Would you be willing to share a bit more about this setup? The only thing keeping my on streaming is the fact that its almost impossible to find new music otherwise. I know LastFM exists but it just doesn't click for me the way that streaming does. I like discovering music organically.
I left spotify around two years ago for a self hosted option (I mostly use navidrome+feishin). Music discovery was a concern for me as well, but then I realized that I didn't like the idea of spotify curating which music I discovered. So far, this is what has worked for me:
- Actually listening to the music I have now. I think the art of listening through full albums has slowly died, but there is so much music we're ignoring because we just listen to Artist's top tracks.
- Word of mouth. Asking my friends what they listen to. This is a way that people used to discover music and I've found so much good music this way.
- Bandcamp. Bandcamp is SUCH a good way to discover new music. You can listen to the music in app, there are great articles and you can actually support the artists!
I have pretty much the same setup. The only thing that bothers me with navidrome+feishin is that gapless playback is not working perfectly.
Also, a great resource for discovering new music is the public library. They often have a curated CD section that I then rip into FLAC. I've had great chats with the people in my town's library, and I often pick a totally random CD off the shelves and discover some amazing artists.
Regarding Bandcamp, I find following small labels to be a great way to find new music. Small labels tend to release music of similar style and quality. They often also have deals on bandcamp where you can buy an entire label's discography for crazy cheap, like a hundred or so albums for $50!
While moving from spotify to youtube music a few years ago I bought a vinyl player to listen to full albums and fell for it. Then when I moved to curate and self host my collection with Plex and Plexamp I realized I'm not using the player anymore since I'm using Plexamp to listen to albums. Plexamp is not perfect and not open source unfortunately, but it's a really good non-enshitified product.
I had to migrate away from youtube music since the experience was infuriating me every time. I love making playlists on the go. In youtube music after adding 30 tracks to the play queue, tapping 1 track accidentally deletes the play queue and plays this track. This made me feel bad every time it happened.
I don't see how it is just accepted to lose progress in 2026 as if we're using win95. It feels like 80% of the sw I use provides a caveman UX, not leveraging the tech, leaking implementation details and being constrained by technical reasons. On the other hand, working on Prepbook[0], I realized how hard it is to create the perfect experience and how it's even harder to justify it financially.
I'm doing discovery by talking to people, I love it. Every time I listen to Monolink I recall my co worker that just said "check out monolink" when he heard I love Ott. I love that it makes the experience about connection to people as well.
was a big question mark I had as well. The Clear Channel and iHeart stations are not known for discovery. Now if you find a college station or by some miracle an independent station you can get some new stuff. My favorite local college station is also ad free. They also have an app which I lean on as it's not the strongest transmitter so their coverage is spotty. Maybe there's other indy stations with apps as well??
This radio station is local to the city I live in, and they've been great for music discovery for me, although heavy focus on local artists, but they've put me onto a few international artists as well.
I subscribe to them, have done so for ~10 years I reckon. I don't listen as much as I used to, but I want them to continue existing either way.
Be aware, the quality of their playlists is incredibly variable, but that's part of the charm. I guarantee you'll hear something you haven't heard before... for better or worse.
This may be long dead, but a relatively recent musical discovery I've come across is Nando's. They play some great Southern American music, with real nice vibes and beats. My Shazam usage is about 75% Nando's.
And I don't mean Southern United States, I mean real, geographical definition South American.
I would always recommend KEXP. They have a really varied set of shows and setlists, don't seem to be swayed by "we must play the top 40", genuinely care about music, and are super nice if you head into the building in Seattle (which has a public access space, coffee shop, bathrooms, and a SubPop store).
I've had three tours around the place just by telling the folks there that Im there from out of town. To be fair, I might have gotten the tours because I came all the way over from England the times, but it's my favourite place to hang out when I'm in Seattle.
Also Ken is the nicest guy ever, and he introduced me to Larry Mizzel Jr while he was broadcasting live.
Get the app, or use the player on their website, and hive then a try for an hour or do. The app has the ability to "heart" a track while it's playing live, which helps with discovery.
RRR and PBS in Melbourne both stream online and are both fantastic for music discovery. Go the former if you lean indie and the latter if you lean international.
Wow this is amazing. I can't believe shoutcast still exists too!! I have fond memories of hosting a shoutcast stream at very low bandwidth over dialup!
There seems to be a few decent apps in F-droid and lots of stations with no ads and very specific genres like just depressive black metal!
I listen to Flow State, SomaFM, and aggregate from local shows and a few people I follow on social media among other discovery platforms. (I don’t have a favorite yet.)
I found that Spotify was increasingly recommending AI artists and songs I already knew. It surfaced very little outside of my comfort zone and effectively nothing that wasn’t new. There’s a whole world of music out there that Spotify wasn’t showing me.
using nts.live and and fip radio -> https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip at the moment for same purpose. Radio France allows to save liked track names in profile to look up later.
