I'm actually using foobar2000 on iOS. Much better for music. Had some reliability issues with VLC for music.

We are genuinely at the point now where you can just mostly summon this into existence with a coding agent.

I thought through the UI and tech stack and reasearched what would actually work first and then wrote a very detailed brief for Codex. And about 2 hours of back and forth and re-thinking later, it works.

One challenge was that the phone has to have the NFC UI on while looking for cards, but i wanted it to turn off while playing so I could have a hole in the box to a blank screen she can swipe to skip back and forward.

This stumped Codex - but I then had the idea to use the depth cam to detect cards placed on the phone, then only show the scan UI again when the card is removed.

So now it works really seamlessly.

1) Place card on, music instantly starts, even remembers where in the song and playlist you are.

2) Remove card, phone detects it can see at least a few cm, instant stop.

3) Place a new, or the same card on and that instantly plays from the last position.

I was in shop the other day with my daughter and the walls were covered in cassette tapes as decoration.

I has to take SO MANY steps back to explain what they were.

I realised she thought all music was just magically created when you ask Alexa for it - so we had to start there to explain someone has to make the music first, and go back though streaming services, digital downloads, to having to literally go to a shop to buy a single song for £4 - which is probably about £20 now adjusted for inflation.

I LOVE THAT IDEA SO MUCH.

It's so dumb and so functional at the same time.

My favourite ideas usually hug that Pareto frontier.

Took a quick look at Noiseblend, seems nice! Will play around a bit more with it when I’m actually at a computer, but I find that I end up getting into a downward spiral of recommendations (not from yours - just in general) that reinforces what I listen to, versus expanding based on what I listen to.

I listen to a good amount of underground hip hop/backpack rap kind of stuff and I find that so many recommendation systems just recommend what I already listen to.

Oddly enough, I randomly asked Claude one day and got three novel album recommendations that no other service really gave me :shrug:

> But I have the same problem of trying to find recommendations.

If you're buying music semi-regularly then the people at the record store are probably starting to recognize you and what you like and will probably be happy to recommendation stuff.

Nice website and functionality!

I would love a way to create a playlist from the related songs it found if that is possible!

I use spotify for convenience and social sake, my friends use it and its been the best mobile/android auto/desktop sync app but it's well known for not having literally the best albums/songs/eps/whatever that they can't monetize or license for whatever reason so you might want to expand your app to look at spotify for recs but factor in that even someone huge like mac miller has a ton of music not on spotify that a real fan would side-eye you for not knowing on a recommendation list.

There is so much early career music for artists you can't find on spotify that it gives people who only learned the artist from spotify a curated history of the artist.

Spotify is the disney land walled garden music app and right now Ella Langley is Minnie Mouse.

When you go camping or kayaking you can tell all the people using spotify, their playlists all blend into the same algo topping songs at some point. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if they factor in how much music is cached near the cell tower at the lake I'm parked on right now to maximize profits and limit their bandwidth costs. Let's keep that Zac Brown Band pumping near the boat ramp and feed it to everyone who probably likes it anyway.

I’d love to. I’m working off memory right now, but it’s nothing fancy.

I’ve got abcde[0] set up to handle the digitizing, navidrome[1] is set up to serve the content from a home lab server/NAS over Subsonic[2].

Play:Sub[3] is an iOS application that works with Subsonic. Just an audio receiver at this point, the app lets me “just play something” which is quite nice. Can “play a random album” for example.

Tailscale just enables this off-LAN.

Happy to give more info if you need!

[0] https://linux.die.net/man/1/abcde

[1] https://www.navidrome.org/

[2] https://www.subsonic.org/

[3] https://michaelsapps.dk/playsubapp/

I don't understand myself, what you actually gain from constantly buying new music. Either the music is good, or it's not. If it's not it's not a loss to not buy it, and if it is it's not going to stop invoking the emotions you like it for, or intellectually demand you. You can hear the same music for hundred of times and still discover some new aspect, instrument, melody or sound, you haven't noticed yet. (if it is good)

If I would try to chase, constantly, new music, I wouldn't be able to actually listen to anything, and thus wouldn't enjoy anything at all.

(The only thing that makes sense to me, if people want to be like their peers and up to trends, so simply "listen" to new music to be able to talk like they now what's en vogue right now. But then it's hardly about the music itself and more like collecting an evergrowing checklist.)

At least for a family plan ($22/mo), around 2-20 or so depending on the CD. That accumulates pretty quickly, and of course you don't have to worry about limitations like living at the same address.

This may be the main difference between consuming content and listening to music. For some people, more is not always better and the process of building a collection and putting time and energy into it is a big part of the experience.

After ten years of Spotify subscriptions, you own nothing. Put that $12.99 or more per month into discs instead, and you'd have quite a nice music collection that's still yours ten years later.

and btw they recently went independent!

Love it, but honestly I’m trying to decouple from services like this.

Although, it’s not a critical-path item..

Things are good when they are good for you. Things are bad when they are bad for you.

By now the Spotify algorithm has been good for me. The day it starts being bad I’ll badmouth it. It’s not the time yet.