It feels like I’m starting to see a pattern where I post something about my life and then a program I use falls under controversy or gets temporarily stunted not long after. This week’s case is Spotube, a #FOSS program that emulates Spotify Premium. It does this by taking information from your Spotify account (your liked songs, playlists, etc.) and pulls the music for those songs from YouTube.

It wasn’t a perfect tool. The load times could be frustrating, especially if you skip a song, it would sometimes not be able to retrieve your music so it would just kind of sit there idly, but when it worked (and it usually would) it helped me better understand why people use Spotify: the sense of discovery. I could just pick a song I wanted to listen to and Spotube would ready a playlist of similar songs to keep with the vibe, and I liked a lot of them.

One of the other parts that was particularly nice was that I could play music and explore around without affecting my YouTube search history. While that doesn’t seem like a big deal, I spend most of my day with YouTube in the background. If I want to refer back to something to go over it or share it with friends, not having all my music there too is usually a blessing.

Now Spotube’s Temporarily Down

It’s not exactly down. Spotube still works, sorta. You are able to still play songs from albums on the home screen and from artist you already follow, but you’re unable to look up songs or see your personal playlists which really strips a lot from the user experience. This is all because Spotube is banned from using Spotify’s API after being issued a cease and desist from the company. In the meantime, while Spotube is unable to use Spotify directly, the focus of the project is rewrite things so that it can comply with copyright.

Now whether or not Spotify or Spotube are in the right doesn’t matter. Like I mentioned, the only thing I like about Spotify is their community playlist selection. There are a lot of things I don’t like about Spotify and that’s why I won’t get premium, but ads aren’t the problem. I can use YouTube Premium and stream any sort of music I want or need. I support Spotube and hope that they’re able to get things corrected so that I can hop back on, but till then I’ve been looking for alternatives.

One of the other nice parts about Spotube is the fact that they have mobile and desktop clients. It’s since been a bit of trouble trying to find apps that do good on both. So far, I’ve heavily been leaning on two: Metrolist for mobile and Nuclear for desktop.

Metrolist

YouTube Music has been pushed as a reasonable alternative to Spotify and comes included with YouTube Premium. Metrolist operates as a FOSS front end for that experience giving me one of things I actually needed most from Spotube and that just streaming from YouTube didn’t quite capture: automatic playlist generation. When I’m up working out, I can just enter in an artist like Bilmuri or Dance Gavin Dance and get started without having the fiddle around finding a playlist aside from one of their albums- always need to have some variety. Metrolist also allows you to sign in with your YouTube Music account so you can have all of your existing playlists and follows moved over seamlessly.

I’m still in the process getting things transitioned. Becoming reliant on Spotube, there was a big gap my YouTube personal playlist and my Spotify one. If there was a way that I could just sync my liked songs between several platforms, my life would be so much easier 😅.

Nuclear

Nuclear has been much more than I would have expected out of the box. It can could use Spotify for looking up songs and playlists, but it can also use Audius, iTunes, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, etc. Not only that, but you can also import and export playlists. If there’s a Spotify playlist I find, I can just take the URL for it, drop it into Nuclear, and instantly add that playlist to my collection.

Not only that, but Nuclear has something I haven’t seen in ages: VISUALIZERS.

For desktop, this has been an excellent replacement! Now I can actually pause the music by pressing the spacebar while focusing on the window– I’m not sure if Spotube didn’t support that or if it was because I was using a Flatpak 🤷. It also provides a command pallet by pressing CTRL+k which works so well for someone more keyboard focused like me.

That’s not to say Nuclear doesn’t have its faults. Nuclear comes prebuilt with an autoradio function, but even if it adds a song(s) to a playlist, it’ll typically just keep replaying that first song with or without loop active. Spotube was only about half the size on the my computer; however, it really does add so much that I feel it about warrants the extra space.

Conclusion

I’m hoping that both of these projects keep working just as good as they have been. I also hope Spotube can come back from this stronger than where they started. It’s definitely going to be a challenge, but I still have great expectations for them. Usually this kind of trouble is what invigorates the community to offer support.

In summary, Spotify offers a platform for sharing music playlists (that needs to have an alternative) that I had actually seen the use of. They started to clamp down on use of their services, and I can’t complain much about that, but other solutions do exist! I’m always happy to see such an active community of people offering solutions and work arounds for these sort of things.