentation must be reviewed, if you snoozy by reading it - remove or rewrite.
I do not care about paragraph long comments in code, because I’m not gonna read them, but I still follow my internal guideline and cut all this verbosity to level where it readable using hooks and skills.
So basicly like you said if you care about product do not add placeholders. It’s take away first impression.
MrGilbert 4 hours ago [-]
Fair enough. But then, how should I enjoy the software, if the documentation to its' usage is buried beyond a whole paragraph? To be clear, I do not judge the usage of AI per se. But you can instruct AI to write a clear manual. It just takes time. :)
nuancebydefault 4 hours ago [-]
I think you got a but too much negativity, from a crowd that became more easily irratated because their AI sensor became very sensitive by e.g. reviewing a lot of AI generated code and comments.
alasano 6 hours ago [-]
Not running code from someone who has so little self awareness that they publish documentation like this tbh.
Doesn't matter if it's open source.
bityard 4 hours ago [-]
I never thought ubiquitous human-written marketing wank was any better.
t-3 4 hours ago [-]
The difference is that the marketing stuff used to be only on corporate websites. Now it's everywhere, because pretty much everybody hates writing, and the "pretty much" can be left off when the writing is a job or some other form of obligation.
bko 6 hours ago [-]
> I feel like if you can’t be bothered to write the code, at least document it yourself and write the marketing copy so I know you understand the product.
Do you not understand it?
This person doesn't owe you any work. He's providing a product for free and this is a reasonable enough description of the product.
> Did the LLM generate some amazing rm -rf somewhere, or another blunder that wrecks data I might care about?
I'm pretty sure at this point hand-crafted code is more likely to contain security bugs. The mythical "rm -rf" random LLM insertion is not a real threat. Every time I see stories about this kind of issue, it's almost always preceded by basically prompt poisoning.
sortoflog 4 hours ago [-]
> This person doesn't owe you any work. He's providing a product for free
A product being free doesn’t make it exempt from criticism. It’s not about “owing” anybody work.
> and this is a reasonable enough description of the product.
It’s not a great idea to signal a lack of effort, nor is it wrong for users to pick up on that signal. This is the post-llm equivalent to spelling or grammatical errors.
> I'm pretty sure at this point hand-crafted code is more likely to contain security bugs.
LLMs produce code which is fairly ‘locally optimal’, so in good hands they can absolutely be used to build correct software. They also allow those with little to no experience* to cobble something together very quickly and easily while creating a ton of security holes. I think you might be underestimating how common the latter is.
* not to suggest this applies to the OP necessarily. Rather some extra wariness is necessary nowadays since the floor has been lowered so much.
bko 29 minutes ago [-]
> A product being free doesn’t make it exempt from criticism. It’s not about “owing” anybody work.
You can criticize it but your criticism is hallow
> It’s not a great idea to signal a lack of effort, nor is it wrong for users to pick up on that signal. This is the post-llm equivalent to spelling or grammatical errors.
Why should you put in effort to something that should be effortless? Why should I waste my time writing some inferior copy by hand?
> LLMs produce code which is fairly ‘locally optimal’, so in good hands they can absolutely be used to build correct software.
Humans produce code which is fairly ‘locally optimal’
Also, interesting you use ‘ as a quote rather than '. I notice these quotes are used with LLM generated text, as I can't find this on my keyboard.
embedding-shape 6 hours ago [-]
> The mythical "rm -rf" random LLM insertion is not a real threat. Every time I see stories about this kind of issue, it's almost always preceded by basically prompt poisoning.
It is real, typically happening when dumber models (haven't personally seen any of the SOTA ones on reasonable thinking/reasoning level do this) try to clean up stuff via bash and forget to assign a variable. Things like "rm -rf sessions/$id" without double-checking $id is actually defined, would do "rm -rf sessions/" and remove the entire directory. Add in more variables in a path like "rm -rf $HOME/projects/$user/$repo/$tmpdir" and the dumb models people think they can use for local coding, promptly removes a lot more than expected.
Not sure how people aren't already running these agents in an environment/sandbox where stuff like this wouldn't matter, locally or not, but some LLMs do truly accidentally delete stuff for people, without "prompt poisoning", I had it happen myself while testing Qwen3.8-27B (BF16) locally just a week or two ago, exactly as described above.
maxibenner 5 hours ago [-]
Just recently, Opus 4.8 almost deleted a bunch of important files (I caught the issue before) because it failed to consider that two-way-sync would delete files from my NAS if deleted locally.
jcarrano 7 hours ago [-]
If it can transform into Winamp I don't care if the code is LLM generated, typed by infinite monkeys or found in some ancient scrolls.
Jokes aside, how can you be sure that the official Spotify app (or any app, or Windows) was not written by a LLM without supervision?
phatfish 6 hours ago [-]
The official Spotify app has some skin in the game. Random dudes self promotion project, not so much.
ornornor 4 hours ago [-]
I suspect the official app would actually be more consistent and not as bad to use if it was generated by an LLM.
hk__2 6 hours ago [-]
Not OP but I don’t really care if it was or not. All I know is that I’ve been using the Spotify app 10+ years and it works well. I don’t know if this random app works, and if it hasn’t been supervised I doubt it does.
6 hours ago [-]
lambdaone 6 hours ago [-]
LLMs seem to have been fine-tuned to use metaphors, presumably because they read like vivid creative writing. The over-use of metaphor in LLM-produced text is exhausting.
exitb 6 hours ago [-]
Uncanny valley. LLMs are great at producing text that reads almost right.
doublerabbit 7 hours ago [-]
I too enjoy wearing the RealPlayer skin of the 90's. Makes me look very chic.
bryanrasmussen 7 hours ago [-]
If the last twenty years of horror movies have taught me anything it is that maybe you can't be a real player, but you can always wear their skin!
jollyllama 4 hours ago [-]
> class BuffaloBill
threethirtytwo 51 minutes ago [-]
Your comment has too much intensity as well. Honestly it too looks like slop. I agree with what you said, but nevertheless your writing is likely AI generated here, it’s very obvious.
andrepd 7 hours ago [-]
Slop code is already hard to tolerate, but any hint of slop in text will immediately make me chuck it into the bin / close the tab, no exceptions. My lifetime is finite, I'm sure as fuck not gonna spend time reading something that a person could not even be arsed to write themselves. I'm only annoyed that it takes sometimes a few seconds, sometimes a few minutes, to detect that I'm actually not reading a person's thoughts but only a machine simulacrum of such.
I highly recommend anybody to take up a similar rule, in any context. Slop in a website? Close. Slop in an email? Bin. Slop in a code comment? Skip.
deadlast2 6 hours ago [-]
There is a tribe of people who carve bots out of trees using their hands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dugout_canoe. It stupid to waste time doing something a computer can do reasonably well. IMO
psd1 5 hours ago [-]
Icymi, "carving bots out of trees" is a wonderful and apposite autocorrect. There's layers to this thing, man!
wartywhoa23 2 hours ago [-]
Generally speaking, it's carving bots out of the environment, trees included, for sure.
wilted-iris 11 hours ago [-]
Spotify is in the process of killing the librespot project that this and most third party Spotify players are built on. I think the golden age of music streaming is coming to an end. I’ve migrated to a self hosted library with streaming and radio for discovery. I hope we’ll see many projects in the space flourish. Many, like Navidrome and the whole OpenSubsonic ecosystem, seem to be doing quite well.
What makes you think Spotify is killing it? I know they aren't supporting FLAC but otherwise I don't think they're actively trying to stop it as opposed to not really caring if they support it (which is more "We don't care" as opposed to "We have to stop this")
earcar 6 hours ago [-]
Author here.
I haven't seen any evidence of Spotify killing librespot. To me the project looks active and works totally fine. I don't have a new Spotify account to verify the claim above.
I suspect wilted-iris is conflating it with the recent changes to the Web APIs: new developer apps can't use all endpoints anymore. In Fastpotify if you add your Client ID I use both an older developer app and your app to keep everything as fast and seamless as possible.
wilted-iris 27 minutes ago [-]
Have a look at the librespot pinned issues, you’ll see the reports from folks experiencing this. You may also be able to find the legal threats they sent out to third party client libraries if you search carefully (many have been redacted.)
wilted-iris 9 hours ago [-]
Librespot no longer works for new accounts. APIs are being gated off and they’re applying legal pressure to dissuade projects from reverse engineering anything new. At the end of the day, they can turn the tap off anytime they want, whether by technical or legal means. I tired of having so much of my music experience at risk and chose to migrate on my own terms.
inigyou 8 hours ago [-]
They can only turn the tap off because those projects operated in ways that required them to leave it on.
Biggest mistake most librefication projects make is to do their project out in the open where they can easily be subject to legal pressure, then fall into complete disarray the moment that pressure appears. They can't move underground once pressure starts, because everyone already knows who they are.
selfhoster1312 8 hours ago [-]
> Biggest mistake most librefication projects make is to do their project out in the open
That's not it. Most youtube downloaders are not developed in the open and Youtube still breaks them every other week by changing on purpose the way they operate. And, unlike highly obfuscated instructions, studying the network queries used by a simple app does not require expensive reverse engineering efforts from Spotify engineers; essentially, it's the same as developing in the open.
The only case i can think where obfuscation might help would be if the actual Spotify API consumers were servers by the app developers (or some form of obfuscation via residential proxies) and the app developed an entirely different API to/from its servers. But then, you're back to the developers and hosts can receive legal threats, etc...
port11 8 hours ago [-]
Bit of an unfair take.
You propose the open-source community operates behind closed doors like the very software they aim to replace?
I’d argue Spotify has so little to gain by being hostile, that perhaps the lawyers are more expensive than just ignoring these pet projects (which would never gain mass adoption).
selfhoster1312 8 hours ago [-]
> the lawyers are more expensive than just ignoring these pet projects
The lawyers are more expensive than happy customers staying customers because they can enjoy the client they prefer, that's for sure.
azalemeth 8 hours ago [-]
If anyone other than me really likes classical music, I thoroughly recommend Hyperion Records. DRM free downloads in your choice of codec, one to two free CDs worth of sampler per month to download (with a jewel case PDF!) and some truly excellent world leading groups and beautiful new music.
10729287 8 hours ago [-]
Thanks for sharing. I loved buying then downloading cheap samplers from punk and hardcore labels when I was younger. That was part of the culture and that really helped me discover new music and shaping my tastes. This is something that doesn't exist that much anymore and I'm glad to find this initiative. I try to listen to classical music but that's a very difficult world to discover, this will probably help by helping me to focus on few titles instead of jumping in the gigantic and maze-ish pool !
azalemeth 6 hours ago [-]
I really enjoyed this comment – thank you.
One part of the classical diaspora I think is both under appreciated and undergoing something of a renaissance is that of contemporary choral music. There are many great examples but two I'd like to draw to attention to two of those I have recently sung, and really enjoy:
(1) The works of Ēriks Ešenvalds,[1] a Latvian composer who was a fellow in composition at Trinity College, Cambridge and brought really a large part of the surprisingly rich eastern European singing tradition to the west. I had never heard of the Singing Revolution against the USSR in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania – countries with a wonderful, rich choral tradition where music (and choirs) played a really nonzero part in the downfall of the USSR. All absolutely beautiful and a group I sing with has worked with a lot of composers from this part of the world. Amazing soundscapes with harmonies that are never quite as good in equal temperament as outside it and yet always tonal and beautiful.
(2) Desmond Earley and the choral scholars of Trinity College Dublin – who conjures up a rich sound world of very pure, Irish tones that almost sounds synthetic but is made entirely from human voices and traditional instruments. It is simple to sing but difficult to master. I would highlight Dúlamán, [3] a traditional song about the economic importance of seaweed.
I think they've archived all the old Linn Records stuff, which is excellent.
fransje26 6 hours ago [-]
Thank you for sharing!
nan60 11 hours ago [-]
> radio for discovery
Would you be willing to share a bit more about this setup? The only thing keeping my on streaming is the fact that its almost impossible to find new music otherwise. I know LastFM exists but it just doesn't click for me the way that streaming does. I like discovering music organically.
bubblemoth 11 hours ago [-]
I left spotify around two years ago for a self hosted option (I mostly use navidrome+feishin). Music discovery was a concern for me as well, but then I realized that I didn't like the idea of spotify curating which music I discovered. So far, this is what has worked for me:
- Actually listening to the music I have now. I think the art of listening through full albums has slowly died, but there is so much music we're ignoring because we just listen to Artist's top tracks.
- Word of mouth. Asking my friends what they listen to. This is a way that people used to discover music and I've found so much good music this way.
- Bandcamp. Bandcamp is SUCH a good way to discover new music. You can listen to the music in app, there are great articles and you can actually support the artists!
l72 40 minutes ago [-]
Regarding Bandcamp, I find following small labels to be a great way to find new music. Small labels tend to release music of similar style and quality. They often also have deals on bandcamp where you can buy an entire label's discography for crazy cheap, like a hundred or so albums for $50!
fbnlsr 8 hours ago [-]
I have pretty much the same setup. The only thing that bothers me with navidrome+feishin is that gapless playback is not working perfectly.
Also, a great resource for discovering new music is the public library. They often have a curated CD section that I then rip into FLAC. I've had great chats with the people in my town's library, and I often pick a totally random CD off the shelves and discover some amazing artists.
lolive 6 hours ago [-]
Mostly I listen to web radios, not always in a language that I master (hello Japanese). And Shazam plus Spotify is still a killing combo, for me.
yard2010 7 hours ago [-]
While moving from spotify to youtube music a few years ago I bought a vinyl player to listen to full albums and fell for it. Then when I moved to curate and self host my collection with Plex and Plexamp I realized I'm not using the player anymore since I'm using Plexamp to listen to albums. Plexamp is not perfect and not open source unfortunately, but it's a really good non-enshitified product.
I had to migrate away from youtube music since the experience was infuriating me every time. I love making playlists on the go. In youtube music after adding 30 tracks to the play queue, tapping 1 track accidentally deletes the play queue and plays this track. This made me feel bad every time it happened.
