I Don't Have Spotify
Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago
idonthavespotify.sjdonado.comTechstoryHigh profile
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Music StreamingLink ConversionUser Experience
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Music Streaming
Link Conversion
User Experience
A website that converts music links between different platforms, sparking discussions on its usability, features, and the broader topic of music streaming services.
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Aug 31, 2025 at 12:50 PM EDT
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ID: 45084673Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 5:36:19 PM
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That defeatism brings you nowhere and this is solvable too by using a custom rom and preferring web browser over apps.
Why not?
With NoScript, and some basic expectations for web designers to try to honour that "graceful degradation" concept that we were all assured was definitely a thing many years ago.
> Is it common for people to disable JavaScript?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/ claims about a quarter of a million users. Which I suppose is really not very much in the grand scheme of things. But there are also people getting similar effects using uBlock and other such tools.
But I don't care how popular this is or isn't. It's my computer and this is how I operate it. And I advocate strongly for others to follow suit, because there are numerous advantages.
And empirically, failure of a site to follow this principle tends to correlate with being unhealthy or unbearable in other ways.
There are of course countless exceptions, which I allowlist with a couple of clicks. But overall I find browsing this way to be a breath of fresh air.
How common? Dunno. People here talk about it whenever it comes up. As a website for chit-chatting about tech stuff we have an unusually large population that cares about this kind of stuff, though.
I understand it probably comes from the original motivation, but the name seems unfortunate since you can totally use it to convert to Spotify from e.g. iTunes if you do have Spotify but just not one of the dozen competitor subscription services
The title "I am cthulhu" is even more memorable, and illustrates why memorability shouldn't be the sole criteria.
GP has a good point imo
"everything" obviously goes a bit far, but as a principle, I couldn't imagine it any other way
That keeps it catchy and accurate to what the user is actually doing.
Then I decided to pop into the comments here.
I Don't Have Spotify: https://idonthavespotify.sjdonado.com/?id=b3Blbi5zcG90aWZ5Lm... "Not available on other platforms."
odesli.co: https://album.link/s/1eDOxiSqqxS8jSgDCsaC38 - no less than eleven different links to stream, though about half of them didn't have anything when I clicked on them. And three links to buy it, too.
I got similar results with my previous two purchases, clipping.'s Dead Channel Sky and Captain Ahab's The End of Irony. IDHS said "not available on other platforms" while odesli.co turned up close to a dozen links to stream each, and three places to buy them. Maybe IDHS works better if you're not a fiftysomething lady with hilariously obscure taste, I dunno?
IDHS: https://idonthavespotify.sjdonado.com/?id=b3Blbi5zcG90aWZ5Lm... - on Apple Music and SoundCloud.
odesli: https://album.link/i/1736268193 - 14 streaming links, 3 purchase. Including working links to Deezer and Soundcloud that IDHS didn't turn up despite saying those are the places you can start from.
Honestly though? I just buy CDs on eBay and rip them to FLAC, and stream them to myself with Jellyfin. CDs are DRM-free (meaning no potential legal issues stemming from breaking DRM), and are already digital so a conversion to FLAC incurs no quality loss. I use a Blu-ray drive, but USB DVD drive can do the job just fine and can be found for less than $20 on Amazon. Also, CDs can be had for fairly cheap because no one wants them anymore, especially if you buy a bunch at once.
This setup works fairly well up until around ~2016 music, when it becomes harder and harder to find CDs for albums released after that.
I've become kind of a grumpy old man who doesn't like much new music, so this works well for me. I still use YouTube music for music that I haven't bought CDs for yet, but I'd say that around ~80% of my music streaming is coming from my Jellyfin server now.
If I wanted to most honestly buy a latest hit, I'd buy it in any DRM-ed form to fuel the sales, and then download it from torrents for convenient listening.
Morally identical probably but is it slightly more legal in the US to run software to crack the DRM? (Hopefully it’d never be tested of course)
So I think a better answer is Qobuz[1], which I recently tried. I had a pleasant experience, where I downloaded DRM free FLAC files. I will use it again, but sparingly, as the cost adds up on top of the Spotify subscription and in comparison to piracy.
