Better title: Convert sharing links between music services
I understand it probably comes from the original motivation, but the name seems unfortunate since you can totally use it to convert to Spotify from e.g. iTunes if you do have Spotify but just not one of the dozen competitor subscription services
Ehn, "I don't have Spotify" is catchy, and probably the most common scenario for many people as Spotify seems to be the general default that is shared. What I don't like about it is that it keeps Spotify's name front and centre. Like I've been making a very concerted effort in the past year to say "internet search" instead of "google it."
I like “web search”
Ya that’s easier, lol
Vivaldi comes with Start Page by default, and I've been liking Kagi a lot recently.
Kagi is very much worth the cost. Doesn't work very well as a verb though.
Kag-it!
Agreed fully. Early Kagi customer, and it's a hard sell to people even though it's worth the cost
Yeah, haven't managed to convince any friends to switch, though for me it was convincing enough to have it pointed out that the subscription price basically replaces the data collection based income of a search engine.
It sounds like the Portuguese imperative for "have a shit", "take a dump": "cague". (As in, "hey you! have a shit!")
I’ve been a Kagi customer for about a year now I think!
Me too and I have the t-Shirt to prove it.
Whoa, they have swag?
duck it
I would never have guessed it’s a tool by the title, I thought it’s a blog post.
Same here - some kind of sanctimonious lecture thing, maybe a bit about FOSS.
No, I don't have Spotify is more memorable.
And less descriptive.
The title "I am cthulhu" is even more memorable, and illustrates why memorability shouldn't be the sole criteria.
GP has a good point imo
It’s on a subdomain. They could very easily make memorizable names for all the different things. “I don’t have Spotify”, “I don’t have Apple Music”, etc. All of those could point to the same tool.
That keeps it catchy and accurate to what the user is actually doing.
It's intriguing. And i suspect the specific audience that doesn't have spotify (and has remembered thinking this phrase/concept) will be the most curious (so, a high correlation with your target). It's exactly why I clicked on it. And it's exactly what I hoped it would be (before having any idea).
Does everything need to be as descriptive as possible? Something should be left for imagination or curiosity.
I kinda like not having the HN homepage not be lorem ipsum but having some clue of what something is about
"everything" obviously goes a bit far, but as a principle, I couldn't imagine it any other way
For programming, sure. For blog posts, that certainly isn't applicable. It's art just as much as it's tech. If the title is outrageously bad, then it's bad art, or art that isn't in your taste. But we are out of the realm of the objectiveness here.
Yes, I’ll admit that before clicking the link I thought this was going to be yet another navel-gazing tech-bro humble-brag blog post.
Similarly here. My first thought was "neither do I, so what?"
Then I decided to pop into the comments here.
I use https://song.link (or Odesli). It finds the link to the song on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, YouTube Music, Pandora, Deezer, SoundCloud, Tidal, Amazon Music, AudioMack, Anghami, Napster, Yandex and BoomPlay, maybe more.
That seems to work a lot better. I tested with the last thing I bought off of Bandcamp, The Life of Clutchy Hopkins by Clutchy Hopkins:
I Don't Have Spotify: https://idonthavespotify.sjdonado.com/?id=b3Blbi5zcG90aWZ5Lm... "Not available on other platforms."
odesli.co: https://album.link/s/1eDOxiSqqxS8jSgDCsaC38 - no less than eleven different links to stream, though about half of them didn't have anything when I clicked on them. And three links to buy it, too.
I got similar results with my previous two purchases, clipping.'s Dead Channel Sky and Captain Ahab's The End of Irony. IDHS said "not available on other platforms" while odesli.co turned up close to a dozen links to stream each, and three places to buy them. Maybe IDHS works better if you're not a fiftysomething lady with hilariously obscure taste, I dunno?
Let's try the least obscure thing I can think of: Taylor Swift's last album, The Tortured Poets Department.
IDHS: https://idonthavespotify.sjdonado.com/?id=b3Blbi5zcG90aWZ5Lm... - on Apple Music and SoundCloud.
odesli: https://album.link/i/1736268193 - 14 streaming links, 3 purchase. Including working links to Deezer and Soundcloud that IDHS didn't turn up despite saying those are the places you can start from.