I don't see how it is just accepted to lose progress in 2026 as if we're using win95. It feels like 80% of the sw I use provides a caveman UX, not leveraging the tech, leaking implementation details and being constrained by technical reasons. On the other hand, working on Prepbook[0], I realized how hard it is to create the perfect experience and how it's even harder to justify it financially.
I'm doing discovery by talking to people, I love it. Every time I listen to Monolink I recall my co worker that just said "check out monolink" when he heard I love Ott. I love that it makes the experience about connection to people as well.
So, not enshittified, but either abandoned or headed for ensloppification.
ggirelli 9 hours ago [-]
I've been using it sporadically over the past 10+ years and have not noticed any major changes, at least for my limited use.
pixelatedindex 9 hours ago [-]
Thanks, I did some digging. My biggest issue is Andrew Jervis not running Bandcamp Weekly anymore. I loved that show :(
thesuitonym 1 hours ago [-]
> its almost impossible to find new music otherwise
I don't know where this opinion came from (Probably Spotify's PR department) but it's just so weird to me. Do you think people didn't find new music before streaming? It's not impossible, you just have to talk to people.
wilted-iris 9 hours ago [-]
I listen to Flow State, SomaFM, and aggregate from local shows and a few people I follow on social media among other discovery platforms. (I don’t have a favorite yet.)
I found that Spotify was increasingly recommending AI artists and songs I already knew. It surfaced very little outside of my comfort zone and effectively nothing that wasn’t new. There’s a whole world of music out there that Spotify wasn’t showing me.
bityard 4 hours ago [-]
I stopped listening to Pandora well over a decade ago because its algorithm eventually decided that I only liked 12 songs in the whole world.
twilo 2 hours ago [-]
There is nothing better plexamp but unfortunately after plex raised their prices it might not be worth it for most
dylan604 11 hours ago [-]
> radio for discovery
was a big question mark I had as well. The Clear Channel and iHeart stations are not known for discovery. Now if you find a college station or by some miracle an independent station you can get some new stuff. My favorite local college station is also ad free. They also have an app which I lean on as it's not the strongest transmitter so their coverage is spotty. Maybe there's other indy stations with apps as well??
BLKNSLVR 11 hours ago [-]
This radio station is local to the city I live in, and they've been great for music discovery for me, although heavy focus on local artists, but they've put me onto a few international artists as well.
I subscribe to them, have done so for ~10 years I reckon. I don't listen as much as I used to, but I want them to continue existing either way.
Be aware, the quality of their playlists is incredibly variable, but that's part of the charm. I guarantee you'll hear something you haven't heard before... for better or worse.
I would always recommend KEXP. They have a really varied set of shows and setlists, don't seem to be swayed by "we must play the top 40", genuinely care about music, and are super nice if you head into the building in Seattle (which has a public access space, coffee shop, bathrooms, and a SubPop store).
I've had three tours around the place just by telling the folks there that Im there from out of town. To be fair, I might have gotten the tours because I came all the way over from England the times, but it's my favourite place to hang out when I'm in Seattle.
Also Ken is the nicest guy ever, and he introduced me to Larry Mizzel Jr while he was broadcasting live.
Get the app, or use the player on their website, and hive then a try for an hour or do. The app has the ability to "heart" a track while it's playing live, which helps with discovery.
frogulis 5 hours ago [-]
RRR and PBS in Melbourne both stream online and are both fantastic for music discovery. Go the former if you lean indie and the latter if you lean international.
using nts.live and and fip radio -> https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip at the moment for same purpose. Radio France allows to save liked track names in profile to look up later.
lolive 6 hours ago [-]
In addition to those two bangers, BBC6 and RNE also have shows to discover new musics.
PS: RadioParadise is also a safe place for good music.
Hype machine used to be so good for this. I haven't used it for a long time but it looks like it is still going in some fashion.
gnarlynarwhal42 9 hours ago [-]
I used to use hypem soo much during the music blog days and had a subscription etc but it seemed to stop working or something so after a while I stopped using it. I will have to check it out again
kachnuv_ocasek 9 hours ago [-]
I just listen to NTS most of the time.
SSLy 8 hours ago [-]
nts is all fire until a dj plays mp3 bitcrunched track that just hurts your ears
hyperadvanced 10 hours ago [-]
Call me a boomer but I’ve had a ton of fun with XM radio. I can find new music on Bandcamp but nothing compares to hearing some classic from the 80’s that you would have never thought to put on when you’re driving home after work on a Friday.
hillbillydilly 10 hours ago [-]
I don't know about you but spotify discovery feels like the least organic discovery possible. Its so homogeneous and predictable and corporate slop adjacent it makes me cringe just thinking about it.
refactor_master 10 hours ago [-]
I've discovered so many great artists through Spotify, and been to many of their shows (which Spotify also helps surface with their "Live Events" feature). I regularly get artists with less than 100k listeners in my Discover Weekly, which I then look up, and find that they did a concert on KEXP, and the comments all proclaiming "I knew good music wasn't dead!".
So I can say for sure that I don't share the slop sentiment. Sure, there's some generic filler every now and then, but any non-cohesive mix, as opposed to a carefully curated album is going to have songs that naturally become "fillers".
Just now, I discovered that Spotify snuck in "The Juan Maclean - Running Back To You (2014)", which is a cover of "Brian Bennet - Solstice (1978)". Neither songs are completely unknown, but they're also not exactly Bruno Mars.
I don't know if this is pure luck or algorithmic rhythm analysis, but for me it's working.
pbasista 11 hours ago [-]
> Spotify is in the process of killing the librespot project
How could they possibly do that? They cannot prevent people or AI from reverse engineering their APIs.
TingPing 11 hours ago [-]
Depends on how much they care. They can take down repos containing any keys, or use heuristics to block clients.
hahn-kev 10 hours ago [-]
Technically no, but they can just ban you. It would not be impossible to detect.
egeozcan 9 hours ago [-]
Anthropic can prevent people from using their models with the subscription plan outside Claude Code, why couldn't Spotify?
sbinder 9 hours ago [-]
Because millions of Spotify-compatible speakers are sold with firmware that will never be upgraded, so they can't ever change the Spotify connect protocol without breaking those devices.
epihelix 8 hours ago [-]
... and no company ever broke backwards-compatible support.
LollipopYakuza 2 hours ago [-]
I'd say it's a good thing they are not (?)
baggachipz 2 hours ago [-]
DMCA has entered the chat.
devindotcom 8 hours ago [-]
I'm glad they're doing well but I would guess only a tiny fraction of the people who use Spotify would be capable of setting up Navidrome. I tried and went back to Plex. I wish it were otherwise but if something takes more than a few clicks to go from zero to music that leaves 95% of users out! I hope these projects get more accessible though.
nickysielicki 10 hours ago [-]
Tools for piracy are much better today than they were back in the Napster or grooveshark days. It’s actually kind of shocking to me that we haven’t had a popcorntime moment for music again. Nothing technical is preventing the creation of a perfect decentralized anonymous p2p FLAC streaming platform with plausible deniability.
paweladamczuk 10 hours ago [-]
How would the plausible deniability piece work? If you stream some bytes to someone else, you can't deny doing it. Unless you imagine this working over Tor, idk what the performance of Tor is these days but I never thought it could support such an application.
nickysielicki 10 hours ago [-]
Music is relatively small. Tor is totally capable of hosting zlibrary without bandwidth restrictions getting in the way.
By plausible deniability I simply meant adopting a similar approach that Stremio has, to keep it on the good side of App Store approval processes. The app itself only allows for creative commons content by default, but with the right incantations it can host anything.
joshschreuder 10 hours ago [-]
Stremio and other apps like Fusion have gone up and been (reasonably quickly) taken down off the App Store though.
Not really "on the good side" when your main distribution method is "add this app to your account within the first 1-2 weeks of it being in the App Store or never again", or sideloading.
Gander5739 8 hours ago [-]
Have you heard of Soulseek? It's an active p2p music sharing platform.
lukeasch21 2 hours ago [-]
To those of you who might get any ideas from this comment, Soulseek already has a growing problem of people vibe coding "free Spotify" apps that end up hammering a few accounts without giving anything back to the community by hosting. The solution seems to be some combination of automated hosting checks and captchas via PM, which are tiresome to maintain and might just drive more people off from hosting altogether.
Shorel 5 hours ago [-]
I feel I am in the golden age of music streaming right now. Just use Deezer instead of Spotify.
Perfect quality and it great selection.
draven 2 hours ago [-]
I use Deezer (in a browser tab, and on my iphone.) It's good, but far from great.
If several artists / bands share the same name, there will be one artist page with all of the artists/bands releases.
The queue management sucks, I can add stuff to the queue, move / remove individual entries. That's it. If I added an album to the queue and want to remove it, I have to click a little cross one time for each track of the album.
Notifications about new releases: great. Except the UI is a tiny dropdown, and hovering over an item removes the little marker signaling it's a new one. It's really difficult to catch up when there are more than 5 new entries.
etc.
walthamstow 1 hours ago [-]
I pay for Deezer but I've never used the app. I download the music I want in FLAC using deemix.
Shorel 39 minutes ago [-]
Hey, don't spoil the party. I knew that. Many others also.
Now the dzr developers will break the functionality. On purpose.
I used to use Tidal, until they patched something, and now FLAC is impossible to obtain from Tidal. Hopefully it still works tomorrow, sheesh.
BoingBoomTschak 3 hours ago [-]
I have a free Deezer account from my family. Shit is extremely barren. Some examples:
1. (already posted on HN) Wanted to try Midori's early stuff, but no "1st" EP nor "2nd" LP. Not on Spotify nor Apple Music either.
3. Okay, let's try Meat Puppets' lauded second LP from my backlog... artist is there, but four first LPs aren't. On Spotify and Apple Music.
4. For fun, let's try to find that very obscure kote kei demo, (螺旋 (Rasen) - Hysterical Noi「z」e / Like「M」(1997)). Nothing, of course, but well, I can't even find it on private trackers or SoulSeek (got some mystery mp3s "somewhere").
So, if I were to stoop down to streaming, looks like Spotify/Apple are less worse here.
Shorel 36 minutes ago [-]
This is actually informative, thanks.
In my case, some music I want is unavailable, some releases from Discos Fuentes of Salsa Brava from the 1970s.
But, in this case, they are also unavailable from Tidal, Spotify, etc...
kombine 8 hours ago [-]
I've also canceled my Spotify sub three weeks ago and migrated to Navidrome. I'm still not quite satisfied with the available clients, I'm using Feishin. Fastpotift looks like a nice candidate to extend to support Navidrome.
jarym 11 hours ago [-]
> I think the golden age of music streaming is coming to an end
There was a world before Spotify. Though the music labels didn’t much like that world we can easily go back to it.
selcuka 10 hours ago [-]
> There was a world before Spotify
There was, and it was definitely not "the golden age of music streaming".
scrollop 6 hours ago [-]
What do you use to stream your local content? Using plex at the moment.
jorisw 8 hours ago [-]
> Spotify is in the process of killing the librespot project
Thanks, but don't see how this Issue backs that up.
the_mitsuhiko 5 hours ago [-]
Not sure what you call it, but new accounts are no longer able to use librespot.
colordrops 11 hours ago [-]
Why are they killing librespot?
HaloZero 10 hours ago [-]
Probably for the same reason Twitter killed their API, more control over the experience and to serve ads/cross-promote. More cross-promote for Spotify.
righthand 10 hours ago [-]
Spoiler: Spotify has always been terrible. The golden age of music streaming was Zune pass where you could stream and download 10 songs/mo.
And arguably Pandora always had a better radio algorithm than Spotify.
pjerem 9 hours ago [-]
The first Spotify client, the one in Qt was actually really good. Things started going downhill slowly when they integrated Facebook then very fast when they threw everything through the window to rewrite everything in electron.
szszrk 8 hours ago [-]
> Spotify has always been terrible.
It wasn't, really. At least not completely. I fully agree on the algorithm - I miss times of scrobbling to Last.fm, which was much better at this. (Spotify always supported scrobbling to Last.fm from their client, surprisingly).
Spotify used to be snappy and worked really well on Linux. I even used it for local libraries, as it was one of the few options that didn't crash on mine.
It was at the beautiful time when we realized web apps can have local storage, Google released that experiment called Chrome to "show public how modern browser can evolve and inspire other browser makers how to progress". We know it ended up in "extinguish the market with it", unfortunately.
But Spotify chose native app approach - they distributed it as packages. Deezer on the other hand, back then (I don't know now) had just native web app that could pull music locally. I think it was an extension of Chrome (?). It also worked perfectly fine on Linux, almost two decades ago.
We had a lot of decent options back then.
wahnfrieden 10 hours ago [-]
CIUT has some great shows and most are available online. University of Toronto.
protocolture 11 hours ago [-]
>I think the golden age of music streaming is coming to an end.
Already ended for me. They killed the plan I was on, and then started sending me begging emails to sign up for a new, more expensive one.
But once I experienced their platform with ads, I just stopped using it entirely.
echelon 11 hours ago [-]
> I think the golden age of music streaming is coming to an end.
It's just getting started.
We're going to vibe code the entire enshittified internet to be ours once again.
The dream of the 90's and 00's is alive again. The indie web is going to become unstoppable.
We can build anything of size and scale with the limited spare energy we have now. Every product will be reborn without big tech tendrils.
nalekberov 11 hours ago [-]
> We're going to vibe code the entire enshittified internet to be ours once again.
It’s such a wishful thinking, but no it doesn’t and won’t work this way. Code != useful product. Plus today’s web is all about fabricated content, AI bots, cloudflare challenge walls and all other annoying stuff. The very idea of being able to create something in seconds is already killing internet.
mixedCase 10 hours ago [-]
Garbage being created at unprecedented rates does not diminish the fact that LLMs are acting as a positive multiplier for useful tools; this very item being one.
No one in all these years had gone through the effort of replicating the Spotify client with a snappy fast interface for a reason. Everything had been an integration into already existing software, or simpler interfaces, because the effort was not worth it. The equation has changed.
flerp 9 hours ago [-]
who said anything about internet
echelon 10 hours ago [-]
You can look at the glass half full all you want, my glass is overflowing.
