[jack_pp]

Do you actually pirate music or did you give it as a general example? I feel no need to pirate music today with all the music streaming services especially since I can find all the music I want on all the streaming services which is a world of difference compared to the video streaming services

[dtx1]

I stopped pirating music a while ago when spotify became better than what the trackers i was on delivered. That being said, i have recently started looking into it again since spotify is dragging their asses on high quality streaming and their app support on linux started to annoy me. The alternative streaming services barely support linux at all so they aren't really an alternative for me. But you are right it's mostly tv-shows and movies, a few books here and there. It seems I've basically missed the golden age of netflix (or there never was one in germany with their shitty catalog) and stayed on private trackers until now. I suspect it won't change any time soon either with all the fragmentation going on and i absolutely refuse to deal with their stupid DRM measures.

[jack_pp]

Have you tried youtube music (via youtube premium)? I'm not sure about the high quality audio part because I only listen via bluetooth. The recommendations, general app UX and the fact that I can listen via website on desktop have made me cancel spotify.

[dtx1]

For low quality audio it's fine, though there's a lot of music I like missing that spotify has. Quality wise it's all over the place and at best as good as spotify.

Generally I don't care much about the UI of any of the services offered and being browser based doesn't really make it any better for me. I can do that with spotify and most other services as well. What I would like to have is a simple paid service with high quality flacs that has an open enough API that i can use many of the great open source tools available and download music for offline use on my phone (data caps and all) without jumping through a lot of hoops. It's not music management is an unsolved problem and for local music i have tons of great options on all my devices from TUI applications to applications with great desktop integration to great open source phone apps. With Spotify there are at least some projects that work somewhat but not really well and certainly nothing that i can easily integrate into my desktop or phone without relying on proprietary clients.

But honestly before I go around trying endless services to get a decent experience I'd rather just take the red music tracker test [1] and build a local collection that "just works" and be done with it.

[1] https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html

[hipitihop]

Have you looked at https://roonlabs.com/ ? I'd be interested in your opinion if you have