Since the Plex announcement that their integration with tidal is ending, I'm considering what my options are. I'm aware the the *arrs but is there anything that will recommend music?
What do all you die hard pirates do to discover new bands?
If you don't have a problem with sharing your listening data:
Last.fm (for example, check "similar to" section of artist pages or "similar albums" of album pages)
ListenBrainz, a free and open source alternative to Last.fm (for example, Music Neighbourhood, ListenBrainz Radio, or the "Created for you" playlists (they have been criticised by people for having too little variety, but according to the devs this will increase as more people use the service))
It doesn't help any one else unfortunately.
But I subscribed to Google Play Music All Access during the original promo in 2013. Part of $7.99 promo deal way back then, was that it was a Lifetime Subscription. Even after raising the price on all the 2014 YouTube Red promo users at the beginning of 2024, I'm still locked in at $7.99. I've de-Googled nearly everything else, but I'll hold on to that subscription till I die, or YouTube does.
this is something i'm trying to figure out myself, so i'm right there with you 😅
the best thing i've done so far is to visit various public tracker sites and look at the trending torrents for music over different time frames.
i've also been just combing through different DJ sets, playlists, and allowing the almighty algorithm on YouTube take me to new places, and then I download the ones that i like. almost crate digging, but digitally :)
I mostly look the reddits or here on Lemmy communitys of the genre I like. I also look at what bands tour with who and give there songs a listen.
But I have also came across a website called coreradio(.)online and it has been great for piracy and discovery of that genre (metalcore and other metals/rock ) as well. No idea if there are similar sites out there for other genres.
I used to use spotify and let it create similar playlists to what I already had but ofc they killed that feature in favor of their useless smart shuffle....
Lidarr Import List might interest you. You can say connect to Spotify's playlists for top hits and have it auto add the albums to your library. Then you can use metadata on the music for smart playlists.
Can you clarify what the plex relationship has to do with this? I use plex and Tidal and always thought it was a little weird that I could access my plex account through plex app or Tidal app.
I still think Tidal has some of the best algorithms for finding new / new to me music. I'm very disappointed that most AI engines seem to suck at good music recommendations ; I thought this might be one meaningful thing I could use them for.
I used the integration to fill in the gaps I have in my personal collection. With tidal, I could start playing my own music and plexamp would just drop in some new songs for me.
It would create some playlists based on what I listened to, which again helped to discover new music.
I could just start using tidal, but that means turning my back on my personal collection. Or I could give up tidal, but that means losing the recommendations.
I see. Now I'm kinda bummed I never took advantage of that option to mix personal collection with the Tidal Playlists - did not know it did that.
A quick search turned up tunemymusic.com which let's you upload a m3u Playlist to Tidal. This might be a good solution. I'll have to play with it myself later.
Not that I know of. I don't know much about the service to be honest but I use it when I feel like doing some exploring and then I just use the website and browse for things that looks interesting.