This is the best year in all of my 20 years in tech. I'm creating so much stuff and it's all I've ever wanted.
This is the dream of the 2000's, and big tech can't stop us anymore.
I think I'm going to write my own music player soon that behaves exactly like I want it to. Maybe this weekend. Or maybe right after my home automation project. But I can probably squeeze them both in.
It's like Christmas every day now.
nalekberov 10 hours ago [-]
Buddy, it’s the same big tech gave you this opportunity. You are creating so much stuff, but most of them are useless garbage that no one cares about.
echelon 10 hours ago [-]
> You are creating so much stuff, but most of them are useless garbage that no one cares about.
Are you so sure of that?
One of my projects is at $5M ARR in just six months. I passed $400k in sales this month. It's an open source project.
I'm teaching my wife to code and we're going to make a video game together. Surely you can see the value in that bonding experience? She never would have been interested prior to Claude Code.
I've been writing my own SRS software for drilling typing in Japanese. It's pretty fantastic. Nothing like that existed before I made it. So many needs that went unmet are just being filled.
That's just top of mind. I've been doing a ton.
Nobody likes to tag music the way I like to (multiple scalar quantified dimensions with clustering), so there's literally no music player on the planet in the shape that I want. If I'd wanted to build that before, I'd have to spend opportunity cost over several weekends to start building, plus the ongoing burden of maintenance. That's likely a few months burnt plus fixing things when API integrations break down. Now it's a few hours plus a bug fix here and there.
This is 3D printing for software.
I don't get the negativity. This is all so magical.
Shorel 5 hours ago [-]
I am very interested in your projects. Particularly the music player.
Tagging for Latin America music is basically a cluster fuck of misleading misunderstandings, there's not a single salsa, merengue, son, charanga, or bachata song that has been correctly tagged in any streaming platform o scrobbler. It's like the people using the platforms are deaf to the rhythms. WTF is Latin Jazz doing in a salsa song? Exactly.
nalekberov 10 hours ago [-]
Well, happy for ya.
righthand 9 hours ago [-]
Links to your $5M ARR FOSS? And is that Annualized Run Rate or Annual Recurring Revenue? I'm guessing the former.
> One of my projects is at $5M ARR in just six months. I passed $400k in sales this month. It's an open source project.
If it's the former ARR, then how are you at $5M if it took you six months to get to $400k? $5M/12 = $416,666.6666666667
Which correct me if I'm misunderstanding (I do frequently) but that means your best average sales month was ~$400k, not 6 months to reach $400k.
FYI on this site, I had to enable WebGL to get it to run in Firefox. Not sure why it requires WebGL specifically I didn't see anything on the pages that seemed to need something like that. They could be losing customers that can't load their site.
0fflineuser 9 hours ago [-]
If anyone is interested in selfhosting or wants to stop using spotify without losing the discoverabily:
I use explo+slsk+lidarr+navidrome, for access on my phone I use dsub2000 or symfonium but mainly dsub2000.
Explo is the software used for the discovery https://github.com/LumePart/Explo
It automatically downloads daily jams, weekly jams and weekly exploration playlists from your listenbrainz account(free) using youtube, soulseek(with slskd) or lidarr (support was merged very recently).
I also imported all my artists from my spotify account when I migrated which you can do in lidarr with the plugin ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶k̶ ̶ bellow ̶b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶s̶u̶p̶p̶o̶r̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶i̶n̶ ̶l̶i̶d̶a̶r̶r̶.̶
This plugin is also needed for downloading songs with slsk in lidarr.
herzzolf 8 hours ago [-]
Thanks for sharing Explo, looks like a good project for discovery, I’m going to check it out!
I’m using a similar setup, with Lidar/Navidrome, but using Subwave for discovery. It works very well for going through your library and playing music like a radio station would, but it won’t recommend anything that’s not already in there.
kombine 8 hours ago [-]
I'm using a similar setup with soularr, and I just need to import my playlists from Spotify, but I'd rather not use a fork of lidarr.
0fflineuser 8 hours ago [-]
Hi,
Actually it's not a fork it's the docker image for the plugin branch.
Sorry I set this up quite a long while ago and didn't remember correctly.
I used lscr.io/linuxserver/lidarr:nightly, note that the `latest` tag won't work as it's using the `master` branch which doesn't have plugin support yet, so either use the `nightly` tag or the `develop` tag.
I recently went through most of the Spotify clients I could find on GitHub, looking for something "lean", including screen real estate.
Most of the GUI apps had something similar to the official app in the maximized window, but none had a good mini-player, something I could put in the corner of an external monitor and control most of the important functions with minimal mouse clicking, including EQ and playlist.
Interestingly this one with its Winamp mode is what I was looking for. Nostaliga is probably playing a part, but it a good UI does not have to be "modern".
I also went through a tour of TUI apps. Lots of interesting work there, but a full TUI with windows was less convenient to navigate, and some of them try to do too much. I wound up using https://github.com/hrkfdn/ncspot because it specifically does not attempt to be a character mode GUI. Almost like a ViMusic.
Dansvidania 3 minutes ago [-]
I would welcome a mobile counterpart to this, if it is even possible. The iOS app is even worse.
hndqbrg2uk 6 minutes ago [-]
Nice to see fastpotify framed this way — I'd been circling the same idea without the right words.
Semkas 7 hours ago [-]
Lots of people seem to care about whether a project was built by hand over time by a few committed developers, or if it was vibe-coded in the past week by a single person.
Whether the distinction matters or not, it would be nice for everyone involved if projects falling into the second category were more upfront about that.
crossroadsguy 2 hours ago [-]
I don't think it's needed or a fair ask. Even though project clearly shows one of the contributors as Claude. There are excellent AI assisted software out there and shite software "crafted" by bare fist and knuckles violently banging a mechanical keyboard in a glorious hacker dungeon.
When I commit I either mark it as my own commit if I've read through every line of that commit at least once (not skimmed), pushed back, changed, etc, or put as "ai@<a word I use>" if it was mostly "fine, do it…" or the "whatever… " phase. I never let AI write a single word of documentation or comment. And I made sure Claude removed its attribution the first time I started using it. Besides I was using GLM 5.2 at that time so Claude was not a fit anyway. I don't think they should have that default behaviour.
yitchelle 7 hours ago [-]
As a matter of interest, would seeing a full disclosure that vibe coding was used sway your decision one way or the other?
matsemann 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, a project maintained and built over longer time has a bigger chance of staying relevant, than someone's weekend fun they will abandon once the dopamine hit of "making something" wears off.
slowin 8 minutes ago [-]
Isn't software written by hand more likely to be abandoned due to the extremely costly nature of keeping its development going? Abandonware definitely existed prior to vibe coding. As long as it's open source, now you can pick it up and keep vibe-developing it if you care to, for very little money/effort.
Semkas 6 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure what decision you're talking about.
My comment just mentions that it would be convenient if disclosure of vibe-coding was more common.
I can look for myself and see that the repo was started a week ago and has had hundreds of commits since, and that the author exclusively talks about ai on twitter. I'd just like it if I could save myself some time, and it would prevent useless discussions in this thread were people argue whether the commit-messages look like ai.
bodge5000 6 hours ago [-]
I'll admit to having some bias against vibe coding, but trying to put that aside I think it depends on the purpose of the project. If it attempts to be an improvement over existing software then absolutely yes it would, things like speed, performance, security and reliability are not something I'd trust vibe coding for. If its for doing something novel where the previously mentioned is less of the focus, I can imagine myself looking past that, sure.
Citizen_Lame 6 hours ago [-]
Due to security and future updates, yes.
IshKebab 4 hours ago [-]
It would save time from having to figure out that myself.
bilekas 46 minutes ago [-]
My worry with this, like all Spotify clients really, is its dependance on Spotify's, quite litteraly, worst public facing API that is known to exist.
I have been using Spotatui and it's been fast enough, but it would be nice sometimes to have a better 'new music' search experience. I'll give this a try, but if Spotify are hell bent on destroying API users, I fear the project maintainers will have more work than it's worth.
egeozcan 9 hours ago [-]
Winamp feature is great but so random, and I love how it's listed as if it's a usual feature expected from any music player.
Hoping for a future in which people complain about missing basic functionality like winamp mode being missing in their music player of choice!
Let me start: I was going to recommend foobar2000 with the spotify plugin but the lack of a winamp mode must be a dealbreaker for many!
devindotcom 8 hours ago [-]
I get around the lack of such a mode by still using winamp!
abrookewood 9 hours ago [-]
I think the key call out with this is how cool egui is (the Rust GUI library it uses). Check out their website: https://www.egui.rs/
Edit: egui is an immediate mode GUI library written in Rust. egui runs natively on , and on the web it is compiled to WebAssembly and rendered with WebGL or WebGPU. Everything you see is rendered as textured triangles. There is no DOM, HTML, JS or CSS. Just Rust.
bschwindHN 8 hours ago [-]
Devs are constantly making the mistake of falling in love with immediate mode GUIs... because it's convenient for them, the developer. For the user, it's almost always a worse experience as things don't behave in the same way as the rest of the platform they're on.
egui is great for video game debug UI overlays and internal tools, and maybe some specialized graphical tools. Otherwise its quirks are too annoying for general purpose app usage. Sure, you banged out a UI quickly with it, at the expense of your users.
piker 5 hours ago [-]
No, it’s fine. It’s the longer term DX that takes a hit. Anything other systems can do, immediate mode can do, because like those systems you can always cache across frames. The same can’t really be said for retained mode. We wrote some about it here: https://tritium.legal/blog/desktop
magackame 5 hours ago [-]
Can you list your exact complaints? It's a GUI like any other.
bschwindHN 3 hours ago [-]
Alright I downloaded the thing, just for you.
* Right off the bat in the login screen, if you resize the window, it flickers
* I logged in. Double clicking the top part of the window doesn't maximize it, like I expect on basically all other windows. I'm using MacOS, btw
* Resizing the main home screen is also a flickery mess. Though I'll give credit, it's a fast flickery mess, because the official spotify app resizes like ass
* Okay, here's one more specific to egui and why I think its approach is not good outside of the app types I listed in my original comment: I type some text in the search bar. Let's say I want to highlight the last word after I've typed it, in order to delete it or type something else. On every other app on my system, I can hold Option + Shift + Left Arrow Key. Or perhaps Cmd + Arrow Keys to move the cursor to the start or end of the line. The egui app just doesn't work, because egui misses so many fine details about text manipulation on a given OS.
* In general, text handling just sucks
* Scrolling doesn't have the inertial bounce when it hits the ends of a scroll action
* It's very easy to create overlapping UI elements by resizing panels and/or the window itself.
Anyway, those are just some of the things from a few minutes of trying this specific app out.
In general, if it's an egui app, I already know there will be weird resizing glitches/flickers, a poor text editing experience, and it will typically not follow the platform's idioms and built-in gestures, scroll physics, behaviors, etc. In this case, the app is decent since it mostly just needs to play music, and you mercifully don't need to interact with it much when it comes to text and such.
But saying "It's a GUI like any other" is like saying "wonderbread is a bread like any other". Maybe it's a curse of knowledge? Similar things happen with coffee. One person says "tastes like coffee" while another can pick out individual flavor notes. Maybe I'm shouting into the void and no one gives a shit anymore, I dunno. But to me, these things matter and are a mark of quality.
If we have LLMs that can shit out whatever code now, why aren't people having them output truly "native" GUIs that use the UI framework of the OS so they can get all the expected behaviors by default?
wasmperson 17 minutes ago [-]
This seems like more of a complaint about egui's choice to re-implement all the widgets from scratch than its choice to use an immediate mode API. The two are orthogonal. The IMGUI idea has its roots in a community of people that like implementing things from scratch, but you could implement it on top of native widgets if you wanted to.
The choice to re-implement native widgets from scratch is justifiable if the egui devs think they can do better than the native widgets do. It's also nearly required in practice if they want the toolkit to have consistent behavior across multiple platforms (something people have learned the hard way multiple times across multiple different UI libraries).
It's hard to get it right, but that's why the egui devs are writing a library: so that others can benefit from that hard work. Many of the things you pointed out are just bugs, and bugs can be fixed.
theodorc 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
TonyStr 8 hours ago [-]
I was about to come here and say that egui is a terrible choice for web. Everything is rendered in a canvas, so accessibility and extensibility is thrown out of the window. Basic browser functions like pinch-zoom don't work, it has some very wonky visual bugs when resizing the window, interactions have a very noticeable delay, no browser extensions work with this.
This is really not a good solution for web apps, and if you're vibe coding your apps anyway, there isn't any reason not to have a native browser application.
WithinReason 9 hours ago [-]
The anti-aliasing is broken, it doesn't apply gamma correction
IshKebab 8 hours ago [-]
Did you look at it recently? Until a few months ago text was a blurry mess but it seems like they've mostly fixed it now.
Fumblenuts 8 hours ago [-]
This feels like it would be an accessibility nightmare?
But maybe it could be cool for doing some advanced animations or rendering games or something.
troupo 8 hours ago [-]
> Everything you see is rendered as textured triangles. There is no DOM, HTML, JS or CSS. Just Rust.
So that's why text selection doesn't work.
punarinta 11 hours ago [-]
Software has finally started to get faster, and I love it.
Pls don't consider this a spam, but if anyone is interested in a fast native Slack client, I'm building one, since Slack themselves don't want to: https://msga.app
ainiriand 9 hours ago [-]
Make MSTeams Great Again when? Amazing work btw.
sceptic123 5 hours ago [-]
Teams was never great to start with
idonotknowwhy 3 hours ago [-]
I just looked through the slop Readme file, it looks like teams is supported.
punarinta 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, Teams is supported, but since their API is really poor compared to Slack, the support is pretty limited.
rsolva 9 hours ago [-]
Just tried your slack client, it has all the features I need and it is super smooth and lightweight, thanks!
Shorel 5 hours ago [-]
Love it.
I did the same for Postman/Bruno.
j1elo 50 minutes ago [-]
I've been using Slint as UI toolkit for Rust and so far liked it, coming as I am from the Qt/QML world.
