LainTrain

sigh

This country sucks.

That's not really even close to what I asked.

Well Bill if you really mean all that, there's no time like the present.

It's one thing to make a profit doing something nice, anyone can do that, but to take a loss for another? To act consciously and refuse to profit off an awful thing?

That's a different thing entirely.

Just gonna repost my comment from the thread on the Technology community yesterday for suggestions and discussion: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/21273053

I used Navidrome and Symfonium with Picard for metadata and relied on a combination of Bandcamp, Rutracker and yt-dlp with a YTM free trial, along with the Spotify data export and manual python scripting elbow grease to fetch, tag all the music from my Spotify and recreate every playlist as m3u8 to be imported inside the Docker, then more elbow grease to actually make the playlist semi-accurate.

Despite Symfonium constantly losing its silly always online DRM license check and locking me out of both my cached and remote (via PiVPN to Nginx on home server to Navidrome) songs due to me having multiple Google accounts on my phone and the app freaking out because it would check the wrong account, forcing me to log out of all accounts and reset the app - losing all my customization and my credit card access for payments until I signed into the right Google account again, I had a fairly functional setup, even with playlist cover art and everything on Symfonium (despite it not being a feature in Navidrome itself).

My playlists were just as they were on Spotify down to each specific song title, album cover and most importantly of course metadata correctness and song order (I have never used shuffle in my life).

Unfortunately I went back to Spotify in the end because most music i listen to is niche and fairly Indie and thus either a pain in the ass to pirate or simply outright unavailable externally anywhere, and to maintain consistent proper metadata for what is there was like a full-time job even with some automation through Picard. I still did this for half a year. Mostly because I just did it while WFH.

I eventually simply gave up downloading more music and listened to the same few thousand songs in my transferred playlists on repeat which for me led to a feeling of stagnancy and eventually depression in life, after I begrudgingly came back to Spotify I immediately discovered several hundred new songs and created multiple new playlists just during my walks to and from the grocery store alone.

My ultimate problem is that on Spotify if I look something up I can just listen to it right away and immediately add it to my library or to a playlist of my choosing.

In contrast, when self-hosting I would have to first look up the music on Google, go to YouTube to listen to it in dogshit quality, look up album/artist on Rutracker, pray that it's there when a lot of the time it is not, filter out albums/songs I don't want from the discography torrent and add it to my qbittorrent-nox on server, mount the NFS share on my main windows PC with my music staging folder, add metadata with musicbrainz Picard and have it move to the finalized folder, then rescan on Navidrome webui, rescan on Symfonium local cache, then add to a playlist, then listen.

This is like, 2-3 hours of conscious effort just for me to skip to the middle of the song, listen for 30 seconds, decide I don't like the song and delete it from the playlist, never to be heard again.

It's way too much.

The unfortunate truth is that despite feeling good about whatever miniscule amount of effect I might have on stopping this wealth transfer from artists and listeners to Spotify and our corporate overlords while those same overlords win elections and take away my human rights while I can't even easily get a fitting new song in decent quality to listen to when attempting to find some peace in that mess, the alternatives just aren't worth it for me.

Yes I could just accept to have less, to just make do with the music I have, but that requires motivation that's frankly hard to maintain if you look around and see how the rest of society behaves, eagerly falling for whatever corposlop becomes available.

Felt like I'm cutting off my nose to spite my face tbqh.

I would love for it to work as it does with Jellyfin and Immich, I have replaced GDrive, Netflix, Google Photos and damn near everything, Spotify is my only subscription left, but it just hasn't worked for me to move off of it long-term. I'd love suggestions on how this problem can be fixed though.

Some ideas of mine:

1. Musicbrainz metadata is awful. Half the time the cover art is someone's photo of some shitty Japanese vinyl with stickers. Pull covers off YT or Spotify. In fact - pull all metadata off Spotify via scraping, with Musicbrainz volunteer metadata serving only as intermediary to connect the audio to the musicbrainz id which should connect to a Spotify option and potentially a fallback option if somehow the music isn't on Spotify.

2. There should be an intelligent playlist creator of some sort where I can give it my Spotify account export data and it can go off song titles and albums in the playlists within to create playlists in navidrome by finding matches in my library and automatically downloading missing ones and it should be at least 99% accurate (most "Spotify playlist downloader" type websites are 99% inaccurate for instance).

