Spotify, MP3s, and MP3 Players.

[knoxstation]

 

    I have a fairly interesting history with Spotify for a very long time, and for a while, I loved it! I couldn't pay for premium when I was in high school and I absolutely loathe advertising and having limited skips... So I would use Spotify++, which was essentially a hacked version of the Spotify app that let you use premium features for free!

    Installing Tweaked/modded apps like Spotify++ on IOS back then (without jailbreaking) involved using third party app storefronts like Tutuapp or Tweakbox, which took advantage of how Apple’s iOS handled signed enterprise certificates and provisioning profiles. These worked like a charm most of the time.. but Apple would occasionally notice that these third party signed apps were used for piracy, and they would revoke those certificates, rendering the apps unusable! Then you would have to wait for these third party store fronts to find new certificates to sign these apps again. It was a crazy cycle/cat and mouse game.

    As the years progressed, Apple cracked down on this exploitation of these certificates and now, installing third party apps this way just isn’t worth it anymore.

    So when I started college and got my first job, I bit the bullet and paid my first subscription. I paid for the student plan for a good 2-3 years. Back then, the student plan was 5.99 a month... if I remember correctly?

 

    And then... Spotify increased the price, I was like, ok fine?? No problem!

 

    And then they did it again...? Uh okay bro.

 

    And then THEY DID IT AGAIN?!

 

    I was getting increasingly tired of these Spoti-cucks raising the price of premium, especially since i wasn’t seeing any visible improvement with the app itself. Like, Spotify fucking sucks now man! The sound stinks, discovering songs on there isn’t the best, and it seems like they want to use AI for everything now. (last year's Wrapped was an actual embarrassing mess). Not to mention a lot of underground gabber/Eurodance tracks aren’t available on Spotify in the US anymore, so a good chunk of my Spotify library has been wiped out in recent years.

    By 2022-23, I decided I was tired of burning my own money away on a platform that wasn’t worth the price anymore, and I switched to mp3s/flac files. I have to upload them to iTunes and sync them to my iPhone but it works really well. I do have to convert all my FLACs to m4a though so its in an Apple friendly format :))) a majority of my files are my CDs that I have ripped, others are things I’ve gotten from Bandcamp, khinsider and Soulseek which is a p2p file sharing network, mainly for sharing music. I have a fairly obscure music taste so I don’t get a lot of downloads from my own library so feel free to take a look at what I have and download whatever you find interesting. My user on there is knoxstation of course! :D

    There’s something about having my own local and personal music collection that just feels really cozy and reassuring. Like, I love knowing that this library is mine and it's absolutely not going anywhere! Not to mention the sound quality is SO MUCH BETTER compared to Spotify, so I'm enjoying my music a lot more. A lot of the music I listen to isn’t available on streaming services either and using YouTube for listening to music just isn’t it, so finally having a dedicated and organized place for all these tracks is super awesome!

MP3 Players: Newgens also taking initiative?!

 

    Nowadays, with Spotify announcing their weird age verification thing, I'm seeing a lot of younger people on TikTok panic buying mp3 players and using YouTube/Spotify downloaders to download music now. Which I think is kind of funny but also really cool! I have an iPod Nano but its battery is completely degraded and dies really quickly. Opening up the 5th gen iPod Nano is actually super hard to do and replacing the battery means you gotta solder it (which I know how to do!) but I just don't feel like putting all that effort into a device that’s only going to hold 16 GB songs. Definitely not enough for my entire library!

    I also have a PSP 1000 but carrying it around just to listen to music is actually really annoying lmao. I still carry it around in my bag when I want to play my games though! That's another piece of old hardware I'm seeing younger people buy again! It seems like every time I told someone about my PlayStation Portable, they would have no idea what it was, fast forward to 2025 and now everyone wants one LOL, it's so cute.

My advice for those looking to get a mp3 player: get one with plenty of space on it!! Also, I'm seeing a lot of people buying them off Aliexpress/Temu and Amazon. Please get off those sites and buy a second hand/thrift one! It’s probably more affordable and you aren’t contributing to E-waste.

 

 

Comments

[burendasan4]

As someone who lived through the beginning of the MP3 era in college, it makes me happy to see younger people getting into stand-alone MP3 players and owning their own digital music instead of falling for the streaming hype. Then again, the streaming services have made it increasingly difficult with raising prices and increasing restrictions, leaving people with little alternative. I have a free Spotify account but stopped using it because the ads became increasingly annoying. I now use Apple Music which is cool for discovering music but if there are songs that I particularly love, I make sure I have my own digital copies (or have them on CD).

My 1st MP3 player (not counting my portable CD player that played MP3 files on disc) was an iRiver H120 because I was snobbishly anti-Apple. But now I regret not getting an iPod when they were popular, so I got into iPod modding around the time of COVID. Indeed, they can be hard to mod or replace the battery! I have a 4th Gen that is among the easiest to repair because I can't solder. I ended up buying a Sony NW-A45 player that has a microSD card slot which allows you to increase your storage space.