Why is Qobuz always missing from these sites? It has superior audio quality beyond all other options.
And it pays artists a fair share per stream, a lot more than other major streaming platforms.
Took me a while to figure out that "example" link is just a placeholder, and not an actual link to test the service with. Clicking "Search" without any link results in "Something went wrong, please try again later." error message, although more precise error message is returned "Invalid link, please try with Spotify or Youtube links." - it should be displayed instead. Overall, why not add a sentence or two about what this website actually does?
The example placeholder needs to be a little darker to make it look more like an example.
I agree, they could extend the sentence on the title screen to say something like "to start finding music titles across your favorite streaming services."
I had no idea what the service was until I read the comments, I just assumed it was something to do with not liking Spotify
Do you have spotify? I'm wondering if it's the people who don't have spotify who "lean" to a certain initial interpretation that is colored by previous experience (especially in having to utter the phrase to someone). If so, it make the naming kind of apt.
I do have Spotify, but I've never known Spotify to have more music than other streaming services apart from its infancy when there wasn't the level of competition as there is now. In fact I thought Apple music now had the greater number of songs in comparison.
I don’t understand what “more music” (“more songs”) means in this context or why it’s relevant.
Edit: I think you’re misinterpreting the use of this tool. It’s not to find tracks across your music services. It’s for when people share links from Spotify but you subscribe to a different streaming service. Spotify has the largest market share (and probably outsized in certain geographic areas) so being on a “minority” streamer requires something like this. You’re not entering an artist name or track. You’re inputting the link.
I don't think I'm misinterpreting, we're saying the same thing. It helps you find tracks or artists across music services based on the link provided from one streaming service.
I also don't see why someone can't just say the artist name and/or song name, rather than sending a link or asking "Do you have Spotify", then putting it through "I don't have Spotify" when you could just search it.
Someone could just say "Hey listen to the new song by xxx"
> "to start finding music titles across your favorite streaming services"
But it isn’t this… so I don’t think we are saying the same thing.
As for someone saying the name etc: you’re missing how people can converse now with multiple chats. People aren’t going to ask what service one has. And they aren’t going to write out a full artist name and title and or album etc. And people share tracks as a sort of metaphor and context specific addition - like a type of slang or colour to conversation. To discuss or address the meta aspects of the track by either party derails the conversation. It’s about understanding the changing nature of communication and how different cultures and generations are doing it.
Even after the fail, I still didn't realize it wasn't an example link and thought that they had made an error in maintaining an outdated or expired one.
They should just use an actual example link!
Nice. Please add Bandcamp (might have to be a link to a search, I know)
Issue: https://github.com/sjdonado/idonthavespotify/issues/32
I want to start buying music (and film/series), to eventually be less dependent on services. Where can I buy DRM free music (and film/series)?
I check these sites in the following order:
2. https://us.7digital.com/ (https://ca.7digital.com/ for fellow Canadians)
EDIT: Also discovered Quobuz has a shop where you can download albums as well https://www.qobuz.com/ca-en/shop
+1 for Qobuz -- it's been where I buy my mainstream music for years now
(They used to have a really nice tarball option for downloading albums, but they axed that so now you have to download songs individually. Massive downgrade in QoL)
Add these up-and-comers:
https://mirlo.space - Collectively owned & managed by musicians
https://ampwall.com - Competitor to Bandcamp with better features
Not sure about movies or TV shows, but I buy songs on Bandcamp fairly often, though that's more less limited to indie bands (not strictly true but true enough).
Honestly though? I just buy CDs on eBay and rip them to FLAC, and stream them to myself with Jellyfin. CDs are DRM-free (meaning no potential legal issues stemming from breaking DRM), and are already digital so a conversion to FLAC incurs no quality loss. I use a Blu-ray drive, but USB DVD drive can do the job just fine and can be found for less than $20 on Amazon. Also, CDs can be had for fairly cheap because no one wants them anymore, especially if you buy a bunch at once.