However, at the beginning I had to choose between Slint[1] and egui[2] (which this project uses)
Anyone has experience in both and is able to drop some thoughts on their strengths & weaknesses for mid-to-large projects?
harel 2 hours ago [-]
This looks great, I'll give it a try. It seems like most of the comments focus on how this was created, whether it's vibe coded, agent engineered, LLM assisted or however you want to term this.
On one hand, I am sad at the collapse of my craft. I love building things in code, figuring it out from the system design to the last compile. On the other hand, I love how productive I am now. How I can complete tasks faster. As someone mentioned, there is a very larger distance between "I vibed coded it and I don't know how it worked" to "I built it and I used LLMs to assist the process".
It is possible to design a system, and instruct LLMs to write code for you. Task them the actual act of code writing, not feature development. It's not "build me a music player" but "I'm building a music player that works like so, and you will now write me the play button component that will behave like so and so, focusing on this or that, paying attention to x, y and z and avoiding a, b and c".
Although the scope is different but I imagine a similar debate when one didn't need to write machine code anymore...
Retr0id 5 hours ago [-]
Interesting. I've always wanted something like this. The official Spotify player sucks in many ways, but the UI/UX is decent, or at the very least I'm used to it now.
All the other lightweight Spotify clients roll their own UIs in ways that I don't like, so I really appreciate that their LLM has taken the time to clone the UI 1:1.
But now I have to decide if I want someone else's vibecode on my computer. I think not.
jeffgreco 2 hours ago [-]
This is cool. A few small thoughts:
- would love to be able to disable podcasts / anything non music related. it's my #1 gripe with the official Spotify client today.
- Winamp buttons shouldn't remain "pressed" in that play state
- Winamp doesn't like being stuck to one edge of the screen, after putting there and interacting it will often jump inward a bit
- Winamp could use the EQ in collapsed mode
- Would be nice for Winamp to remember its position (i think it grabs the NW corner of the large player every time?
djhworld 4 hours ago [-]
I might be misremembering, but I swear when Spotify launched it was a big revelation at the time because the client was super fast and playback was almost instantaneous. This was a big deal as other music players like iTunes were bloated.
Obviously streaming was the big selling point, something that iTunes didn’t offer at the time, but I swear the client was written in some native UI framework, along with the C/C++ library.
Or was the spotify UI always just a browser engine skin and the perception of speed was from the playback engine?
Anyway, cool to see projects like this
wasmperson 8 minutes ago [-]
I found a talk with some history of the Spotify client's transition:
It was originally native, then native with some web-based bits, and then the web-based bits slowly ate the whole thing. It seems the ease of development with web-tech compared to C++ (also the better font rendering and screen reader support) was just too tempting.
Interestingly the Spotify client was never based on electron but instead arrived independently at the "chromium + web app" architecture at around the same time as Atom did.
oxymoron 2 hours ago [-]
Ludvig Strigeus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Strigeus?wprov=sfti1 wrote the original client, and fast, lean, native clients was his modus operandi. OpenTTD and uTorrent were both built the same way. I’ve been wondering on and off over the years why Spotify abandoned it. My guess is that it was hard to scale that approach and that a hybrid browser client was easier to scale when there are many different engineering teams working on different parts of the client.
What's funny about having to rely on unauthorized clones to provide a fast native UX was that Spotify's original client back in 2008 started out as beautifully light, custom rendered native client.
Few Apps ever had that wow factor the first time I used it, it was so much lighter and more responsive than anything else of the day. I remember being perplexed at how I could search and skip to any part of a song quicker than iTunes could looking at a local library. Everything was latency-free and instantaneous.
We were building a Music Startup at the time, so we investigated how it worked. We we’re very surprised we couldn’t find any evidence of an established UI toolkit. It looked as though they had built their own custom UI renderer and optimized TCP protocol which sent back its metadata in XML. Their traffic looked like it was initially seeded from their own (or CDN) servers (for best latency) and then overtime we would see some P2P traffic on the wire.
Our QT/C++ client had decent performance but was noticeably heavier than Spotify's. I was disappointed to see their native client eventually be abandoned and succumb to become yet another Chromium wrapper. I expect it fell to the pressures of a growing startup adding 100s of developers (without the skill of their original CTO/devs) where a native UI couldn't be updated and re-iterated as fast as a Web App. I wish they maintained 2 desktop clients, and left their native client alone to just be an audio player and push all their new social features to their new flagship CEF app.
It's unfortunate the skill and desire of building fast native UIs are being lost to Electron and CEF wrappers. Seems the larger the organization the more likely they are to build new Web rendered Desktop Apps and we have to rely on unauthorized Indie efforts like this for fast, responsive native UIs.
(The comment is from a 2021 post about another Rust-based Spotify client.)
exitb 11 hours ago [-]
It’s not specific to this program, but I lately get this feeling that distributing widely a piece of software that exists for 5 days and saw a dozen releases in that period is stretching the open source trust model.
fishgoesblub 11 hours ago [-]
Spotify used to use Qt for its desktop client. Good times.
reddalo 7 hours ago [-]
Good times. The old Spotify client was native and fast. I miss that. The new one is heavy and clunky.
occz 7 hours ago [-]
This is actually wrong, it was never QT. It was however not built with web technologies back in the day
AtNightWeCode 3 hours ago [-]
Did it really? I remember that Wimp used Adobe Air and Deezer used Flash.
qgin 32 minutes ago [-]
Not helpful for Linux users, but FYI both the Windows and Mac Apple Music clients are native apps.
progbits 7 hours ago [-]
What do you all use to buy music these days?
I've been slowly trying to stop my spotify usage and replace it with owned audio files.
Mostly I try to use Bandcamp but many artists are not there. Sometimes I just rip the audio from youtube but would prefer a way to buy that gives most of the money to the artist.
hipgrave 6 hours ago [-]
I've found that it's actually surprisingly difficult to find a lot of music I like for purchase. Bandcamp is good but there is also 7Digital (both owned by Songtradr), Bleep and Qobuz. 7Digital usually has stuff that won't be on Bandcamp. There are also a few newer alternatives popping up like Ampwall, Subvert, and Mirlo.
embedding-shape 7 hours ago [-]
Saving everything until Bandcamp Fridays for the ones on Bandcamp, otherwise pretty much Beatport or not buying it at all. Some labels I've listened to for a long time (like Liquicity) I buy the music straight from their store, figure the artist/label gets the most then.
benrutter 7 hours ago [-]
I don't stream and buy all my music (aside from radio etc), I get music from:
- Bandcamp (for new music)
- Second hand CDs for charity shops and discogs (for older music)
- Quoboz / Amazon (for new music not on bandcamp or something specific I can't find elsewhere)
aorth 7 hours ago [-]
After discovering music I like on YouTube or whatever, I buy albums on Bandcamp and Qobuz if possible, and Amazon as a last resort. Then I host them on my personal Navidrome server to enjoy without involving any big tech.
smcleod 7 hours ago [-]
Bandcamp, and I have on several occasions emailed the band directly and asked if I could purchase directly from them.
dotancohen 7 hours ago [-]
Are compact discs no longer available? I used to rip from those - every album I've ever downloaded and kept I have the CD for. Some bought before the download, many bought after.
But it's been a long time since I've heard anything good enough to purchase.
VilleSalonen 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
nasso_dev 3 hours ago [-]
i also prefer bandcamp but since nobody has mentioned it yet, there is also beatport
jbarberu 7 hours ago [-]
My personal tier list is:
- Bandcamp
- CD
- 7digital
I host the media on a Jellyfin server and use offline playlists on my phone with Finamp for Android, works quite well for me!
sznio 7 hours ago [-]
I go to the weekly flea market and sometimes find something that interests me
krater23 5 hours ago [-]
Fuck it! I sail away under the flag of jolly rogers...harrrrrr!!!
VilleSalonen 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
infomiho 2 hours ago [-]
I had the same urge recently, I got tired of huge RAM use. It looks much less cool, but it suits my needs.
Looks good, but ran into loading spinners fairly quickly, large playlists kill this, I suspect because the api is not properly respecting the cache headers and is refetching the same information repeatedly and thus getting rate limited. Also
Once that happened I wasn't then sure if issues I'm seeing are from api or the app itself. It's possible this is prioritising the responsiveness of the UI rather than the actual speed of user interactions.
Also the menu bar icon doesn't work for me (on MacOs). I can see it, but it doesn't do anything and there's nothing in the app itself to enable/disable it (though thankfully it does respect cmd+drag to delete).
sceptic123 5 hours ago [-]
Also doesn't seem to remember player position between app openings
merrvk 8 hours ago [-]
Tried using Spotify web client on Safari the other day. Performance was absolutely terrible.
For comparison I was using Apple Music via safari before.
I’m just surprised that such a big company can produce such an awful web experience, guess everyone is just using the native app, but for some that’s not possible
Waterluvian 4 hours ago [-]
Spotify on Ubuntu one day stopped outputting audio and never again could I get it to work. How do you screw up the one thing your app needs to do?!
I use Strawberry as my music player on Linux, which is a native Qt app and has Spotify integration. No need for the spotify app.
Strawberry has great collection support as I own thousands of ripped CDs.
mdnahas 1 hours ago [-]
I just looked at Strawberry. Spotify is done via a GStreamer plug-in. It looks like you have to compile it yourself.
GuestFAUniverse 8 hours ago [-]
That name is horrible.
Potify sounds like a toddler is learning to take a dump.
And well, putting "fast" in front of it doesn't impress either in that case.
Traubenfuchs 7 hours ago [-]
Potify, the scientifically proven way to get toddlers potty trained, with wearables, app support and an AI coach.
mappu 10 hours ago [-]
If you're focused on lightweight, native and fast, I don't think you should use an immediate-mode GUI toolkit. Why does an app like this need to hit a 60fps framerate? It's not a game.
mijoharas 8 hours ago [-]
I was surprised to see an immediate mode gui toolkit.
They're great to integrate into a game loop because you control your loop, (and they're a delight to use) but I thought for perf retained mode was the way to go?
Am I missing something? Then again if the bar needing to be beaten is spotify's existing desktop app maybe it doesn't matter?
7 hours ago [-]
winrid 10 hours ago [-]
Most immediate mode does a scene graph diff so it's not that bad
I have a custom IM GUIs based ide thing in C++ that uses like .2% of my 10yo CPU.
IshKebab 8 hours ago [-]
Egui doesn't do that. But it's written in Rust and only updates when you interact with it so in practice it's way more efficient than I would have expected.
earcar 6 hours ago [-]
Author here. Two reasons I chose an immediate mode UI framework:
1. Latency. A click paints on the next frame, because it sidesteps the stages of a retained mode UI: there's no dirty-marking, no layout and paint passes scheduled for later, no cached visual state that can be stale.
2. Simplicity. The UI is a plain function of app state. There's no retained tree to keep in sync and no invalidation bugs: mutate the state and the next frame shows it.
Yes, the drawback is that you have to watch what a frame costs, but it doesn't repaint at every frame. It paints on input and you can schedule repaints yourself. Fastpotify sits at zero CPU when idle, asks for a few frames a second while a track plays, and runs at full rate only while you scroll.
Other than having abysmal inconsistencies in their UI, ive never had any problems with the native Spotify app. I've been using Spotify for 10 years now and when im on my PC i open the app, either put my Podcast or song and then minimize it. Didnt know people had such issues with the app.
4 hours ago [-]
angelofthe0dd 3 hours ago [-]
I use the Spotify browser UI on my PC because the Windows 11 app is such a joke. However, the browser UI makes my screen go completely black for a second every single time. That's my #1 reason for wanting to try this. Spotify's playlist algorithm is a joke at best, but that's another issue altogether.
NoboruWataya 7 hours ago [-]
Wow, I was going to say I assume the pic in the top right is of the official Spotify client, which seems confusing, but it seems this actually just looks really like the official client. Which is good but possibly makes it more likely Spotify will come after you.
The UI feels a lot less sluggish than the official client (which in my experience seems to have gotten way worse lately) but in many cases I am just sent to a loading page which ultimately takes a similar amount of time to load the content. So it seems a lot of the slowness is coming from the Spotify server side, it's just that the official client seems to freeze while waiting for a response whereas this doesn't.
Hopefully Spotify don't kill librespot. As I understand it you can basically only use it with Premium accounts, so it's not like they aren't getting paid anyway. If some other provider were to come along and offer access to the same content as Spotify with a stable API that you can use with any client, I would pay more for that than I currently do for Spotify.
As an aside, ncspot is another good and more minimalise Spotify client, which is a TUI.
Skwid 6 hours ago [-]
If anyone wants a lightweight, GUI, non-slopcoded spotify client I find spotify-qt[1] does the job nicely.
Alas, it wears only the skin of your system QT theme
I can’t speak for mobile, but the desktop/web product has been a disaster for years. When Spotify went full Electron a few years back, a bunch of standard macOS keyboard shortcuts stopped working. These issues were on their “support” forum for years before being automatically closed.
mjaniczek 2 hours ago [-]
I like the idea of a fast Spotify player, but I can't get over my doubts of LLM code quality when the audio playback stutters even with the 200ms output buffer setting (on macOS).
2 hours ago [-]
arajnoha 5 hours ago [-]
Just came to say that official client (all its processes combined) uses 1.1Gb of RAM on my macbook air, while this, playing the same track from the same playlist and nothing else, gets only up to 280Mb
Retr0id 5 hours ago [-]
That's an improvement for sure, but 280MB also seems like a lot.
piker 5 hours ago [-]
Because the official client is an electron app.
flyingjoe 4 hours ago [-]
I came here to say the opposite. Running on MacOS 15.7 the original Client uses ~200mb and Fastpotify uses ~500mb playing the same song while being substantially slower when navigating music.
EDIT: I forgot about the Spotify Helper processes - taken into account the original spotify needs ~1GB.
