In the past I used to be paying for Spotify. But these days I like keeping my music in the form of MP3s local on my phone. I’m not an audiophile or anything, I just like the control that approach offers and that I always have access to my music even without internet. The music player of my choice is Vanilla Music.
One feature that perhaps I am looking over in simple music players is search. Any suggestions for a good Android mp3 player app with search?
Me and my family already have a respectable CD collection. So one year ago I decided to rip it in order to have it locally on my devices. A few months ago I set up polaris on my raspberry pi to host this collection as a streaming service. It comes with a web interface and an android app and I am quite happy with it. The only issue is that now I spend a lot buying new CDs xD
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I use Poweramp. It is not free nor open source afaik but it looks nice, works well, and does indeed have a search function.
I have used both Spotify and TIDAL, both with alias information, but now I primarily use TIDAL because I like the higher quality. It requires no information other than an email, and a payment method if you use the Premium version (I do, but I use Privacy.com to alias my CC details).
I also have a large FLAC music collection which I host on a Plex server. If I can’t find something on TIDAL but want it in lossless format, I find a FLAC copy of the album and put it on my Plex server.
The most private way would be something self-hosted like Plex, but there are obvious downsides such as electricity costs, storage costs, building your collection, and lack of new music recommendations.
P.S. If I wasn’t into “Hi-Fi Audio” I would just use Spotify, because they have a bigger catalog and I find the quality of the recommendations to be better than TIDAL.
I used the FOSS app “ViMusic” for a while. It was great but to find new songs to listen to I now use Spotify (premium) with the few privacy toggles turned on.
You could try to use Mullvad DNS, or other DNS that automatically blocks ads.
If you will use Spotify in browser, or other services/programs, it should block ads automatically.
- In some cases the website can be more sophisticated, and detect this blockage, making the website brake, or not work.
Try Muffon it’s open source and cross platform. You could listen music from
Last.FM
VK
OdnoklassnikiYandex Music
Spotify
Bandcamp
Deezer
SoundCloud
YouTube Music
YouTube
Discogs
Genius
MusicBrainz
It’s called being a pirate
On mobile I’m a big fan of ViMusic. Can’t say much for their privacy or anything like that but it’s FOSS and keeps me at least at arms length from big tech which I like
edit: correction, just downloaded InnerTune and love it will be slowly switching over
Just for the sake of argument, creating a streaming service that doesn’t know what songs you listen to is possible, it would just be unnecessarily complicated for relatively little gain.
The service I’m envisioning could use RSA blind signatures for authentication. Basically when you pay them, they grant you a cryptographic token which—because of how blind signatures work—can’t be tied back to your account/payment method.
Then, the client could have Tor connectivity built-in (or more realistically, something similar to Apple Private Relay), so the service never discovers your IP address. Your device requests a song using that blinded token, and streams it over an anonymizing network. The service can’t connect the song to your payment method or account because of the blind signature, and can’t connect the song to your device because of the anonymizing network. The service is still able to count which songs are being streamed overall, and verify that some payment was made, so artists aren’t affected. Boom, private streaming enabled by strong encryption 
Real (non-music-streaming) services already do this by the way, Google VPN uses blind signing to (theoretically) decouple your VPN connection from your Google account, GNU Taler uses blind signing to enable payments where the user’s privacy is protected, and I think Monero uses blind signatures in a similar fashion (but I am not a cryptocurrency expert).
Again, nobody will ever do this for a streaming service, because probably nobody outside of maybe some people on this forum would even care about or want this. But is it technically possible? Sure.
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That would be trickier, an algorithm which runs locally on-device would be the way to go, but I have no idea how easy it would be to design a good one.
Apple Music either through their app on my phone or when at my computer i sign into the web client.
I use a dedicated music player for my PC so I don’t need to connect to online platforms to listen to my music collection. Clementine is what I personally use, but I can also recommend Quod Libet as another music player.
I have ditched Apple Music, the service and the app. I have gone old school analog and gone back to owning my music mostly via buying CD’s and some songs on Bandcamp and iTunes.
I am currently using VLC to listen on my devices. Not great UI but it works and is FOSS.
Planning to get a CD player and maybe even a record player!
Not my top pick for listening to music, but a reminder that internet radio is entirely free and private. Most players will let you record songs while/after they’re playing too, which is handy.
You’re pretty guaranteed to hear some music you haven’t before, whether that ends up being a good thing or not lol
There are great alternatives. I did not use all of them. But worth trying.
Spotube
Songtube
Vimusic
Musify
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Apple Music and Bandcamp.
YT music (through VIMusic, Invidious, Newpipe, or mpv) is pretty neat. I don’t see anything wrong with it.
Recommendations aren’t possible unless your data is read and analysed. This would defeat the purpose of any E2EE not already provided by TLS.
thanks for the recommend