I’ve been using one of the Pandora services, but I’ve been getting a little annoyed with the stations (which I presume I would get the same annoyance from other services, too). So I’d like to be able to create a station and add songs that I own and that wouldn’t normally be in that station. (And I know you can add artists to the stations, but some artists only have a few songs I like, and I surely don’t want the station inundated with similar artists of the music I don’t like. Shudder the thought, 😬 ).
You can add music you own to a Spotify playlist. Maybe only on PC?
Subsonic is a nice self-hosted solution to stream your own media and there are several phone apps available to access your Subsonic server.
Or Navidrome. It is FOSS and subsonic-compatible.
As someone else has stated, you can add music you own (or at least, music to which you have files for) directly in to Spotify, though I’ll say the reliability is “ok” if you are listening on multiple devices. My guess is they don’t host those files the same as the others. Maybe if you have a server or computer that’s always on, you can put the file on that, and add it to Spotify on that device, maybe Spotify will just feed you the file from your computer
That’s fine, am a Linux user and not a big deal running a file/media server, also have large enough SD cards, so still not a problem storing music either. I would just like to be able to purchase some new songs just so I can be able to adjust the playlists to something more to my tastes for particular songs over the entire genre or band’s albums which can often contain other bands/songs that just bug the living daylights out of me, heh.
I see, well if you’re more in the self-hosted side of things other people have given some suggestions that seem like it would work well for your needs.
I used to have a huge collection of music I’d accumulated and only played files locally, but I’ve gotten lazy over the years and am a Spotify boy now. I will say that it’s been irritating me to no end with how bad shuffle is; my main playlist has over 500 songs in it and I know there’s at least a hundred or so that I haven’t heard in months because Spotify’s “shuffle” thinks it knows what I want to listen to more than I do.
If you like what’s on offer by Spotify, there’s a free alternative that I like called Spotube. It uses your Spotify account for recommendations but then uses YouTube’s (and YouTube Music’s) backend to get the songs. You can also change the backend use a Piped instance instead of YouTube.
I don’t trust the internet anymore but that sounds rad
Spotify can actually do that, but it’s a bit cumbersome: as the local songs to a playlist on a PC. Then set that playlist to be downloaded on the phone, and it will download the files directly from the PC as long as they are on the same network.
YouTube Music with the bonus that you also get YouTube Premium. Cons is that you’re supporting the Google.
Some have suggested Subsonic or Navidrome, which entail hosting yourself.
Ibroadcast.com allows you to access your music from everywhere as you upload your music to their servers.
Innertune. It hooks into YouTube music without any ads, no account creation required, offline listening, and it’s free. One of the best apps on my phone.