However it's still a lot faster than Fastpotify
baggachipz 2 hours ago [-]
Go easy on Spotify, they don't have much budget left after paying ungodly sums of money for exclusive contracts with nazi-enablers.
stan-ely 2 hours ago [-]
Looks neat, i hope the librespot issues from the initial days don't come up here
sznio 9 hours ago [-]
I've been thinking recently about buying an AI-capable GPU and using it to reverse-enginner and debloat apps I use every day. It seems like a task that even a dumber AI model could do. Disassemble the app, then either cut the things I don't care about, or just implement it fresh in a correct way.
IshKebab 8 hours ago [-]
I don't think models that run on single GPUs are capable of that yet sadly. You still need to spend ~$100k to get an actually good local LLM. Correct me if I'm wrong, local AI guys. It's really hard to get actually numbers on this stuff, but to run e.g. GLM 5.3 Flash as far as I can tell you need one of those super expensive 8 GPU machines.
sznio 7 hours ago [-]
if i tasked it with "create spotify" I'd need that much.
asking it to "disassemble Spotify and find out the minimal code path needed to play a song" is much more in reach. I don't need it to oneshot it. If it gets stuck, I've read enough disassembled C to figure it out and get it unblocked.
Instead of banging my head against a binary for 5 hours, I'll have my agent bang it's weights for 20 hours, then put in my 1 hour of polish.
My first task would be to fix the Android version of Facebook Messenger. My friends still stick with it because they have iPhones, and that version works fine. I have been putting up with broken image previews for 2 years now. I'll fix that fucking wild pointer they don't care about and make it usable as a chat app. And I'll remove the ads while at that.
Shorel 5 hours ago [-]
Qwen 3.8 will do it, but it will probably require 72 hours or more.
doublerabbit 7 hours ago [-]
Aye, and those 8GPU machines are expensive. Powering 2x GPU for GLM is eye watering expense, £5k a month.
alejoar 2 hours ago [-]
Doesn't appear to find Nest speakers :(
I'd use it otherwise, this is great.
prinny_ 5 hours ago [-]
This may be a low effort comment but I just wanted to say that there was a missed opportunity to call this project Spotifast.
stuaxo 4 hours ago [-]
One of the things I liked the least about spotify is typing in a song name, and then getting a infinite list of every song named like that.
I want the song to be a starting point, like Last.fm radio was, I almost never want to listen to every version of it.
DressOrc 1 hours ago [-]
oh wow, Ive been waiting for this for years, its insane we run entire browsers just to play music. Very excited to try this out
drooopy 2 hours ago [-]
I find spotify to be more bloated now than iTunes was when apple pulled the plug on it.
som 5 hours ago [-]
Love the Winamp feature - but more so that it comes with milkdrop! That is next level.
What would YouTube music support look like? And another random feature request - universal playlist import / export (i.e. take my YouTube playlist and convert it to Spotify and vice versa - Rosetta stone style)
ljouhet 3 hours ago [-]
I used `cargo install --path . --locked` to install (had an error when compiling `librespot`)
Ciantic 7 hours ago [-]
Very cool. I'm cloning the repo, just in case it gets taken down. I've been using EGUI, but its biggest problem is that LLMs really struggle with it. There isn't enough good examples of it. This codebase seems to have a lot of good examples, so given this as a reference, one might make a lot of progress much faster.
bjord 2 hours ago [-]
need this for android. on average, it takes genuinely about five minutes to open—I think it reindexes my entire micro sd card every time.
sota_pop 4 hours ago [-]
Kudos, I have been carrying exactly this on my personal “to do” projects list for quite some time. Looks really nice!
ramon156 6 hours ago [-]
I'd love to put in some love and effort into a Spotify replacemeny that supports jams. I'd share the app with friends. I needed an excuse to make a cross-platform app anyway.
sandrew17 3 hours ago [-]
The classic skins are bringing me back. Well done.
I would pay reasonable money for a similar native MS Teams client. I now run teams on a separate laptop to avoid it killing my main work machine.
dzonga 3 hours ago [-]
whether vibe coded (which it is) or not - this is free work for a corporation.
that could hardly care less for it's users / customers.
cdrnsf 3 hours ago [-]
I've been using Navidrome for a while and love it (long enough to have written an iOS + macOS client). I mount my music from a B2 bucket and use a shell script to sync additions to it. AudioMuse-AI does a great job generating playlists and populating similar artists. There are lyrics plugins, an Apple Music plugin that can populate metadata and on and on. It's a great system and free from the catalogue rot and slop that's been eroding the benefits of streaming for a while now.
TKAB 3 hours ago [-]
oh my god. The WinAMP mode is awesome! Probably been waiting for this to be available on macOS for 20 years.
swah 4 hours ago [-]
Doesn't play but looks just like the original.
quyleanh 4 hours ago [-]
It’s relied on librespot so cannot work with free account.
amadeuspagel 7 hours ago [-]
It's hard to think of a name worse then "spotify" itself, but fast "fastpotify" may be it.
drxzcl 10 hours ago [-]
That seems like the kind of name that's gonna earn you a C&D.
Walf 11 hours ago [-]
Fuck Spotify. Even if you don't care about the ethics of Daniel Ek's investments, the platform itself is crap. One of the lowest paying to artists, not paying at all unless they hit a threshold, and the catalogue is filling up with AI slop, which they push on users via 'radio' and 'mix' playlists, so they can pay even less royalties. No, thanks.
SuperMouse 11 hours ago [-]
I've tested Deezer for half a year. The software quality was horrible.
Had a lot of crashes, it often took many many seconds to change between the songs and often getting stuck, the buffering algorithm was nuts and eating a lot of bandwidth.
Everything on a standard Pixel. Full 5G coverage was available.
Alternatives?
zcrar70 10 hours ago [-]
Qobuz have the highest per stream payout rate for artists [0], and have the best audio quality of all streaming platforms (better even that Tidal imho). They have desktop, mobile and android auto (and presumably carplay) clients, and an equivalent to Spotify Connect whereby streaming can be switched to a different client.
Downsides are no native client (same webview approach as Spotify), not as strong recommendations (though slowly improving), good but slightly quirkier UI (also slowly improving). For me the trade offs are worthwhile.
I've been happy with Qobuz as well. I use the third party open source QBZ client on Linux desktop.
cmehdy 11 hours ago [-]
Tidal is the last streaming service I use, split between that and a jellyfin+arrs setup coupled with buying music from artists directly.
Fuck Spotify and their rotten leadership. Was amongst the early adopters (2009). I'm sure they won't care for the loss, and I won't miss th when they're gone.
jorisw 8 hours ago [-]
Seriously tried Tidal. Gave up on it because of the software quality.
_kidlike 7 hours ago [-]
Also, I know it's a bit niche, but Deezer does not have an equivalent of "Spotify Connect" protocol, which means that Network Integrated Amplifiers (like Onkyo A-50), CANNOT implement a player with good UX. Spotify is now king since they introduced lossless quality which is enabled by default in such amplifiers. The benefit is that there is no local streaming (e.g. Bluetooth) and no latency. The data come from Spotify directly to the amplifier and then your speakers.
So, Deezer that had a audiophile target audience, has effectively lost the game.
LollipopYakuza 2 hours ago [-]
Nitpicking but those devices do not "benefit lossless by default" after Spotify started offering it.
I was very disapointed that my Yamaha network receiver didn't get an update to support lossless from Spotify Connect.
_kidlike 40 minutes ago [-]
:exploding-head:
sznio 7 hours ago [-]
>The benefit is that there is no local streaming (e.g. Bluetooth)
how is a lack of an offline, standard, widely supported option a benefit?
_kidlike 6 hours ago [-]
I didn't say this is not supported. But it's not as good as streaming from Spotify directly to the amp, and the media decoding happens locally.
Adding the Bluetooth layer adds more layers of encoding/decoding, and generally speaking it has narrower bandwidth.
Walf 11 hours ago [-]
Tried Tidal? The one gripe I have with it is no remote control, as in using phone to change what's currently playing on the device connected to my sound system, without it thinking I want to start playing on my phone.
Apple Music pays artists better, too.
mcmcmc 10 hours ago [-]
I left when they forced podcasts into my music app and never looked back
tamimio 10 hours ago [-]
The best is to host your own, navidrome is great and easy to set up. But if you really wanna hate on one, it’s Apple Music, believe it or not, they will actually delete ALL your playlists that you made over the years if you stop paying subscription for few weeks or sometime for days, why? Because Apple says fuck you, you are renting and you are not entitled for anything, which also explains why they are now trying to have hardware as a service with their new renting hardware program.. at least spotify doesn’t do that and keep your playlist to export later.
ourcat 6 hours ago [-]
Careful, you'll get downvoted by knee-jerk reactions from people who have absolutely no idea whatsoever about the harm Spotify causes to artists trying to survive in the music industry.
Walf 1 hours ago [-]
I already did ;)
veeti 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
broodbucket 10 hours ago [-]
Would be great if it could get included in Flathub, without it, I'd rather have an AppImage than a Flatpak file I think
smcleod 7 hours ago [-]
I wish someone would do this for Apple Music. Their app is dreadful!
zoky 11 hours ago [-]
It supports WinAmp skins too… Dare I say it?
hdjrudni 11 hours ago [-]
It really whips the llama's ass?
monster_truck 11 hours ago [-]
I hacked the official client apart to hide some bullshit (like podcasts) and fix bugs that were pissing me off. Shared it exactly once and it stopped working within a month. Bugs were still there too
I stopped sharing after that.
figmert 11 hours ago [-]
Have you seen Spicetify[0]? It allows for this kind of stuff and seems to be a lot more stable than doing it all manually.
This app is a dream come true for me. As a user I'm heavily invested in Spotify but I've grown more and more irritated with their client. Especially the recommendations, which thankfully are largely absent from your client.
Would love a setting to also remove the "Made for you" section, as well as the "Recommended for you" section, both on the home page.
I was using Spicetify to customize the official client to this effect, using CSS.
mijoharas 7 hours ago [-]
I was curious about the choice of an immediate mode rather than retained GUI toolkit.
Could you speak a little more about the trade-offs and decisions there w.r.t. performance.
Per another comment, is it true that you trick people wanting to view your code on GitHub, into starring your repo?
earcar 8 hours ago [-]
No. The "Star" button on the website is a simple link to the repo.
benjaomin 7 hours ago [-]
I takes several seconds to load the Queue, what's happening there?
benjaomin 7 hours ago [-]
correction: it took several seconds to load the queue the first time.
armcat 10 hours ago [-]
You had me at Winamp
angelofthe0dd 3 hours ago [-]
Winamp was peak.
toomasr 4 hours ago [-]
Now we just need an iOS app that doesn't offer you a choice of speakers on every open and you can just hit play as you intended
eonmatrix 2 hours ago [-]
Cool project. Building it on Fedora is another story.
baxuz 6 hours ago [-]
Fastslopify
haaz 4 hours ago [-]
always thought the spotify ui was really really good, it just has way more features and feels like it is made by a great team that actually uses the app and has input over it's design, vs apple music which is just a normal app that feels like it was made by a committee
ourcat 7 hours ago [-]
Vibe coded or not, Spotify is a disgusting company for artists, however fast or fancy it's made.
yonisto 4 hours ago [-]
Serious question: down the road, what's the point of such a UI? (Don't get me wrong, I really like and enjoy it!)
My spouse, for example, doesn't interact with her clock app anymore—she just talks to it.
Wouldn't many programs just use a local LLM to perform whatever is needed?
winrid 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
dylanger 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
rixed 11 hours ago [-]
Another site tricking users willing to look at the code into starring the repo instead.
How desperate do you need to be to resort to this?
yedpodtrzitko 10 hours ago [-]
I had to read the comment a few times. Do you mean "starring" instead of "starting"?
rixed 10 hours ago [-]
Yes sorry, fixed. Thanks!
earcar 8 hours ago [-]
No. The "Star" button is a simple link to the repo.
nalekberov 10 hours ago [-]
Without looking at the codebase I am pretty sure it’s a vibe coded rust app, because this is what today’s most programmers understand about software.
txdv 9 hours ago [-]
the commits are very fine grained and the text is unusually not AI.
I mean you can beat AI to do anything nowadays, but this looks not that bad
ghosty141 8 hours ago [-]
I'd argue nobody writes such long commit messages this consistently. I'm VERY sure this is fully AI generated.
TonyStr 7 hours ago [-]
The volume of commits is quite crazy. For example, he wrote a +486/-51 commit in 20 minutes (33287cb) with quite dense rust code. That's about 25 changes per minute -- very impressive! The docs also smell of LLM output, for example describing the app as native despite using egui/wgpu.
But hey, he's here, we can just ask him! @earcar
inexcf 7 hours ago [-]
What about egui and wgpu is not native?
Those are both generally what is considered running something natively. Both even mention running "natively" in their descriptions.
I guess what you mean is "OS-provided controls". In that case, ye that is not what this is.
tetrisgm 10 hours ago [-]
and?
worldsavior 10 hours ago [-]
That's boring, and unmaintainable.
txdv 9 hours ago [-]
until someone comes up with a non vibe coded one ill be happy having at least a fast option
dzikimarian 3 hours ago [-]
It's working way better than original client. What does it say about Spotify devs?
ralfhn 11 hours ago [-]
It takes five minutes to make a website look less obviously AI-generated.
brendanmc6 11 hours ago [-]
It takes five seconds to scroll to the bottom and see that it's a Jekyll theme before posting a negative comment
danilafe 11 hours ago [-]
Surely they're referring to the llm-isms in the text?
minitech 11 hours ago [-]
A Jekyll theme from the same person as this project, yes.
famahar 10 hours ago [-]
If it was a site made with AI it would be stuffed with way more ad copy, components, UI toggles, and small text. If this was made with AI, they seem to have restrained it from going on the gaudy UI mess of most AI generated sites that are what I like to think of as "Maximalist Minimalist". A hodgepodge of a design library.
p-e-w 11 hours ago [-]
The website looks great to me, clean and simple, perfect for a project like this. “Not looking like it was made by AI” isn’t something I value for itself in a website, any more than “not looking like it was made with injection molding” is something I would value in a plastic item.
Either it’s good or it isn’t, but it’s not good or bad because of how it was made.
xxs 10 hours ago [-]
> “not looking like it was made with injection molding”
Aside machining POM, what else is there. Injection molding tend to be great.