I used to use hypem soo much during the music blog days and had a subscription etc but it seemed to stop working or something so after a while I stopped using it. I will have to check it out again
Call me a boomer but I’ve had a ton of fun with XM radio. I can find new music on Bandcamp but nothing compares to hearing some classic from the 80’s that you would have never thought to put on when you’re driving home after work on a Friday.
> its almost impossible to find new music otherwise
I don't know where this opinion came from (Probably Spotify's PR department) but it's just so weird to me. Do you think people didn't find new music before streaming? It's not impossible, you just have to talk to people.
I don't know about you but spotify discovery feels like the least organic discovery possible. Its so homogeneous and predictable and corporate slop adjacent it makes me cringe just thinking about it.
I've discovered so many great artists through Spotify, and been to many of their shows (which Spotify also helps surface with their "Live Events" feature). I regularly get artists with less than 100k listeners in my Discover Weekly, which I then look up, and find that they did a concert on KEXP, and the comments all proclaiming "I knew good music wasn't dead!".
So I can say for sure that I don't share the slop sentiment. Sure, there's some generic filler every now and then, but any non-cohesive mix, as opposed to a carefully curated album is going to have songs that naturally become "fillers".
Just now, I discovered that Spotify snuck in "The Juan Maclean - Running Back To You (2014)", which is a cover of "Brian Bennet - Solstice (1978)". Neither songs are completely unknown, but they're also not exactly Bruno Mars.
I don't know if this is pure luck or algorithmic rhythm analysis, but for me it's working.
Based on benchmarks[1], CachyOS is slightly faster than other distros, only behind Clear Linux (RIP), but I would be extremely curious to see why this would warrant a whole who distro being created. These optimizations can (and probably will) be upstreamed into Arch Linux at some point in the future. Compiler optimizations are one thing, but enabling newer instruction sets doesn't improve performance sans some very specific workloads. This all seems like marketing hype to me with very little substance.
The small performance boost isn't the main reason most people install these distros instead of Arch, they rather have to spend hours reading the Arch wiki and instead want a GUI live boot installer, preconfigured desktop environments that just work with NVIDIA, built-in gaming-meta-packages that make gaming on Linux more bearable.
I just recently made to switch to base Arch from Cachy so I can run Omarchy without any issues and it did take several hours of extra setup just to have a working system but it is nice knowing how to do it now.
I understand, but this distro doesn't bill itself as an "arch but for noobs" or something of the like like EndeavorOS does. It puts performance first and foremost, and I'm also making the (dangerous) assumption that Arch was chosen as the base for its reputation of being fast, up to date, and light, and not for any other reason(s). See also: constantcrying's comment
Gentoo exists, and has been popular with those that simply enjoy the idea of their systems being slightly better optimized. There's really not much else to it.
The main reason for CachyOS to exist is that it can take bigger risks and ship defaults more mature distros wouldn't be comfortable with.
In terms of benchmarks, gamers tend to care more about consistent responsiveness (and worstcase performance) than raw throughput. Phoronix benchmarks are probably not the best way to compare CachyOS against other distros. E.g., look at the game benchmarks you linked: all tested games were already running above 500 frames per second in the worst performing game.
Even in the USA, the full 9-digit "Zip + 4" code will often identify a specific building. And some really big customers (e.g. the IRS) will have their own 5-digit zip code.
Let's not get the point of the article twisted. I think the interoperability between the two is absolutely a positive. Google's RCS implementation is what I targeted in this article because I've repeatedly had several issues with it. It has nothing to do with interoperability between the two. Android-Android is affected the exact same way by the issues I mentioned.
Intel's chips have become so absolutely awful in the last few years I also have no desire to buy one, even in laptops where power efficiency is so important. Maybe I'm just yelling at clouds but the whole P-core and E-core architecture seems off to me (and clearly Intel too), and having to implement new schedulers for virtually zero performance gain (just power efficiency) is really annoying. Especially as a Linux user where power efficiency isn't really the priority and battery life tends to suck anyway.
The whole P-core and E-core architecture is everywhere now on the ARM world that people keep praising around here, if anything Intel is trailing behind.
I understand it on ARM, since it's primarily targeted at mobile and other oddball devices, but using on desktop class chips just seems odd to me. I'd even understand doing so on laptop chips but desktop ones just seems like leaving extra performance on the table.
P and E cores were around on arm at least a decade before Alderlake released. I remember being told to hold out for Haswell because it was rumored to have big and little cores like arm cpus; enabling your computer to use minimal power to check for mailbox updates.
Would you be willing to share a bit more about this setup? The only thing keeping my on streaming is the fact that its almost impossible to find new music otherwise. I know LastFM exists but it just doesn't click for me the way that streaming does. I like discovering music organically.