It's real, and been around for quite a while.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18921296

Interesting to see how much more pro-copyright (and less hacker-like) HackerNews has gotten since then. It's sad.

Hacking turned from various shades of hat color into “growth hacking” then the world ended

There's being "pro-copyright" and then there's just the topic of paying artists, and then choosing not to pay them.

Which sometimes is bizarrely and belligerently defended like some moral stance (barely even in relation to copyright/piracy), and sometimes bubbles up like tools that not just avoid paying artists, but make it harder to pay artists, even when those artists have something set up that's a far cry from ad driven platforms. Like, it's not just 'removing third party ads', it's removing any surface and any mention that may have artist selling their music. Is that even about copyright? The music is available to listen either way so it's hardly even infringing that way, it's just that something like this app chooses an active stance (how else would one describe actively removing everything about paying aspect) that's against paying artists, at all and in any form.

It's not even about 'what does downloading music entail', it's just 'fuck paying artists'. Music has been beaten towards kind of just giving up and making things free to stream and just kind of hoping to get their money elsewhere (concerts, merch, music sales), and yet still some people want artists to shrink with their "paying for art bullshit" even further as to preferably have artists not even mentioning that and themselves not seeing any of that at all.

So I assume you give money to every single beggar artist that is playing in the street, metro, etc, right?

It's not about choosing which artists you like and whether you want to give money to some particular artist or not, and not even just personally refusing to give money to any artist.

It's about going out of your way to create something that gets in the way of artists getting paid, such as obscuring/eliminating an option to buy music or give money to an artist, not just from yourself alone but from other people, who might not even have such a stance, or even realize that there has been an anti-artist decision made for them.

Not even adblockers go this far, because they just remove third party ads, and artists are still free to promote their stuff in other ways (for example, on youtube, there's still stuff in description, annotations, things inside the video, etc.). A player like this removes those options from artists completely.

It's also like, not even that different on bandcamp - you can just listen to some music there and move on without buying it. Removing an option to buy an album is kind of different. Imagine if ad blocker did that to a bandcamp webpage, that would be absurd. (bandcamp doesn't even have ads though. well, depending on what you consider "advertising or promotion", maybe the whole website looks like endless promo to you, if that's the way someone looks at entertainment)

> Removing an option to buy an album is kind of different.

The option is never removed, anyone can go purchase the music/album.

It's there when you listen on bandcamp, it's not there in the player. It's removed from the listening experience in this app, and made further obscure by not linking out. Are we actually gonna argue whether a "music player focused on streaming" that touts removing everything else, isn't doing the thing it's doing?

A music player goal is to play music, not purchase stuff. What if the music has already been purchased but not available on that particular local device?

iTunes/Apple Music (where you can literally pay per track), Spotify (pay for streaming access and some other stuff), bandcamp itself (the web page is the player. purchases are also available within android app), are all music players where you can buy music and stuff, with decades of history. iTunes goal was literally to purchase music and play it, all in the same player program, and that's been released over two decades ago. Countless web platforms of different scales offer buying music (album or track by track) and function as a player as well. Amazon still sells mp3s in that way, and Amazon Music website is both a music store and a music player. There's a long history and wide variety of platforms with a goal of both purchasing and playing music, all within the same surface, be it an app or a web page.

What's next, arguing that these aren't actually "music players"? that paying for streaming access to music isn't actually paying for music?

There's just a variety of music players with different goals. Some players' goals are to prevent people from buying music or even discovering that they can pay for music. Again, with bandcamp it's not even removing bad third party ads or anything, it's just removing a purchase option, when it very often doesn't even prevent you from listening to music for free anyway, or sometimes even just downloading some music for free.

Not providing a feature since day 1 != removing

That project is many years old. Apparently they added bandcamp support somewhere in 2020, and then continued to not "provide" any clue that music could be bought there. They could do something, but clearly supporting artists, or rather, letting other people support artists and not getting in the way of that support, is not in their interests even on better music platforms.

> beggar artist that is playing in the street

They are called "buskers". I disagree that buskers are beggars given that they are trying to earn money by providing entertainment.

I've seen Nuclear many times while browsing flathub - it never launched for me. And it seems that it's a common problems looking at their closed issues.

You should open a PR to add this comment to the testimonials!

It's funny and harmless, but it does make me less likely to use the product. Because I don't know where the line for funny and harmless ends. Would it be funny and harmless to install a keylogger alongside the software? Maybe I need better personal security practices but it's much easier to avoid anything with this kind of smell.

>Devs telling chatGPT to suggest pizza recipes means they might keylog their software.

Sad times we live in

It's a real project. I use this to stream my music

assuming you are not in poverty, you deserve to be clowned on for using this, because there is one thing I can assure you: you're listening to the absolute shittiest encodes and rips that are out there. YouTube in particular is chock full of muddy transcodes. At that point why bother? You probably exclusively listen to music on your cell phone speaker at full blast in public too, you goddamn wilted lettuce brain

I mean at that point you might as well just shove a plug in your ass that vibrates to the music and enjoy CBAT that way, you tasteless freeloader

In the future teens are going to put their music through the yt encoding to get that authentic 2010-20s feeling.

Oh god, just like vacuum tubes.

It's totally real, I've even contributed to the project, Admin has the patience of a saint in my experience.

There are things which might not look too corporate-friendly, the humor, the anime styled girl mascot, I consider these to be a perk rather than a problem.

Doesn't seem like this helps their cause, because if you wanted to spread adoption of your project, you would want LLMs to train on it. So it'll be suggested to future users.

What makes you think their cause is widespread adoption?

It’s not a commercial project so I don’t think they have much to gain from that, and similar to things like yt-dlp it’s probably beneficial for them to stay small enough to not catch the attention of the services they build on top of, as they might try to shut them out.

No, why would anyone care about the slop fed to echoborgs.

You must be young. This is how a lot of projects used to be before everyone sold their soul. This is the original hacker spirit.

Around 2010-2015 there was the cloud-based version of this called Grooveshark.

Basically, you streamed each individual file from other people's libraries, which theoretically (at the time) avoided the Napster problem. "You never download the content" they said. It had EVERYTHING as long as the right people were online. Audio books, random weird remixes, you name it.

UMG ultimately took them down.

Wow Grooveshark I hadn't head that name in a while. That was a great time

I'm old enough to remember that Punk's not dead, just smells that way. I just hadn't seen this kind of thing in a long while.