I find the Android app particularly bad, just a couple of examples:
- Under a playlist you get a list of suggested songs, the UI element looks like a "regular song", but unlike every other "song" element the user has been trained to recognize, the "swipe right to queue" does not apply to these elements. For some reason.
- When you don't have connectivity, e.g. you walk into a Faraday cage, then the search tries to reach the internet and won't show you results before it either: 1) does so, 2) times out. Which means you can't browse your local library before some websocket times out. Just show me the local results first?
Case in point, I make a daily playlist for running and that UX is frequently changing and often for the worse, but I deal with it because it's a habit that costs me a few seconds maybe a minute per day. The cost of switching to a new thing just feels daunting so I stay.
I also am guilty of enjoying the wrapped summaries at the end of the year :)
Is there any music streaming service with fast native cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows, Android) clients? Because I'd switch. Feel like Spotify's recommendations have taken a nosedive lately, so that wouldn't hold me back too much.
i use apple music. love it way more than spotify. i originally got it because their descriptions of albums and their playlists are done by actual music nerds. i use the website on linux since it’s my daily/work driver and their app on my phone and macbook when i use it. the apple music app was fine on windows before i switched to linux entirely. definitely leagues better than itunes was.
have the family plan and i never hear complaints from the family members who use it on android.
i hated how spotify would just remove tracks after id spend time making a playlist and suddenly it would just be gone, like not greyed out, just gone. so irritating.
in terms recommendations, apple is a definitely far better than spotify, but it’s still nothing compared to music store nerds, college radio, or friends. recommendation algorithms from every platform are trash and just can’t compete with other people, at all. go to your local record store, look through the employee recommendations or just talk to them, most of them are working in a music store because they love music (its not for the money lol) and then buy the vinyl, you’ll thank yourself later.
It's way better now, and the recommendations are pretty good. The app is still crap though (although granted significantly better than Spotify!). Theres some bonkers UX decisions and the mix of Apple Music and iTunes store is piss poor. It's just got some illogical crap going on where depending on where in the interface you right click a song or artist it changes what options you'll get.
[0]: https://cider.sh
Spotify doesn’t completely agree with that.
‘Spotify is a digital music, podcast, and video service that gives you access to millions of songs and other content from creators all over the world.’
I left in the middle of their ‘we do Podcasts’ bs, where they were pushing Joe Rogan hard.
Yuck.
https://support.spotify.com/nz/article/what-is-spotify/
That's crazy, I just checked on mine (macOS), it's only ~300MiB, about as much as Apple Mail which is native.
Still a bit much for what I need it for, but tolerable.
1. If you have no connectivity, the app will frequently get stuck in the offline state, playing the spinner indefinitely, even after connectivity has returned. I had similar issues on Spotify, but Amazon Music is so much worse. 2. I had Amazon Music eat my entire cellular plan's data monthly allowance in a day, after it seemingly got stuck in a loop trying to download the same podcast again and again. The podcast is unplayable when it gets in this state, even on perfect Wi-Fi, it just never starts playback. This has happened twice now (incidentally on the same podcast, but different episodes), even after deleting and reinstalling the app entirely.
The second bug is a deal breaker, so I've gone back to Spotify.
I only went to Spotify because my kids wanted it. The integration for Spotify is still very good, compared to Amazon Music.
best value for money if you use youtube is youtube music app that you get from youtube premium.
I use youtube music, but I am looking for alternatives (but not spotify for various reasons).
Any recommendations anyone has for music discovery I'm all ears. I recently moved away from a town that had a 10/10 radio station and I'm really feeling the TOP-40-only pain.
music is tough business to negotiate all the contracts and figure out a business model
If I remember correctly, it has a plus on the side to add it to the playlist. Clearly different I guess (and why would you want to listen to a song before adding it to the playlist amirite?). I also love the way you have to refresh a list to get 3 new songs instead of just getting a scrolling list where you can go back.
So my only path/answer to this was to cancel it. They poisoned the well so efficiently that I will never trust another streaming service again for my lifetime. I hate rewarding bad business practices, businesses pushing their ideologies towards me. No thanks.
Apple’s boomer surprise when they discovered we don’t all like U2 was hilarious.
I do have a more pared down selection of mp3s loaded on my device in case of emergency, but I use it less and less now.
Until you want to play back a playlist in random order over airplay or bluetooth, then the decade old bug with thousands of replies on their forum confirming it surfaces, and it only loops the first 100 songs in the playlist.
The number of bugs in their service that have existed since inception is insane. It's a buggy mess, and the UI & UX is comically poor. Not to mention the resource usage, as someone else pointed out below its incredibly insane that they think it's ok for it to be such a massive resource hog.
There's a ton of these inconsistencies. For example, the new releases albums where songs become available over time also do not have it. It's infuriating how inconsistent the UI is sometimes.
Not so long ago they also had two versions of the "swipe right to queue" UI, one with long swipe (the current one), and one with a much shorter one. I preferred the shorter (with the hard break) one because it is much clearer when a song actually gets added to the queue. What often happens when you're adding multiple songs to the queue, if you only swipe a little bit, it is unclear if it was enough to add it to the queue. With one song this isn't a problem because a message with "added to queue" is shown, but for multiple songs, the messages are shown on top of each other.
let a whole ecosystem of music streaming apps take off that cater to different niches of listeners.
each app would be able to differentiation themselves with their UI but also features like recommendations/playlists/etc. And spotify wouldn't see them as competitors because they'd still be getting their cut because they all go through their API.
.. which in turn causes my AirPods to connect to my laptop
I have to go manually hunt to connect everything correctly Every. Single. Time.
> “Ctrl+M turns it into a tiny player that wears any classic Winamp 2 skin, spectrum analyser, equalizer, and playlist included. 2000s vibes, pixel for pixel.”
Everything is said with too much intensity, and phrasing that sounds impressive but doesn’t really mean that much. Like “wears any classic Winamp 2 skin” feels so awkward, what’s “wears”? You mean it can use it?
I feel like if you can’t be bothered to write the code, at least document it yourself and write the marketing copy so I know you understand the product. Otherwise how can I trust running it on my computer? Did the LLM generate some amazing rm -rf somewhere, or another blunder that wrecks data I might care about?
Yes, the code is generated. Yes, the docs are generated. I agree LLM copy is annoying and will rewrite them myself.
But I built this for myself out of frustration with the official client, and I use it every day, so every bug I find is fixed immediately. I also care about bugs and PRs from other people, as you can see the amount that have been closed on the repo. The only reason I would stop maintaining this is if Spotify kills it.
I also wouldn't call this vibe coded either. Human directed and LLM generated is fairer. It's been an intense 5 days with tons of design decisions and testing on 3 platforms. I think we need a new vocabulary to distinguish it from "author doesn't care". I do.
> I also wouldn't call this vibe coded either.
It's vibe-coded. Get over it.
End of the day this person is solving a good problem and sharing the work. This is what we want.
It's still open source! Just like in the pre-AI era they are welcome to submit a PR and improve it in the way they like it. The main dev seems very open to accepting help.
Given the project is open source, have at it! See if you can help improve it instead of complaining. This is a significant improvement and a cool project!
I find this kinda funny. Fix the obvious part, better not look at the code.
Remember when people used to care about making a good first impression?
https://sjsebastian.substack.com/p/thinking-through-the-mach...
> The Debian Project nevertheless expects that all contributions submitted to Debian, regardless of how and with which tools they were produced, satisfy the same standards of quality, correctness, maintainability, and legal compliance.
Slop text on the homepage does not scream "quality" to me.
The code is worse, somehow. Endless paragraphs of comments that say nothing: https://github.com/crmne/fastpotify/blob/d9aafbf8e0b0c4d2da3...
I rewrite docs myself on my own projects because they read as very LLMish, there's an intermediate stage which feels slightly less bad where I ask it to remove most of the comments, especially LLM signposting ones and then "rewrite any remaining comments and docs in a dry ukgov/gds style" which makes things slighyly less worse.
Does this still have that?
> But I built this for myself out of frustration with the official client
But you didn't build it. This is akin to me telling an intern to build me a widget and then claiming it was me who built it. Or a construction manager saying they built a skyscraper.
Yes, the intern and the construction crew needs guidance and management, but I can't then go to the management committee and claim ownership of the effort.
> I also wouldn't call this vibe coded either.
You didn't write any of the code or even the documentation for that matter. You guided a code generator that relied on you to guide high level decisions but then did all the implementation on it's own. That's vibe coding.
There is no point in taking pride in typing out lines of code by hand. The entire world is moving on.
Any act of making can be treated as product, as craft, or as art. You'll find yourself taking all three stances at different points. Any engineer or artisan or artist can choose to pour their attention and love into any layer of the production process.
I like ceramics. I like wheel throwing. Once upon a time, the pottery wheel was a newfangled technique for rapid and regular production of commodity goods. Same with coil building, same with slip casting, same with standardization of glaze recipes, gas and electric kilns, all of it.
But I know people who choose to quarry and purify their own clay, or to mix their own glazes, or to fire their pieces in a hole in the ground dug by hand with a fire they built by hand. I know people who make dozens of identical copies of just a few forms, after they spend months iterating on carving intricate molds. I know people who will spend a whole season working on a single hand-built bust.
And none of these people have ever, to my knowledge, expressed scorn for any of the others, for focusing on a different step in the process.
It’s not even knowing how it works or even what it used to achieve the desired result.
You wrote it or not, that’s your code. You are the one responsible. The machine has no brain. Use yours.
If the construction manager did lay the bricks or did the majority of the work in all aspects, they could claim to have built a building. Otherwise they contributed work, no denying that, but they can't claim credit for building it. Same way that architects can't claim they built the skyscraper, even though they probably spent a lot of effort designing it to specs. To the best of my knowledge, no serious architect claims they "built" the building. They have designed it yes. Same way, the construction manager would claim they have managed the construction.
I admit that the classification is fuzzy, but there's an explosion of vibe coders going about claiming to have built things, whose contribution is basically spending a total of one hour with a prompt and and LLM doing basically all the heavy lifting.
That's not necessarily the case of the author here, but the line has blurred a lot and people very giddily claim credit for much less actual accomplishment than what would've flown in the past.
With vibe coding you know nothing.
Some would use the term "Agent Engineering" for what OP did.
FWIW I agree with your post and perhaps we need a separate name for people who just instructed an LLM to build something, but then took the trouble to understand how the thing actually works.
It seems to me that this is not the case here. The author used LLM to build the whole thing and left it at that. Which is completely fair, I'd do the same if I just wanted to scratch an itch with the minimal amount of effort, but then I wouldn't go around claiming "I built it".
It is also totally not what I want for docstrings in code or Powerpoint drafts, where consistency in language is critical.
It's as if the person writing these lines didn't care about the result. One could argue that people not caring about written documentation isn't anything new, but in the past, these documentations also had little text. So they were easier to digest. Now, we get great walls of text that are hard to read. I cannot say that I like that.
Just share the prompt you used, regardless of how low quality or bad it is, rather than this word spaghetti of 100s of words saying basically nothing, such a waste.
> can you build a website to promote the app
> can you add a page showing off the winamp mode
Documentation is first part people see when presented. I personally hate AI written text even though I do agentic engineering a lot as well. Any user facing documentation must be reviewed, if you snoozy by reading it - remove or rewrite.
I do not care about paragraph long comments in code, because I’m not gonna read them, but I still follow my internal guideline and cut all this verbosity to level where it readable using hooks and skills.
So basicly like you said if you care about product do not add placeholders. It’s take away first impression.
Doesn't matter if it's open source.
Do you not understand it?
This person doesn't owe you any work. He's providing a product for free and this is a reasonable enough description of the product.
> Did the LLM generate some amazing rm -rf somewhere, or another blunder that wrecks data I might care about?
I'm pretty sure at this point hand-crafted code is more likely to contain security bugs. The mythical "rm -rf" random LLM insertion is not a real threat. Every time I see stories about this kind of issue, it's almost always preceded by basically prompt poisoning.
A product being free doesn’t make it exempt from criticism. It’s not about “owing” anybody work.
> and this is a reasonable enough description of the product.
It’s not a great idea to signal a lack of effort, nor is it wrong for users to pick up on that signal. This is the post-llm equivalent to spelling or grammatical errors.
> I'm pretty sure at this point hand-crafted code is more likely to contain security bugs.
LLMs produce code which is fairly ‘locally optimal’, so in good hands they can absolutely be used to build correct software. They also allow those with little to no experience* to cobble something together very quickly and easily while creating a ton of security holes. I think you might be underestimating how common the latter is.
* not to suggest this applies to the OP necessarily. Rather some extra wariness is necessary nowadays since the floor has been lowered so much.
You can criticize it but your criticism is hallow
> It’s not a great idea to signal a lack of effort, nor is it wrong for users to pick up on that signal. This is the post-llm equivalent to spelling or grammatical errors.
Why should you put in effort to something that should be effortless? Why should I waste my time writing some inferior copy by hand?
> LLMs produce code which is fairly ‘locally optimal’, so in good hands they can absolutely be used to build correct software.
Humans produce code which is fairly ‘locally optimal’
Also, interesting you use ‘ as a quote rather than '. I notice these quotes are used with LLM generated text, as I can't find this on my keyboard.
It is real, typically happening when dumber models (haven't personally seen any of the SOTA ones on reasonable thinking/reasoning level do this) try to clean up stuff via bash and forget to assign a variable. Things like "rm -rf sessions/$id" without double-checking $id is actually defined, would do "rm -rf sessions/" and remove the entire directory. Add in more variables in a path like "rm -rf $HOME/projects/$user/$repo/$tmpdir" and the dumb models people think they can use for local coding, promptly removes a lot more than expected.
Not sure how people aren't already running these agents in an environment/sandbox where stuff like this wouldn't matter, locally or not, but some LLMs do truly accidentally delete stuff for people, without "prompt poisoning", I had it happen myself while testing Qwen3.8-27B (BF16) locally just a week or two ago, exactly as described above.
Jokes aside, how can you be sure that the official Spotify app (or any app, or Windows) was not written by a LLM without supervision?
