I’m going insane. I cannot for the life of me find a suitable way to listen to music privately. I’m on iOS, and I don’t know whether to just stick to Apple Music or give up on music in general (I tried, TRIED to go local, but all the apps are shitty). Any way to listen to music and not have your data compromised? Should I just stick to Apple Music and hope that laws change (maybe something like EU’s DMA?)

Edit: Hey all! First of all, thank you so much for all the recommendations! I’ve discovered so many great apps and tools I didn’t even know existed (and it has also brought my hopes up for privacy in general). Even though it’s still not perfect, I’ve been using foobar2000 on iOS, downloading music I find (I’m still using Apple Music for discovery, but will probably stop when my subscription ends this month). For desktop I’m using HyperPipe, which although a little buggy at times is so awesome! One thing I do miss about this system is the lack of lyrics. Apple Music has such a beautiful UI when it comes with lyrics, but you can’t have it all when it comes to privacy it seems. Thanks for the amazing discussion! I’m so far loving Lemmy ;)

  • @MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world
    11•2 years ago

    Self-host your library? I don’t know why that seems so hard, going by your phrasing.

    If you absolutely must listen to music online (I empathise, I need to do so to find new music), here’s what I do: Librewolf with Ublock Origin, Cookie Manager, Dark Reader, NoScript + music.youtube.com.

    No advertisements, minimal tracking (because you will explicitly disable every other script than the one(s) required to stream music). Use a VPN and fake your user-agent/browser fingerprint for more privacy (haven’t done it since I can’t figure out how to do so for Firefox).

    Cheers

  • @airikr@lemmy.ml
    9•2 years ago

    I download the music from YouTube (through front-end services like Piped) and play it locally through a music player.

    I don’t know how it works on iPhone (I have an Android phone), but I can use NewPipe and LibreTube and Seal to download the music. If I’m on the go that is. Otherwise I download the music through ytdlp and transfer the files to my smartphone.

    Apple really restrict their users to their own ecosystem.

    • @uberrice@feddit.de
      1•2 years ago

      Yt-dlp is great for getting music from YouTube music.

      You even get fairly good quality if you have premium (I do through Argentina, so it costs me cents per month)

      • @airikr@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2•2 years ago

        Woot? yt-dlp premium? Never heard of it. yt-dlp have always been and will always be free (donations aside) since it’s open sourced. Sounds like you pay to a scammer. Or do you mean YouTube Premium? :)

  • @StewartGilligan@lemmy.world
    8•2 years ago

    If you want something on Android, check out ViMusic. It uses YouTube Music as a back-end and can recommend stuff based on what you listen. It also supports offline playback. On desktop, you can use Hyperpipe. It also uses YouTube Music as its back-end.

    If you want ultimate privacy, then download your favorite songs and use VLC or self host them and stream it from there.

  • @Nikls94@lemmy.world
    8•2 years ago

    You could get Spotify and switch it to private.

    I don’t really care about other knowing what music I listen to and even use the “AI" to give me songs that I might like. Most of them are not my type but there is 1 or maybe 2 every week that are good that I’d‘ve never searched for.

  • @utopia_dig@lemmy.ml
    6•2 years ago

    I’m using Qobuz. Since it is a rather small service, I just hope it is more private than the “big players” like Spotify/Apple Music. But the main benefits of Qobuz are the audio quality and the (afaik) highest payment per streamed song for artists.

  • @quantenzitrone@feddit.de
    5•2 years ago

    If anyone is interested, i recently developed my own system of defining my music library declaratively in the Nix programming language and started switching to it. It creates folders as playlists and can automatically download the music from YouTube or SoundCloud. I plan to expand and improve this further.

    I doubt this will work on IOS tho, sorry OP.

    https://codeberg.org/quantenzitrone/declarative-music.nix

  • @myself@lemmy.ml
    4•2 years ago

    tried to go local but the apps are shitty

    die-hard poweramp fan here but idk if it also exists for ios

  • SokathHisEyesOpen
    4•2 years ago

    MP3 files that you own. They can never take them away from you, and you don’t have to pay every month for them.

  • @Dillacorn@lemmy.ml
    3•2 years ago

    I built an OpenMediaVault NAS and run a JellyFin server on it… connect with wireguard and stream music with Symfonium I’ve decided to download on the web… it’s a little work to get there but it’s def private as long as you trust the devs. I’d also recommend vimusic for music discovery and web playing.