[1] https://www.qobuz.com/gb-en/shop
Is there a normie search mode, or is this to be expected?
Some big labels unfortunately have a "No Bancamp allowed" policy. This is the case for Century Media, which is owned by Sony, which has a large share in Spotify. I'm sure there are more examples like this.
The only ethical way I see to truly own all of your music is to pirate it, and support the artists by buying their merch and going to their shows.
For video, there's never been a DRM-free store, unfortunately. Your only option there (besides hoisting the black flag) is to buy DVD/Blu-Ray releases and rip them yourself.
[0] https://www.cinemutins.com/
1. https://bandcamp.com/
2. https://us.7digital.com/ (https://ca.7digital.com/ for fellow Canadians)
3. https://www.hdtracks.com/
EDIT: Also discovered Quobuz has a shop where you can download albums as well https://www.qobuz.com/ca-en/shop
https://mirlo.space - Collectively owned & managed by musicians
https://ampwall.com - Competitor to Bandcamp with better features
(They used to have a really nice tarball option for downloading albums, but they axed that so now you have to download songs individually. Massive downgrade in QoL)
-https://hardwax.com/
-https://clone.nl/
-https://boomkat.com/
extra bonus: blu rays work in a ps5, so i can just do that instead of trying to figure out the stream setup.
I Don't Have Spotify - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42110877 - Nov 2024 (371 comments)
First problem I have using this in my iPhone is that the url bar is wider than the screen (maybe due to my font?) and I can’t even manage to paste a link into it unless I turn the phone sideways. The other problem is that the links she sends are google search link which triggers some kind of weird “search” behavior from the browser
This could be awesome but the paste behavior on iPhone is just so terrible
If she doesn't want to do the extra step of following the link through to find the real URL, there are web extensions that will resolve the Google tracking links for you.
I agree, they could extend the sentence on the title screen to say something like "to start finding music titles across your favorite streaming services."
I had no idea what the service was until I read the comments, I just assumed it was something to do with not liking Spotify
Edit: I think you’re misinterpreting the use of this tool. It’s not to find tracks across your music services. It’s for when people share links from Spotify but you subscribe to a different streaming service. Spotify has the largest market share (and probably outsized in certain geographic areas) so being on a “minority” streamer requires something like this. You’re not entering an artist name or track. You’re inputting the link.
I also don't see why someone can't just say the artist name and/or song name, rather than sending a link or asking "Do you have Spotify", then putting it through "I don't have Spotify" when you could just search it.
Someone could just say "Hey listen to the new song by xxx"
But it isn’t this… so I don’t think we are saying the same thing.
As for someone saying the name etc: you’re missing how people can converse now with multiple chats. People aren’t going to ask what service one has. And they aren’t going to write out a full artist name and title and or album etc. And people share tracks as a sort of metaphor and context specific addition - like a type of slang or colour to conversation. To discuss or address the meta aspects of the track by either party derails the conversation. It’s about understanding the changing nature of communication and how different cultures and generations are doing it.
They should just use an actual example link!
Spotify already use some of those, but I dunno if they expose via API or make it searchable.
You're probably right that it would end up being more clunky and broken.
But I think a song is much closer to a resource (like a hyperlink to a website), than to a contact address (like a mailto link).
This is actually a regular problem for me, and I solved it by backing up my messages, then using a script to scan them for music URLs, and create a playlist on my music service of choice. It felt like a pretty silly thing to create.
I also don't have spotify. I used to have spotify but it started playing spanish language commercials for no apparent reason and their support wouldn't do anything about it other than inform me that if I paid for an account there would be no commercials. So I started paying for apple music.
What's it supposed to do?
But it is...
Unfortunately, the app wouldn't show up in the play stores search results even if you searched for its exact name and on iOS the app didn't make it through the review process because it has no UI. So I took it down after a while although I still feel like it's a handy tool if people send you music.
https://github.com/vbackeberg/share-song-2
Issue: https://github.com/sjdonado/idonthavespotify/issues/32
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