That said, I'd still gladly pay for the music discovery, I just have started to feel cheated out of my money over the years doing so. Should I really be paying $10/month to listen to the same songs I listen to every other month. I don't go on a music collection binge all that often you know.
And then poof, it's gone.
It's good for discovery also, since while Bandcamp Daily is a marketing tool, it's still written by music nerds who do a good job curating music from local scenes and odd genres. Indie labels also often run storefronts on Bandcamp, and are a decent way of finding the same, as most release music from their local area or with a similar sound. It's different from algorithmic discovery, and requires a bit more effort, but IMO it's worth it to explore on your own, and a fun way to learn something more about an album or track than streaming services' "Chill Hip Hop Beats To Study/Relax To"-style personality-void mood-based curation.
Bandcamp isn't perfect, to be sure. It's not as good for older music (though there are niche labels like https://habibifunkrecords.bandcamp.com/ that dig up old recordings and re-release them digitally) or big-name artists on major labels, but there's so much music available nowadays that you usually won't be at a loss for something to listen to, you just won't always be able to find a specific track as easily as on Spotify. Their mobile app also isn't great, and really needs to add a way to download tracks for offline listening, but hey, no music service is perfect, and I'm fine using a mix of both it and Spotify where one offers a better experience than the other.
Not to mention that on youtube (etc.) you can get stuck with obnoxious advertisements before and after the song.
I still remember being impressed by the preference-clustering paper in '95 (https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.10...) by an MIT grad for what became Firefly (later purchased by Microsoft solely for their sign-in tech called Passport https://web.archive.org/web/19970116111618/http://www.firefl... , still a bit annoyed they shut it down and let music recommendation languish for another decade).
I wonder if you could you "scrobble" your local non-spotify song plays into a free spotify account and then scrape the generated playlists. You'd need a way to use whatever song metadata you have locally to find spotify's copy (if any), a way to drive plays (if you have to use the official client, have it dump to a null audio sink), and a way to scrape playlists.
EDIT: incidentally there was a recent Spotify integration component: https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_spotify , not sure if that still works. It also looks like there was an older one for creating playlists using last.fm.
> ...as if millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced
I've since created a playlist dedicated to those lost songs, long forgotten fossils, as I randomly re-find or re-remember them. Sadly, there's fewer than 20 songs in there even after all this time.
- cross-fading between songs
- a real queue that is separate from the playlist so you can program what plays next and in which order easily (CTRL+D to add / remove, and a advanced window can show the queue)
- a remote control with an Android app
- stop after this song
- a giant search / filter bar. It does not has to have the focus to start searching, just type when Clementine is the active window
- MPRIS integration (obviously)
- several playlists open at the same time
- the mood bar
It also has:
- tag editing
- integration with many online services
- a library handling that does not get in the way but full-featured anyway
- support for removable media
It's awesome. It could use some pretty some improvement for its look, but it is pretty decent and does the job.
It's a fork and a continuation of Amarok 1.4.
The project is still alive, it somehow has an issue releasing a version but the player is stable.
(I wouldn't recommend it for casual users, I tell family members to use VLC.)
The bare-bones experience is kind of nice, to be honest, as my listening habits don't really need much functionality beyond "load a folder of music, respond to media key inputs, and scrobble to last.fm".
It might have been the case that the song didn't disappear, but is instead hidden because it's unavailable.
At the bottom of the preferences window there's a section called "display options." In there enable "show unavailable songs in playlists."
I organize everything in foobar now, both local music and streaming playlists with the help of extensions. You can add Youtube sources to your playlists. Even if the links break, you can automatically fix them, keep the name and structure. Have not tried the app versions.