This setup works fairly well up until around ~2016 music, when it becomes harder and harder to find CDs for albums released after that.
I've become kind of a grumpy old man who doesn't like much new music, so this works well for me. I still use YouTube music for music that I haven't bought CDs for yet, but I'd say that around ~80% of my music streaming is coming from my Jellyfin server now.
Much new good music can be bought DRM-free on Bandcamp.
If I wanted to most honestly buy a latest hit, I'd buy it in any DRM-ed form to fuel the sales, and then download it from torrents for convenient listening.
Good support
Morally identical probably but is it slightly more legal in the US to run software to crack the DRM? (Hopefully it’d never be tested of course)
You can brag about a successful crack of the DRM but refuse to prove it if you leave no traces downloading the rip.
For music, Bandcamp and Qobuz both offer FLAC. iTunes store and Amazon both sell DRM-free downloads as well (though with lossy compression).
For video, there's never been a DRM-free store, unfortunately. Your only option there (besides hoisting the black flag) is to buy DVD/Blu-Ray releases and rip them yourself.
For video, the quite obscure CinéMutins[0] offers DRM-free downloads. The catalogue is in large part in French though and the movies that aren’t are hard-subbed in French. There’s also basically no mainstream films, the focus is on social messages, but there are moderately-known films here and there.
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Strongly second BandCamp
...especially on certain Fridays, when they channel 100% of the sales revenue directly to the artists.
The first Friday of every month, to be specific.
They started skipping some months. Check https://isitbandcampfriday.com/ for the next one.
This coming Friday (September 5th) is one! Woo!
This is a brilliant marketing move, imo. It feels like it adds a lot more support for the band than it actually does, which is probably like 11% more than the few bucks they would have otherwise gotten when you bought an album. Good will all around, at a small price.
Someone please correct me if I am wrong, but I think iTunes doesn't put any DRM on the albums you buy from there.
Once upon a time they did, but I've been buying DRM-free music from iTunes for a long time now. The songs might have a watermark though? I don't really think so, but even if they did, I don't really have a problem with that.
Folks are saying Bandcamp, but surely that's only for the few indie artists that are on there (in comparison to the wider music ecosystem covered by Spotify). Please explain if I'm missing something here.
So I think a better answer is Qobuz[1], which I recently tried. I had a pleasant experience, where I downloaded DRM free FLAC files. I will use it again, but sparingly, as the cost adds up on top of the Spotify subscription and in comparison to piracy.
Bandcamp has a wider selection than you'd think. I've been pleasantly surprised at how often I will find an artist who sells music there. Qobuz is good too, I use them both.
I feel like I'm missing something, too. I just went there and searched for some very large artists (pulling from a Wikipedia article on best-selling artists of all time). Every single one was a fake profile, with no actual music by the artist.
Is there a normie search mode, or is this to be expected?
Bandcamp is primarily for independent artists and independent record labels. Depending on what music you listen to, you will either not be able to find anything (e.g. anything popular enough to be played on the radio), or you will be able to find more than on conventional streaming services (e.g. extreme metal).
Some big labels unfortunately have a "No Bancamp allowed" policy. This is the case for Century Media, which is owned by Sony, which has a large share in Spotify. I'm sure there are more examples like this.
The only ethical way I see to truly own all of your music is to pirate it, and support the artists by buying their merch and going to their shows.
Thank you! I was reading so many comments suggesting that everything should be on Bandcamp, but my searches did not show that. I was wondering if I was maybe on the wrong website.
For tv and movies you're basically hoping they had a DVD release. All the options options to "buy" are essentially one time fees to stream it on various services or when you get a download it will have HDCP drm on it. I can understand why they don't offer drm free versions because I would give them away like candy to my friends but it's mostly all available pirating anyway so I doubt it really matters.
I don't know why you're downvoted? If you want to stay legal, you gotta buy DVDs and Blu Rays, mostly used or in bargain bins to keep it relatively affordable.
Many record stores also sell digital editions of (new) vinyl releases, see for example:
iTunes Store has been DRM free for music for a very long time. Still have it for video though.