3. Navidrome or one of it's clients should have a plugin to get suggestions at the bottom of playlists like Spotify via last.fm and play music instantly directly from Spotify/YTM, with a button to add a song to your playlist, when you do so, it automatically downloads it, copies metadata off Spotify, and adds it to whatever playlist you added it to.

All that should hopefully ease the pain and make it so you can discover, listen and add to your library without so many barriers.

Yeah I remember being out with work colleagues IRL at a pub and there was some friends or a company, it was absolutely rammed as well, some guy kept talking to me because I think he was a friend of a colleague, and he kept buying me drinks, but I straight up didn't realize he was even talking to me most of the time because of how packed it was, and at work it was tradition for people to take turns to buy rounds for everyone so I thought I was getting drinks on someone from work 💀

If I even understood that this person was trying to probably approach, my reaction would've been "literally who" because I never even knew him before, but also, that's true for 99% of men.

I feel like it's clear from this seemingly widespread psychological tendency of distrusting strangers that if there's a kernel of truth to the pseudoscience that is evolutionary psychology it's that perhaps we as a species were meant to have a much smaller social circle where we'd know everyone intimately and pick a mate over the course of a long time knowing them or at least knowing about them in our little tribe, transitioning from friends to eventually dating etc. that way also if someone was abusive you'd know just because you'd probably know and possibly be even friends with all their exes, the unknown risk is just kinda not there.

Obviously in a global urban world with the sheer amount of people you'd be lucky to even see the same person more than once, all behavior is effectively inconsequential like in an open world video game because other people might as well despawn as soon as you turn the corner. Dating apps are kind of a market solution to this, but obviously corpos have totally misaligned incentives because men to them are the customer who they need to make pay, with promise of women being the product, and men need to be kept on the app as much as possible and thus single to make them the most money, so it's just fucked.

Star Trek is definitely not thriving. It's more like Apophis before he died, pathetic and old, an ossified parasite begging for a new host to inhabit and latch onto. Star Trek is dead and Alex Kurtzman, Secret Hideout and Hollywood nepotism killed it.

Stargate, Firefly and Enterprise can live on as the last good sci-fi shows of the 20th century culture. The Expanse, For All Mankind are all really good modern sci-fi works, with the latter being ran by a major Star Trek writer for TNG and DS9 - Ronald D Moore.

Yeah I don't understand how anxious mfers will do acid to "heal" and then end up freaking out so hard they need the hospital yet they refuse to have the hypervigilance from trauma inherent in our brutal society to think ahead and take your friend or your ass to the nearest bus stop and say you don't know 'em, just found em prjectile vomiting and offered help, and you know nothing of any onions or lemon tek.

Realize that even if there's a law that says docs can't call the cops on you for ODing or freaking out like in the UK, NHS trusts and hospitals can and do have informatics departments (I worked on one) that absolutely compile statistics shared with other depts in government and maybe even public for transparency of resourcing demand and budgeting, which the cops can take one look at and use to find an address range and put out a notice so that sussy packages whether domestic special brown shit with 'zenes in that brown yellow envelope still soaked with solvent or anything from the Netherlands sent to that address range get put for randomized checks and then they bust you on the next DNM order via "machine learning statistical analysis" or "randomized checks".

Cops are above the law. There are many docs who are cops at heart. If you got something to lose don't be a fool and count on a "system" which will chew you up and spit you out.

...unless im misunderstanding and this is about paying for healthcare in America and not about being arrested for possession or being under the influence. In which case yeah also don't give em palantir ass mfers anything anyway

Wish I had your money experience tbqh, because Spotify algorithm is the only algorithm I use (that I'm aware of, anyway) and it's the only one I find that doesn't just suggest me random crap, but is almost dead on to what I want every time I'm building a new playlist, and while I had a fairly developed and diverse taste to start with, I have found hundreds of artists that I would consider myself a fan of through Spotify. It's genuinely a lot to give up to never find any artists like that again and go back to a much more narrow cone of vision for music :(

Even though I talk a big game about quitting algos everywhere else on Lemmy, I also can't say I was ever particularly impressed with recs of YT's, Google's, Tumblr's or Insta's or TikTok's algos in comparison, hence why all those were very easy to delete/block/disable.

