Music Guide for People Who Hate Spotify (WIP)

This will soon be written up properly, but for now here's a bunch of helpful links and notes.

• foobar2000 (works best, but ugly) see also foobar2000 guide page for recommended skins etc.
• Clementine (or Strawberry on Linux) (also ugly)
• Wacup (WinAmp redux) (keeps crashing on me)
• DeaDBeeF (haven't tried yet, looks very technical)

• MusicBrainz Picard (my favorite)
• beets (too techy for me but if you're a nerd you'll love it)

• ListenBrainz
• Last.fm (still around!)
• Libre.fm
• Maloja (self-hosted)
• Pleroma (federated thing)

Download Wacup and hope it doesn't crash or else try QMMP

Old school Winamp skins here: Winamp Skin Museum

Put Winamp on your website with this code from sadgrl

Used to be that you could get a bunch of free music to download from everyone including Starbucks (remember the free weekly songs?), now of course everything's streaming and the freebies have mostly stopped. But if you look around you can still find some stuff…

• Bandcamp has lots of indie artists who give stuff away for pay what you want, or for free. Try searching through this tag to start with
• https://soundcloud.com/Soundcloud sometimes has free music but whether it's easy to download or not is up for debate
• Archive.org's audio collection, and they have a huge live bootleg collection, too
• Check to see if your local library gives you access to Freegal, which has a certain amount of free downloads per week

I'm not telling you to break the law. This is not legal advice. etc.

• You can use something like yt-dlp to download audio from Youtube videos
• Music rotation websites share individual MP3s, usually of lesser-known bands. This isn't as popular nowadays as it used to be, but you can occasionally find one still running
• There used to be heaps of out-of-print soundtrack blogs on Blogger, but many have fallen to copyright strikes in recent years. Still, you can still sometimes find some old uploads available. Try searching for “sharity blogs” and see what pops up
• Soulseek is still available and still usable, and of course you can try roaming around IRC for MP3 rooms
• Torrents, DDL forums, etc…I won't get into those here but if you're into pirating you probably know about those places, anyway