Ask HN: How to go back to listening to MP3s?

I never switched away. I still have my music that I collected since elementary school. Many songs would be impossible to find nowadays. There is no reason to go strictly one way. The good news is that you can start building your collection whenever you want.

I listen to FLAC's mostly (high quality, loseless audio files - CD quality or better) most of my collection has come from ripping CDs I owned or checked out from the library or albums bought on bandcamp, quobuz, and ototoy.

I use Rhythmbox to listen to files on my PC (Linux) - I think they have/had a Windows port at some point. VLC works too but is more cumbersome for large libraries on desktop IMHO. But VLC is actually pretty good on Mobile (iOS/Andriod.) besides the pain of syncing files over to iOS.

I splurged on a dedicated DAP (Digital Audio Player) last year that I'm mostly happy with: a HiBY R1 (my two complaints are: 1. for whatever reason it refuses to pair to my car's bluetooth, no issues pairing to numerous other devices. 2. It doesn't remember what you were last playing when it shuts off.)

I use cmus on my laptop and vanilla music player on my phone, I like things to be simple. I have never used a streaming service but I did just decide to go back to listening to the radio and ordered myself a radio good enough to pick up shortwave and am stations from around the world, should be here tomorrow and I am looking forward to it.

I wanted the WinAmp experience in my iPhone with the long playlist. I could not find anything remotely competent either as a web tool or something from the App Store. So, I wrote my own solution. It creates a static playlist as a webpage with a built in mp3 player that allows playing from my home file server.

I've settled over the years on using syncthing to keep copies on my machine and phone. After testing quite a few android players I settled on Oto Music. I'm currently back in the Mac world and use Cog. I still like to use cmus in the terminal.

For acquiring music, the bulk I get from bandcamp. I usually try hard to get my music legally, but sometimes it isn't possible, ripping from YouTube, searching torrent sites, using russian search sites which still seem to index the blogs that stored downloadable links to music like we had about 10 years ago...

I'm curious if any of you has made the switch back to listening to mp3s?

I never stopped. If there is something I like listening to then I must have local copies of it or it does not exist as far as I am concerned. The internet is too fragile to depend on. Companies come and go. Songs get censored, altered or cancelled based on societal identity politics. The internet and power distribution could vanish in one gamma ray burst. Nobody will believe it can happen until it does.

App: I put the songs on MP3 players connected to a tiny mixer and my 1990's sound system. I keep several MP3 players in metal containers and boxes to shield them when not in use.

I never switched away from listening to my own music collection, so my experience may not be useful to you. Here's the setup I have. I run Kodi as my music server at home, with a NAS that contains all of my music. My collection is quite large and continues to grow. I get most of my new music on CDs (usually purchased at the merch table at live performances) or through Bandcamp these days, although I'm open to any source that allows me to have unencumbered lossless recordings.

This allows me to use Kodi's native front end when I'm listening on my home sound system, to use a web front end to play on any web-connected computer, and to stream from my server to my smartphone when I'm out and about. It's the best of all worlds. I have all the convenience of a streaming service, but I actually own the music and it will never become suddenly unavailable or replaced by inferior versions, and I don't have a fixed recurring cost just to enjoy music. Plus, a ton of great music is simply not available on any commercial streaming platform and this eliminates that issue.

I don't tend to use MP3s, though. I go with FLAC instead. Kodi will transcode the FLACs to other formats if needed.

I (somewhat) recently switched from using MP3s to using streaming services. Personally, my music taste (and the amount of tracks that I listen to) is way more varied now than it was before, but I suppose that depends both on how you use streaming services and how you use local MP3s.

Back when I still used exclusively MP3s, I used Music on Console Player [0] on my personal computer and Snae Player [1] on my school's chromebook, since we were only allowed to use web apps on our Chromebooks. On my phone I found VLC [2] to be the best app since it has so many features. I can highly recommend both programs.

I still have all three installed and use them whenever I don't have internet. Although I haven't updated my local music library in a while, so I am reminded of my old music tastes whenever I open either of them.

[0]: https://github.com/jonsafari/mocp

[1]: https://snaeplayer.com/

[2]: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-android.html

People are making a things way too hard. The old way still works. Manage your music using the native app on Macs or iTunes for Windows, sync with iPhone. Music you buy from Apple has been DRM free since 2009.

Yep and I have kept it really basic and simple, I just store them in a folder in /home/$user/music and let jukebox scan and catalogue and I keep a subset on my phone, really that simple.... And you know what, it feels great, but then again, I am old enough to fondly remember just listening to a Walkman and being blown away.

Jellyfin

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=jellyfin

I never stopped listening to mp3's, at least not altogether. I do spend quite a bit of time listening to music these days using Youtube / YT music, but I do still listen to my local collection at times. And I buy mp3 albums from Amazon every once in a while.

For listening I've mostly used xmms over the years, but recently I've been using Audacious[2] mostly.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMMS

[2]: https://audacious-media-player.org/

Dug out my old iPod. Put it in a Bose sound dock. The biggest problem is fighting Apple’s repeated dark patterns forcing people to join their music subscription.

They also repeatedly offload my music off my phone. It’s super irritating. The FTC should investigate them for the practice. Making my music inaccessible after I repeatedly tell them not to in order to force me to subscribe to listen to the music I already own should be illegal.

In the past year I bought a Ruizu clip-on MP3 player. If I want something new I use yt-dlp and get specific songs.

It's nice having a device not connected to the internet.

In the past I used jellyfin.

I have my own huge collection of my favorite music but, as it turns out, my carefully curated Pandora channel matches my music tastes so faithfully that it keeps introducing me to new music that I just love.

And it almost never plays a song that causes me to hit next. Of course, it took a long time to get the channel tuned just right - but now I play music for 5+ hours without interruption of nothing but music I love.

I use an mp3 player usually, but I do have an mpd setup with my NAS serving the files and other devices (desktop, media center, laptop) acting as satellites.

Audacious + Local files

Puddletag for file metadata modification

Inbuilt "song change" plugin for logging / metadata collection

Conky for Visualization

https://winamp.com/player WinAmp has made a comeback.

I'm another who never stopped. I still use matchbox-sized MP3 players, replacing them when they die. Wifi is sparse in my area, and even cellular signals are unreliable (and expensive), so I stayed local-only.

The little players also have discrete "stop" and "volume" buttons or rockers, which means I can pause or adjust volume without having to see the player. Much better than hauling a phone out and spend time navigating menus.

Nobody ever says a word to me, unless I have the earbuds in; then complete strangers will walk up and start talking. Pause the player, remove an earbud, ask them to repeat what they said; they get angry. The usual.

I have spotify (The duo plan is cheap where I’m at and my SO wanted to use it work). But I do maintain my own collection, mostly because Spotify UI is pure garbage.

My collection is store on an old mac mini (with debian). It’s directly linked to an home theater setup via optical. I have MPD on it that I control with Rigelian on my phone. But I often just ssh and use MoC to play music.

I also have gonic (subsonic server) that uses the same library. I use Amperfy to play music from my phone. I could use navidrome, but I don’t like web players.

As for the management, it’s all manual. I’ve tried beets but the overhead wasn’t worth it. I have several collections which have different filesystem organization schemes.