Worth noting though, your phrase "came on" makes me think you are talking about some sort of smart shuffle or auto-generated playlist feature, which I never used. My only interaction with the Spotify algorithm is scrolling to the bottom of a playlist I'm making and seeing the list of songs that are listed at the bottom as recommended, if I like it and there's a place for it on the playlist, I will add it. The only flaw in this mode of interaction is after many many playlists, and the fact that I try not to repeat any songs between playlists, I find that what it tends to suggest is just songs I already have in my other playlists.

This 100%. Just because capitalism makes streaming unethical doesn't mean we need to go back to old studio system of other capitalist bastards to serve as gatekeepers of art.

I used Navidrome and Symfonium with Picard for metadata and relied on a combination of Bandcamp, Rutracker and yt-dlp with a YTM free trial, along with the Spotify data export and manual python scripting elbow grease to fetch, tag all the music from my Spotify and recreate every playlist as m3u8.

Despite Symfonium constantly losing its silly always online DRM license check and locking me out of both my cached and remote (via PiVPN to Nginx on home server to Navidrome) songs due to me having multiple Google accounts on my phone and the app freaking out because it would check the wrong account, forcing me to log out of all accounts and reset the app - losing all my customization, I had a fairly functional setup, even with playlist cover art and everything on Symfonium (despite it not being a feature in Navidrome itself).

My playlists were just as they were on Spotify down to each specific song title, album cover and most importantly of course metadata correctness and song order (I have never used shuffle in my life).

Unfortunately I went back to Spotify in the end because most music i listen to is niche and fairly Indie and thus either a pain in the ass to pirate or simply outright unavailable externally, and to maintain consistent proper metadata for what is there was like a full-time job even with Picard. I still did this for half a year. Mostly because I just did it while WFH.

I eventually simply gave up downloading more music and listened to the same few thousand songs in my transferred playlists on repeat which for me led to a feeling of stagnancy and eventually depression in life, after I begrudgingly came back to Spotify I immediately discovered several hundred new songs and created multiple new playlists just during my walks to and from the grocery store alone.

My ultimate problem is that on Spotify if I look something up I can just listen to it right away and immediately add it to my library or to a playlist of my choosing.

In contrast, when self-hosting I would have to first look up the music on Google, go to YouTube to listen to it, look up album/artist on Rutracker, filter out albums/songs I don't want from the discography torrent add it to my qbittorrent if available, mount the NFS share on windows with my staging folder, add metadata with musicbrainz Picard and have it move to the correct folder, then rescan on Navidrome webui, rescan on Symfonium local cache, then add to a playlist, then listen.

This is like, 2-3 hours of conscious effort just for me to skip to the middle of the song, listen for 30 seconds, decide I don't like the song and delete it later. It's way too much.

The unfortunate truth is that despite feeling good about whatever miniscule amount of effect I might have on stopping this wealth transfer from artists and listeners to Spotify and our corporate overlords while those same overlords win elections and take away my human rights while I can't even easily get a fitting new song in decent quality to listen when attempting to find some peace in that mess, the alternatives just aren't worth it for me.

Yes I could just accept to have less, to just make do with the music I have, but that requires motivation that's frankly hard to maintain if you look around and see how the rest of society behaves.

Feels like I'm cutting off my nose to spite my face tbqh.

I would love for it to work as it does with Jellyfin and Immich, I have replaced GDrive, Netflix, Google Photos and damn near everything, Spotify is my only subscription left, but it just hasn't worked for me to move off of it long-term. I'd love suggestions on how this problem can be fixed though.

Actual answer.

27 yo elder here. Found my 'the one' on OkCupid back in the day, just prior to its enshittification by matchgroup. Just for the record this is a transbian relationship so idk how if at all it would apply to cishet relationships.

Every prior long term relationship with both men and women and all dates I've been on also came from there or otherwise online like social media or forums.

Approaching IRL does suck because most of the time you come off as a total creep intruding on someone just trying to exist, and dating apps at least have a safety net that being there is in and of itself a signal of some intention to date, like you know it won't be inappropriate,

To be fair, that does suck for men, but I'm also unsure whether IRL would be the better strategy, I'm bi myself and not sure if I'd respond positively if approached IRL, in fact I'd probably think it's gonna be some sort of scam or crime about to occur I'd be the victim of.