I highly recommend anybody to take up a similar rule, in any context. Slop in a website? Close. Slop in an email? Bin. Slop in a code comment? Skip.
I haven't seen any evidence of Spotify killing librespot. To me the project looks active and works totally fine. I don't have a new Spotify account to verify the claim above.
I suspect wilted-iris is conflating it with the recent changes to the Web APIs: new developer apps can't use all endpoints anymore. In Fastpotify if you add your Client ID I use both an older developer app and your app to keep everything as fast and seamless as possible.
Biggest mistake most librefication projects make is to do their project out in the open where they can easily be subject to legal pressure, then fall into complete disarray the moment that pressure appears. They can't move underground once pressure starts, because everyone already knows who they are.
That's not it. Most youtube downloaders are not developed in the open and Youtube still breaks them every other week by changing on purpose the way they operate. And, unlike highly obfuscated instructions, studying the network queries used by a simple app does not require expensive reverse engineering efforts from Spotify engineers; essentially, it's the same as developing in the open.
The only case i can think where obfuscation might help would be if the actual Spotify API consumers were servers by the app developers (or some form of obfuscation via residential proxies) and the app developed an entirely different API to/from its servers. But then, you're back to the developers and hosts can receive legal threats, etc...
You propose the open-source community operates behind closed doors like the very software they aim to replace?
I’d argue Spotify has so little to gain by being hostile, that perhaps the lawyers are more expensive than just ignoring these pet projects (which would never gain mass adoption).
The lawyers are more expensive than happy customers staying customers because they can enjoy the client they prefer, that's for sure.
One part of the classical diaspora I think is both under appreciated and undergoing something of a renaissance is that of contemporary choral music. There are many great examples but two I'd like to draw to attention to two of those I have recently sung, and really enjoy:
(1) The works of Ēriks Ešenvalds,[1] a Latvian composer who was a fellow in composition at Trinity College, Cambridge and brought really a large part of the surprisingly rich eastern European singing tradition to the west. I had never heard of the Singing Revolution against the USSR in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania – countries with a wonderful, rich choral tradition where music (and choirs) played a really nonzero part in the downfall of the USSR. All absolutely beautiful and a group I sing with has worked with a lot of composers from this part of the world. Amazing soundscapes with harmonies that are never quite as good in equal temperament as outside it and yet always tonal and beautiful.
(2) Desmond Earley and the choral scholars of Trinity College Dublin – who conjures up a rich sound world of very pure, Irish tones that almost sounds synthetic but is made entirely from human voices and traditional instruments. It is simple to sing but difficult to master. I would highlight Dúlamán, [3] a traditional song about the economic importance of seaweed.
[1] https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_HYP202607B – track 6 (the whole lot is free!) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing_Revolution [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iRfI1ezYjA&list=RD3iRfI1ezY... – this was a sampler from hyperion too and I have the whole lot legally as flac.
Would you be willing to share a bit more about this setup? The only thing keeping my on streaming is the fact that its almost impossible to find new music otherwise. I know LastFM exists but it just doesn't click for me the way that streaming does. I like discovering music organically.
- Actually listening to the music I have now. I think the art of listening through full albums has slowly died, but there is so much music we're ignoring because we just listen to Artist's top tracks.
- Word of mouth. Asking my friends what they listen to. This is a way that people used to discover music and I've found so much good music this way.
- Bandcamp. Bandcamp is SUCH a good way to discover new music. You can listen to the music in app, there are great articles and you can actually support the artists!
Also, a great resource for discovering new music is the public library. They often have a curated CD section that I then rip into FLAC. I've had great chats with the people in my town's library, and I often pick a totally random CD off the shelves and discover some amazing artists.
I had to migrate away from youtube music since the experience was infuriating me every time. I love making playlists on the go. In youtube music after adding 30 tracks to the play queue, tapping 1 track accidentally deletes the play queue and plays this track. This made me feel bad every time it happened.
I don't see how it is just accepted to lose progress in 2026 as if we're using win95. It feels like 80% of the sw I use provides a caveman UX, not leveraging the tech, leaking implementation details and being constrained by technical reasons. On the other hand, working on Prepbook[0], I realized how hard it is to create the perfect experience and how it's even harder to justify it financially.
I'm doing discovery by talking to people, I love it. Every time I listen to Monolink I recall my co worker that just said "check out monolink" when he heard I love Ott. I love that it makes the experience about connection to people as well.
[0] https://prepbook.app
https://pitchfork.com/news/epic-games-sells-bandcamp-amid-la...
So, not enshittified, but either abandoned or headed for ensloppification.
I don't know where this opinion came from (Probably Spotify's PR department) but it's just so weird to me. Do you think people didn't find new music before streaming? It's not impossible, you just have to talk to people.
I found that Spotify was increasingly recommending AI artists and songs I already knew. It surfaced very little outside of my comfort zone and effectively nothing that wasn’t new. There’s a whole world of music out there that Spotify wasn’t showing me.
was a big question mark I had as well. The Clear Channel and iHeart stations are not known for discovery. Now if you find a college station or by some miracle an independent station you can get some new stuff. My favorite local college station is also ad free. They also have an app which I lean on as it's not the strongest transmitter so their coverage is spotty. Maybe there's other indy stations with apps as well??
https://threedradio.com/
I subscribe to them, have done so for ~10 years I reckon. I don't listen as much as I used to, but I want them to continue existing either way.
Be aware, the quality of their playlists is incredibly variable, but that's part of the charm. I guarantee you'll hear something you haven't heard before... for better or worse.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zHR0HMFY60 (with 2 minutes of silence at the start to, presumably, avoid auto-copyright claims).
I listen to a lot of SomaFM (free, https://somafm.com/) and the Flow State radio-podcast (paid, https://www.flowstate.fm/).
I've had three tours around the place just by telling the folks there that Im there from out of town. To be fair, I might have gotten the tours because I came all the way over from England the times, but it's my favourite place to hang out when I'm in Seattle.
Also Ken is the nicest guy ever, and he introduced me to Larry Mizzel Jr while he was broadcasting live.
Get the app, or use the player on their website, and hive then a try for an hour or do. The app has the ability to "heart" a track while it's playing live, which helps with discovery.
So I can say for sure that I don't share the slop sentiment. Sure, there's some generic filler every now and then, but any non-cohesive mix, as opposed to a carefully curated album is going to have songs that naturally become "fillers".
Just now, I discovered that Spotify snuck in "The Juan Maclean - Running Back To You (2014)", which is a cover of "Brian Bennet - Solstice (1978)". Neither songs are completely unknown, but they're also not exactly Bruno Mars.
I don't know if this is pure luck or algorithmic rhythm analysis, but for me it's working.
How could they possibly do that? They cannot prevent people or AI from reverse engineering their APIs.
By plausible deniability I simply meant adopting a similar approach that Stremio has, to keep it on the good side of App Store approval processes. The app itself only allows for creative commons content by default, but with the right incantations it can host anything.
Not really "on the good side" when your main distribution method is "add this app to your account within the first 1-2 weeks of it being in the App Store or never again", or sideloading.
Perfect quality and it great selection.
If several artists / bands share the same name, there will be one artist page with all of the artists/bands releases. The queue management sucks, I can add stuff to the queue, move / remove individual entries. That's it. If I added an album to the queue and want to remove it, I have to click a little cross one time for each track of the album. Notifications about new releases: great. Except the UI is a tiny dropdown, and hovering over an item removes the little marker signaling it's a new one. It's really difficult to catch up when there are more than 5 new entries. etc.
Now the dzr developers will break the functionality. On purpose.
I used to use Tidal, until they patched something, and now FLAC is impossible to obtain from Tidal. Hopefully it still works tomorrow, sheesh.
1. (already posted on HN) Wanted to try Midori's early stuff, but no "1st" EP nor "2nd" LP. Not on Spotify nor Apple Music either.
Only yesterday:
2. Looking at Bleach (the Japanese hardcore punk/noise rock band): nothing and they aren't extremely obscure or anything (https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/bleach-4). They're on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/artist/5gRsPZZNgrkagQnDlyFZUC) but missing two LPs; on Apple Music too (https://music.apple.com/us/artist/bleach/74570682) and one more LP available.
3. Okay, let's try Meat Puppets' lauded second LP from my backlog... artist is there, but four first LPs aren't. On Spotify and Apple Music.
4. For fun, let's try to find that very obscure kote kei demo, (螺旋 (Rasen) - Hysterical Noi「z」e / Like「M」(1997)). Nothing, of course, but well, I can't even find it on private trackers or SoulSeek (got some mystery mp3s "somewhere").
So, if I were to stoop down to streaming, looks like Spotify/Apple are less worse here.
In my case, some music I want is unavailable, some releases from Discos Fuentes of Salsa Brava from the 1970s.
But, in this case, they are also unavailable from Tidal, Spotify, etc...
There was a world before Spotify. Though the music labels didn’t much like that world we can easily go back to it.
There was, and it was definitely not "the golden age of music streaming".
Source?
And arguably Pandora always had a better radio algorithm than Spotify.
It wasn't, really. At least not completely. I fully agree on the algorithm - I miss times of scrobbling to Last.fm, which was much better at this. (Spotify always supported scrobbling to Last.fm from their client, surprisingly).
Spotify used to be snappy and worked really well on Linux. I even used it for local libraries, as it was one of the few options that didn't crash on mine.
It was at the beautiful time when we realized web apps can have local storage, Google released that experiment called Chrome to "show public how modern browser can evolve and inspire other browser makers how to progress". We know it ended up in "extinguish the market with it", unfortunately.
But Spotify chose native app approach - they distributed it as packages. Deezer on the other hand, back then (I don't know now) had just native web app that could pull music locally. I think it was an extension of Chrome (?). It also worked perfectly fine on Linux, almost two decades ago.
We had a lot of decent options back then.
Already ended for me. They killed the plan I was on, and then started sending me begging emails to sign up for a new, more expensive one.
But once I experienced their platform with ads, I just stopped using it entirely.
It's just getting started.
We're going to vibe code the entire enshittified internet to be ours once again.
The dream of the 90's and 00's is alive again. The indie web is going to become unstoppable.
We can build anything of size and scale with the limited spare energy we have now. Every product will be reborn without big tech tendrils.
It’s such a wishful thinking, but no it doesn’t and won’t work this way. Code != useful product. Plus today’s web is all about fabricated content, AI bots, cloudflare challenge walls and all other annoying stuff. The very idea of being able to create something in seconds is already killing internet.
No one in all these years had gone through the effort of replicating the Spotify client with a snappy fast interface for a reason. Everything had been an integration into already existing software, or simpler interfaces, because the effort was not worth it. The equation has changed.
This is the best year in all of my 20 years in tech. I'm creating so much stuff and it's all I've ever wanted.
This is the dream of the 2000's, and big tech can't stop us anymore.
I think I'm going to write my own music player soon that behaves exactly like I want it to. Maybe this weekend. Or maybe right after my home automation project. But I can probably squeeze them both in.
It's like Christmas every day now.
Are you so sure of that?
One of my projects is at $5M ARR in just six months. I passed $400k in sales this month. It's an open source project.
I'm teaching my wife to code and we're going to make a video game together. Surely you can see the value in that bonding experience? She never would have been interested prior to Claude Code.
I've been writing my own SRS software for drilling typing in Japanese. It's pretty fantastic. Nothing like that existed before I made it. So many needs that went unmet are just being filled.
That's just top of mind. I've been doing a ton.
Nobody likes to tag music the way I like to (multiple scalar quantified dimensions with clustering), so there's literally no music player on the planet in the shape that I want. If I'd wanted to build that before, I'd have to spend opportunity cost over several weekends to start building, plus the ongoing burden of maintenance. That's likely a few months burnt plus fixing things when API integrations break down. Now it's a few hours plus a bug fix here and there.
This is 3D printing for software.
I don't get the negativity. This is all so magical.
Tagging for Latin America music is basically a cluster fuck of misleading misunderstandings, there's not a single salsa, merengue, son, charanga, or bachata song that has been correctly tagged in any streaming platform o scrobbler. It's like the people using the platforms are deaf to the rhythms. WTF is Latin Jazz doing in a salsa song? Exactly.
> One of my projects is at $5M ARR in just six months. I passed $400k in sales this month. It's an open source project.
If it's the former ARR, then how are you at $5M if it took you six months to get to $400k? $5M/12 = $416,666.6666666667
Which correct me if I'm misunderstanding (I do frequently) but that means your best average sales month was ~$400k, not 6 months to reach $400k.
"AI for artists", Carl!
I use explo+slsk+lidarr+navidrome, for access on my phone I use dsub2000 or symfonium but mainly dsub2000.
Explo is the software used for the discovery https://github.com/LumePart/Explo It automatically downloads daily jams, weekly jams and weekly exploration playlists from your listenbrainz account(free) using youtube, soulseek(with slskd) or lidarr (support was merged very recently).
I also imported all my artists from my spotify account when I migrated which you can do in lidarr with the plugin ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶k̶ ̶ bellow ̶b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶s̶u̶p̶p̶o̶r̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶i̶n̶ ̶l̶i̶d̶a̶r̶r̶.̶
plugin: https://github.com/TypNull/Tubifarry
̶f̶o̶r̶k̶ ̶d̶o̶c̶k̶e̶r̶ ̶i̶m̶a̶g̶e̶:̶ ̶g̶h̶c̶r̶.̶i̶o̶/̶l̶i̶n̶u̶x̶s̶e̶r̶v̶e̶r̶-̶l̶a̶b̶s̶/̶p̶r̶a̶r̶r̶:̶l̶i̶d̶a̶r̶r̶-̶p̶l̶u̶g̶i̶n̶s̶
docker image: lscr.io/linuxserver/lidarr:nightly
This plugin is also needed for downloading songs with slsk in lidarr.
I’m using a similar setup, with Lidar/Navidrome, but using Subwave for discovery. It works very well for going through your library and playing music like a radio station would, but it won’t recommend anything that’s not already in there.
Sorry I set this up quite a long while ago and didn't remember correctly.