Buying is a lot harder than pirating these days. Just join RED.
These days running yt-dlp -x is way easier than maintaining ratio on freaking RED..
i buy cds and blu rays. there's a program called "makemkv" that allows you to make digital backups, including things like commentary tracks.
extra bonus: blu rays work in a ps5, so i can just do that instead of trying to figure out the stream setup.
many vinyls I purchase come with a digital code for drm free mp3 download.
iTunes Store.
Couldn't we have a music:// protocol or something, to be opened by the OS's preferred music app? Anything like that already exist?
Do people actually like that kind of thing? mailto links always do a thing I don't want and obscure the actual address I could otherwise copy/paste. I feel similarly about matrix.to links. In the worst case it does nothing or opens something the user didn't want to use.
The behavior I'm imagining is: someone sends me a link to a song, provided by their music service of choice, which I can't use. I click the link, then my OS tries to open that resource in my preferred music player. I haven't thought about what happens if that doesn't work (not available on the service for example).
You're probably right that it would end up being more clunky and broken.
But I think a song is much closer to a resource (like a hyperlink to a website), than to a contact address (like a mailto link).
This is actually a regular problem for me, and I solved it by backing up my messages, then using a script to scan them for music URLs, and create a playlist on my music service of choice. It felt like a pretty silly thing to create.
If i open a .mp3 file on my computer, it will open my local preferred audio player. It could have the same functionality as treating the resource as a 'file'
I’m not sure how that would work without a unique and agreed-upon shared identifier across platforms. There’s no equivalent to referencing a song using a URI.
There are already industry standard codes for songs, albums, performers, etc: ISWC, ISRC, IPI, IPN, ISNI.
Spotify already use some of those, but I dunno if they expose via API or make it searchable.
Small UX thing: I would have loved to not had to inspect element to grab the placeholder text to test it out :)
I maintain a playlist/mixtape here for fun that doesn't rely on Spotify - just YouTube but with a very different audio focused UI
Before I enable JavaScript, exactly what is this supposed to do?
From their GitHub: Effortlessly convert Spotify links to your preferred streaming service
Links to songs or can it get full play lists too?
Sorry, I'm not the author. I don't have Spotify either.
Songs, if you paste playlist it just searches for a playlist with similar words in their title.
That seems correct really? I suppose the other thing it could do would be to fetch each song at that point in time and link them individually. But then if you want that, you can always do that from the original ones anyway.
Seems like you can provide the link of an Spotify hosted song and the site would give you links for alternatives such as Youtube Premium and Apple Music
How do you even browse the web? Is it common for people to disable JavaScript?
Not the poster, but I also leave js disabled by default. Meltdown/Spectre made it very clear that automatically executing untrusted third-party code securely is basically impossible. I browse the web using Chromium. I don’t think it’s common for people to disable js, but it works way better than you might expect. It’s easy to add an exception for the handful of sites that really need it. (Just three clicks.) Half of the web becomes better (no ads, no cookie banners). The other half stops working entirely, but usually that’s just a reminder that the content was probably not worth reading in the first place.
I keep it disabled by default (noscript) it is a tossup, lots of sites just load the essentials with JavaScript disabled and are, as a result, much better. Others break entirely. The ones that totally break tend to be the silly over-designed ones though. Most useful info is available in plain text (see the phenomenon of an old research professor’s home page).
How common? Dunno. People here talk about it whenever it comes up. As a website for chit-chatting about tech stuff we have an unusually large population that cares about this kind of stuff, though.
> How do you even browse the web?
With NoScript, and some basic expectations for web designers to try to honour that "graceful degradation" concept that we were all assured was definitely a thing many years ago.
> Is it common for people to disable JavaScript?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/ claims about a quarter of a million users. Which I suppose is really not very much in the grand scheme of things. But there are also people getting similar effects using uBlock and other such tools.
But I don't care how popular this is or isn't. It's my computer and this is how I operate it. And I advocate strongly for others to follow suit, because there are numerous advantages.
I usually keep js disabled by default with uBO and enable it per-site when it fails. Not terribly inconvenient (worst is auth workflows that bounce you through a few domains, but just save your settings as you go through it and you would only need to do that once for that flow).
