Hello! I was looking for alternatives for Spotify to listen to music and create and share playlists with friends, and found a huge amount of players, both local and streaming, but none of them offered a reliable way to share playlists with friends. So here me out: what if there were a federated, self hostable platform where you can create an account, that provides an API that all the million music app can integrate easily in order to synchronize and share them also with people that uses other apps? Do you think it would work? I believe that if something like this would widespread, huge music companies like Spotify and Youtube wouldn’t implement such a thing, but that perhaps would be also a way to “disincentivize” people from using those services!
“Hi friends Me on musicapp1 and Fred on musicapp2 created this cool playlist, hear it out!!”
“Sorry I pay 12$/month for Spotify, I cannot see it”
I made a quick and dirty (emphasis on dirty) app to do that. You upload your own music and m3u playlists and get a link to share with your friends. The master controls what’s played and that is synchronised to everyone. We used it to control music for our remote D&D sessions.
https://github.com/bjoern-tantau/share-your-music
The code and interface are really ugly. And I cannot provide support because I’m disabled. But it can serve as a proof of concept.
Yeah something similar to this, with API to access it from any music player app! The features that would make it really appealing (imo) would be:
- share playlists with friends using different music players
- cooperative playlists: give edit permission to other users (chosen by you), so that you can create playlists with your friends
- search playlist: search “rock music” and get all public playlists that matches your search, perhaps even with tags
I like the sound of that
It’s not FOSS afaik, but it’s free and works really well: https://www.tunemymusic.com/
It’s actually very very cool, the closest to what I imagined. Yeah sadly it doesn’t seem to be FOSS
The main difference with my “idea” is that this one creates a copy of the playlist on each service, so if you want to share it you need to know which player the other person is going to use, or just send him all the links. My idea instead has just a single playlist, accessible with API that can be used by every music player
thanks for sharing this!
With your idea, does the service (eg yt music, Spotify) have to specifically support the API?
Yes, it’s like a common “protocol”. Probably huge music apps like youtube and spotify would never adopt such a thing unless it become really really widespread among other platforms, but just being able to share them across FOSS music players would be amazing imo
Maybe even FOSS wrappers for the big services. Such as https://github.com/th-ch/youtube-music/
Having a federated music platform would be great both for people and for artists!
I’m self-hosting Navidrome, which does sync playlists. However, Android clients generally suck, so I’m using Symfonium (paid app) to access my NAS music files.
If you can put up with the currently available Navidrome clients, then that’s a FOSS (and self-hosted) solution to consider.
I already looked into Navidrome, but as far as I understand you have to keep a music library on the server, and then you can stream from there.
What I was thinking instead was just a playlist sync server: the music player apps will still play music from they were playing before, so some from local files, some from YouTube, some from Navidrome ecc, but the playlists are synced on this served and can be exchanged with other users that use different players
Can you export playlists from Navidrome? I’m running it and can’t see a way of doing that. (The workaround I’m using is building playlists in Synology Audio Station and then setting up Navidrome to import them. If you know a better way of doing this I’d be interested.)
Can you export playlists from Navidrome?
This button saves an m3u file.
Because I use symfonium on Android, playlists sync between my device to Navidrome.
Thank you. You are absolutely right and it was right there in front of me!
No problem! I’m fairly new to Navidrome (from Synology Audio), and while I don’t use Navidrome directly through a browser, I know that it’s compatible with more third-party apps, and I’ve been happy with how it’s been working.
Do you mean like a FOSS version of https://soundiiz.com/transfer-playlist-and-favorites?
Or at a song/album level, a FOSS version of https://odesli.co/?
If I understood correctly these are one-shot services: I have a spotify playlist and want to convert it to a YouTube playlist. Instead what I have in mind is a way to sync a playlist “player agnostic”, so that it can be viewed by any music player supporting the API