And it seems to have been merged so the plugin branch is not needed anymore, see: https://github.com/Lidarr/Lidarr/pull/1829
So the official image would work.
edit:
I just migrated and I can confirm it works.
I used lscr.io/linuxserver/lidarr:nightly, note that the `latest` tag won't work as it's using the `master` branch which doesn't have plugin support yet, so either use the `nightly` tag or the `develop` tag.
See: https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-lidarr/#version-ta...
As Music Assistant supports subsonic (https://www.music-assistant.io/music-providers/subsonic/) and Navidrome expose a subsonic endpoint it should be possible (https://www.navidrome.org/docs/developers/subsonic-api/).
Most of the GUI apps had something similar to the official app in the maximized window, but none had a good mini-player, something I could put in the corner of an external monitor and control most of the important functions with minimal mouse clicking, including EQ and playlist.
Interestingly this one with its Winamp mode is what I was looking for. Nostaliga is probably playing a part, but it a good UI does not have to be "modern".
I also went through a tour of TUI apps. Lots of interesting work there, but a full TUI with windows was less convenient to navigate, and some of them try to do too much. I wound up using https://github.com/hrkfdn/ncspot because it specifically does not attempt to be a character mode GUI. Almost like a ViMusic.
Whether the distinction matters or not, it would be nice for everyone involved if projects falling into the second category were more upfront about that.
When I commit I either mark it as my own commit if I've read through every line of that commit at least once (not skimmed), pushed back, changed, etc, or put as "ai@<a word I use>" if it was mostly "fine, do it…" or the "whatever… " phase. I never let AI write a single word of documentation or comment. And I made sure Claude removed its attribution the first time I started using it. Besides I was using GLM 5.2 at that time so Claude was not a fit anyway. I don't think they should have that default behaviour.
I can look for myself and see that the repo was started a week ago and has had hundreds of commits since, and that the author exclusively talks about ai on twitter. I'd just like it if I could save myself some time, and it would prevent useless discussions in this thread were people argue whether the commit-messages look like ai.
I have been using Spotatui and it's been fast enough, but it would be nice sometimes to have a better 'new music' search experience. I'll give this a try, but if Spotify are hell bent on destroying API users, I fear the project maintainers will have more work than it's worth.
Hoping for a future in which people complain about missing basic functionality like winamp mode being missing in their music player of choice!
Let me start: I was going to recommend foobar2000 with the spotify plugin but the lack of a winamp mode must be a dealbreaker for many!
The demos are very good: https://www.egui.rs/#clock
Edit: egui is an immediate mode GUI library written in Rust. egui runs natively on , and on the web it is compiled to WebAssembly and rendered with WebGL or WebGPU. Everything you see is rendered as textured triangles. There is no DOM, HTML, JS or CSS. Just Rust.
egui is great for video game debug UI overlays and internal tools, and maybe some specialized graphical tools. Otherwise its quirks are too annoying for general purpose app usage. Sure, you banged out a UI quickly with it, at the expense of your users.
* Right off the bat in the login screen, if you resize the window, it flickers
* I logged in. Double clicking the top part of the window doesn't maximize it, like I expect on basically all other windows. I'm using MacOS, btw
* Resizing the main home screen is also a flickery mess. Though I'll give credit, it's a fast flickery mess, because the official spotify app resizes like ass
* Okay, here's one more specific to egui and why I think its approach is not good outside of the app types I listed in my original comment: I type some text in the search bar. Let's say I want to highlight the last word after I've typed it, in order to delete it or type something else. On every other app on my system, I can hold Option + Shift + Left Arrow Key. Or perhaps Cmd + Arrow Keys to move the cursor to the start or end of the line. The egui app just doesn't work, because egui misses so many fine details about text manipulation on a given OS.
* In general, text handling just sucks
* Scrolling doesn't have the inertial bounce when it hits the ends of a scroll action
* It's very easy to create overlapping UI elements by resizing panels and/or the window itself.
Anyway, those are just some of the things from a few minutes of trying this specific app out.
In general, if it's an egui app, I already know there will be weird resizing glitches/flickers, a poor text editing experience, and it will typically not follow the platform's idioms and built-in gestures, scroll physics, behaviors, etc. In this case, the app is decent since it mostly just needs to play music, and you mercifully don't need to interact with it much when it comes to text and such.
But saying "It's a GUI like any other" is like saying "wonderbread is a bread like any other". Maybe it's a curse of knowledge? Similar things happen with coffee. One person says "tastes like coffee" while another can pick out individual flavor notes. Maybe I'm shouting into the void and no one gives a shit anymore, I dunno. But to me, these things matter and are a mark of quality.
If we have LLMs that can shit out whatever code now, why aren't people having them output truly "native" GUIs that use the UI framework of the OS so they can get all the expected behaviors by default?
The choice to re-implement native widgets from scratch is justifiable if the egui devs think they can do better than the native widgets do. It's also nearly required in practice if they want the toolkit to have consistent behavior across multiple platforms (something people have learned the hard way multiple times across multiple different UI libraries).
It's hard to get it right, but that's why the egui devs are writing a library: so that others can benefit from that hard work. Many of the things you pointed out are just bugs, and bugs can be fixed.
This is really not a good solution for web apps, and if you're vibe coding your apps anyway, there isn't any reason not to have a native browser application.
But maybe it could be cool for doing some advanced animations or rendering games or something.
So that's why text selection doesn't work.
I did the same for Postman/Bruno.
However, at the beginning I had to choose between Slint[1] and egui[2] (which this project uses)
[1]: https://slint.dev/
[2]: https://www.egui.rs/
Anyone has experience in both and is able to drop some thoughts on their strengths & weaknesses for mid-to-large projects?
Although the scope is different but I imagine a similar debate when one didn't need to write machine code anymore...
All the other lightweight Spotify clients roll their own UIs in ways that I don't like, so I really appreciate that their LLM has taken the time to clone the UI 1:1.
But now I have to decide if I want someone else's vibecode on my computer. I think not.
- would love to be able to disable podcasts / anything non music related. it's my #1 gripe with the official Spotify client today.
- Winamp buttons shouldn't remain "pressed" in that play state
- Winamp doesn't like being stuck to one edge of the screen, after putting there and interacting it will often jump inward a bit
- Winamp could use the EQ in collapsed mode
- Would be nice for Winamp to remember its position (i think it grabs the NW corner of the large player every time?
Obviously streaming was the big selling point, something that iTunes didn’t offer at the time, but I swear the client was written in some native UI framework, along with the C/C++ library.
Or was the spotify UI always just a browser engine skin and the perception of speed was from the playback engine?
Anyway, cool to see projects like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UsnX5X_DF0
It was originally native, then native with some web-based bits, and then the web-based bits slowly ate the whole thing. It seems the ease of development with web-tech compared to C++ (also the better font rendering and screen reader support) was just too tempting.
Interestingly the Spotify client was never based on electron but instead arrived independently at the "chromium + web app" architecture at around the same time as Atom did.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28203654
What's funny about having to rely on unauthorized clones to provide a fast native UX was that Spotify's original client back in 2008 started out as beautifully light, custom rendered native client.
Few Apps ever had that wow factor the first time I used it, it was so much lighter and more responsive than anything else of the day. I remember being perplexed at how I could search and skip to any part of a song quicker than iTunes could looking at a local library. Everything was latency-free and instantaneous.
We were building a Music Startup at the time, so we investigated how it worked. We we’re very surprised we couldn’t find any evidence of an established UI toolkit. It looked as though they had built their own custom UI renderer and optimized TCP protocol which sent back its metadata in XML. Their traffic looked like it was initially seeded from their own (or CDN) servers (for best latency) and then overtime we would see some P2P traffic on the wire.
Our QT/C++ client had decent performance but was noticeably heavier than Spotify's. I was disappointed to see their native client eventually be abandoned and succumb to become yet another Chromium wrapper. I expect it fell to the pressures of a growing startup adding 100s of developers (without the skill of their original CTO/devs) where a native UI couldn't be updated and re-iterated as fast as a Web App. I wish they maintained 2 desktop clients, and left their native client alone to just be an audio player and push all their new social features to their new flagship CEF app.
It's unfortunate the skill and desire of building fast native UIs are being lost to Electron and CEF wrappers. Seems the larger the organization the more likely they are to build new Web rendered Desktop Apps and we have to rely on unauthorized Indie efforts like this for fast, responsive native UIs.
(The comment is from a 2021 post about another Rust-based Spotify client.)
I've been slowly trying to stop my spotify usage and replace it with owned audio files.
Mostly I try to use Bandcamp but many artists are not there. Sometimes I just rip the audio from youtube but would prefer a way to buy that gives most of the money to the artist.
- Bandcamp (for new music)
- Second hand CDs for charity shops and discogs (for older music)
- Quoboz / Amazon (for new music not on bandcamp or something specific I can't find elsewhere)
But it's been a long time since I've heard anything good enough to purchase.
- Bandcamp
- CD
- 7digital
I host the media on a Jellyfin server and use offline playlists on my phone with Finamp for Android, works quite well for me!
Built a native Spotify player with Rust and GPUI: https://github.com/infomiho/cadence
Once that happened I wasn't then sure if issues I'm seeing are from api or the app itself. It's possible this is prioritising the responsiveness of the UI rather than the actual speed of user interactions.
Also the menu bar icon doesn't work for me (on MacOs). I can see it, but it doesn't do anything and there's nothing in the app itself to enable/disable it (though thankfully it does respect cmd+drag to delete).
For comparison I was using Apple Music via safari before.
I’m just surprised that such a big company can produce such an awful web experience, guess everyone is just using the native app, but for some that’s not possible
Potify sounds like a toddler is learning to take a dump. And well, putting "fast" in front of it doesn't impress either in that case.
They're great to integrate into a game loop because you control your loop, (and they're a delight to use) but I thought for perf retained mode was the way to go?
Am I missing something? Then again if the bar needing to be beaten is spotify's existing desktop app maybe it doesn't matter?
I have a custom IM GUIs based ide thing in C++ that uses like .2% of my 10yo CPU.
1. Latency. A click paints on the next frame, because it sidesteps the stages of a retained mode UI: there's no dirty-marking, no layout and paint passes scheduled for later, no cached visual state that can be stale.
2. Simplicity. The UI is a plain function of app state. There's no retained tree to keep in sync and no invalidation bugs: mutate the state and the next frame shows it.
Yes, the drawback is that you have to watch what a frame costs, but it doesn't repaint at every frame. It paints on input and you can schedule repaints yourself. Fastpotify sits at zero CPU when idle, asks for a few frames a second while a track plays, and runs at full rate only while you scroll.
The UI feels a lot less sluggish than the official client (which in my experience seems to have gotten way worse lately) but in many cases I am just sent to a loading page which ultimately takes a similar amount of time to load the content. So it seems a lot of the slowness is coming from the Spotify server side, it's just that the official client seems to freeze while waiting for a response whereas this doesn't.
Hopefully Spotify don't kill librespot. As I understand it you can basically only use it with Premium accounts, so it's not like they aren't getting paid anyway. If some other provider were to come along and offer access to the same content as Spotify with a stable API that you can use with any client, I would pay more for that than I currently do for Spotify.
As an aside, ncspot is another good and more minimalise Spotify client, which is a TUI.
[1] https://github.com/kraxarn/spotify-qt
EDIT: I forgot about the Spotify Helper processes - taken into account the original spotify needs ~1GB. However it's still a lot faster than Fastpotify
asking it to "disassemble Spotify and find out the minimal code path needed to play a song" is much more in reach. I don't need it to oneshot it. If it gets stuck, I've read enough disassembled C to figure it out and get it unblocked.
Instead of banging my head against a binary for 5 hours, I'll have my agent bang it's weights for 20 hours, then put in my 1 hour of polish.
My first task would be to fix the Android version of Facebook Messenger. My friends still stick with it because they have iPhones, and that version works fine. I have been putting up with broken image previews for 2 years now. I'll fix that fucking wild pointer they don't care about and make it usable as a chat app. And I'll remove the ads while at that.
I'd use it otherwise, this is great.
I want the song to be a starting point, like Last.fm radio was, I almost never want to listen to every version of it.
What would YouTube music support look like? And another random feature request - universal playlist import / export (i.e. take my YouTube playlist and convert it to Spotify and vice versa - Rosetta stone style)
that could hardly care less for it's users / customers.
Had a lot of crashes, it often took many many seconds to change between the songs and often getting stuck, the buffering algorithm was nuts and eating a lot of bandwidth.
Everything on a standard Pixel. Full 5G coverage was available.
Alternatives?
Downsides are no native client (same webview approach as Spotify), not as strong recommendations (though slowly improving), good but slightly quirkier UI (also slowly improving). For me the trade offs are worthwhile.
[0] eg. https://resources.onestowatch.com/ethical-music-streaming-pl...
Fuck Spotify and their rotten leadership. Was amongst the early adopters (2009). I'm sure they won't care for the loss, and I won't miss th when they're gone.
So, Deezer that had a audiophile target audience, has effectively lost the game.
how is a lack of an offline, standard, widely supported option a benefit?
Adding the Bluetooth layer adds more layers of encoding/decoding, and generally speaking it has narrower bandwidth.
Apple Music pays artists better, too.
I stopped sharing after that.
[0] https://spicetify.app/
I've been using it for a while, shows up as a speaker, and uses around 25-40MB of RAM.
Would love a setting to also remove the "Made for you" section, as well as the "Recommended for you" section, both on the home page.
I was using Spicetify to customize the official client to this effect, using CSS.
Could you speak a little more about the trade-offs and decisions there w.r.t. performance.
(Nice work btw, seems very interesting!)
C.f. this comment[0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49519099
My spouse, for example, doesn't interact with her clock app anymore—she just talks to it.
Wouldn't many programs just use a local LLM to perform whatever is needed?
How desperate do you need to be to resort to this?
I mean you can beat AI to do anything nowadays, but this looks not that bad
But hey, he's here, we can just ask him! @earcar
I guess what you mean is "OS-provided controls". In that case, ye that is not what this is.
Either it’s good or it isn’t, but it’s not good or bad because of how it was made.
Aside machining POM, what else is there. Injection molding tend to be great.