Many people do, including myself (but I don't know how common it is by percentage though, but it is probably low). Although some web pages do not work, some work better. Even if it does not work, sometimes I can find the data and can still use it due to that, or use the API.
Progressive enhancement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement
And empirically, failure of a site to follow this principle tends to correlate with being unhealthy or unbearable in other ways.
There are of course countless exceptions, which I allowlist with a couple of clicks. But overall I find browsing this way to be a breath of fresh air.
I do it as well. I'm sure it's a lot more common among HN's techie audience than the general population.
It's the modern "I don't even own a TV."
How _do_ you browse the web with Js enabeld?
Using an ad blocker. Noscript seems far more annoying than useful to me, resource usage is almost never an issue and everyone is tracking me through my phone regardless.
> and everyone is tracking me through my phone regardless.
That defeatism brings you nowhere and this is solvable too by using a custom rom and preferring web browser over apps.
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Putting aside security/privacy implications,
Why not?
No it's not common which is why most of us don't bother to support it. They are an incredibly noisy minority though.
I don’t have time to browse the web. I’m too busy talking about how I have JavaScript blocked.
I created an app a while ago that would allow converting a link right through the sharing dialog on iOS and Android.
Unfortunately, the app wouldn't show up in the play stores search results even if you searched for its exact name and on iOS the app didn't make it through the review process because it has no UI. So I took it down after a while although I still feel like it's a handy tool if people send you music.
I feel like if you're going to have an example that presumably works, it should be value instead of placeholder or at least default the request to whatever is in the placeholder input if you click submit.
The first use case that comes to mind (if this had an API, which I don't think it does), is to easily convert a list of Spotify links into different links that can be downloaded from `yt-dlp`.
This would be great
Previously on HN: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42110877>
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
I Don't Have Spotify - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42110877 - Nov 2024 (371 comments)
If one is thinking about switching from Apple Music to Spotify, can someone recommend a website to automatically move the song collection? I think it was easier a while ago but then Apple cracked down on it, so I am not sure if there's an automated option now
https://www.tunemymusic.com/ will do anything to anything
I have wanted something like this for a long time. My wife uses yt for music and I use Spotify
First problem I have using this in my iPhone is that the url bar is wider than the screen (maybe due to my font?) and I can’t even manage to paste a link into it unless I turn the phone sideways. The other problem is that the links she sends are google search link which triggers some kind of weird “search” behavior from the browser
This could be awesome but the paste behavior on iPhone is just so terrible
She sends you the Google redirect links from the search page rather than the underlying YouTube URL?
If she doesn't want to do the extra step of following the link through to find the real URL, there are web extensions that will resolve the Google tracking links for you.
You could raise an issue here? https://github.com/sjdonado/idonthavespotify/issues
While the name is a bit click baity, I still keep buying good old CDs, or DRM free MP3s.
Is there a way to create an always up to date mirror of a curated Spotify Playlist to Apple Music (such as Top Hits of X country?). Apple doesn't have a large selection of dynamically generated playlists
I dont have Spotify either. I have self determination.
This reminds me of similar discussions we've been having about this topic. The key challenge I see is implementation at scale.
With music I gave up and just listen to soma fm. I donate $40 a year. Download wat I like if needed from YouTube illegally
I would also support this as a browser extension, possibly with an auto redirect!
Responding to the title..
I also don't have spotify. I used to have spotify but it started playing spanish language commercials for no apparent reason and their support wouldn't do anything about it other than inform me that if I paid for an account there would be no commercials. So I started paying for apple music.
Ok
> Something went wrong, please try again later.
What's it supposed to do?
Please add pirate MP3.
Ok, I'm not in on the joke. What's going on here?
It doesn't work, at least with Spotify playlists.
"Not available on other platforms."
But it is...
Registration is free though
Niceeeeee
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It probably has more to do with other streaming services existing, and having a significant enough market share for this to tool to be useful for people.
who asked
I didn't realise Spotify was a link sharing platform. Oh wait, it's not.