Idk who needs to hear it, but stop buying this shit. If it has a computer inside, but you can't flash your own software onto it, just pass. If you're unsure, look around, find the nearest Linux user and ask for help.
You won't even have to ask if they use Linux, they'll tell you.
Nobara btw.
Arch users, assemble!
And my Arch!
And my... hang on, I just need to apply this tweak from the wiki...
And my axe!
I am ashamed to say I'm an ex-Arch user. I really liked Arch, but if you go long periods without updating it it becomes really painful when you do eventually apply updates. I got tired of finally booting some system I hadn't touched in a year to work on something or other attempting to apply updates to it, and then spending the next 6 hours fixing everything that broke because one of the updates from last week applied before one from 10 months ago that it depended on, or some config file I touched once 3 years ago changed and needs manual fixing now.
Yeah I was a Gentoo user a long time ago so when I finally installed Arch I had a little mental note in the back of my head to update every week unless I wanted to sort out things I shouldn't have to sort out.
It's been months since I've updated my system, I'ma be in for a ride
Have my babies, EndeavourOS!
Gentoo users, start compiling for the assembly next month!
(I don't use gentoo btw)
So, is that a right away thing, or does that mean 2 or 3 weeks from now?
j/k
Shouldn't it be Desbian?
Hey, not all of us Debian users are lesbians.
It would be more accurate to call us lovers of lesbians.
...yet.
Oh yea. There's definitely still time.
Got any tips or tidbits for Nobara? I'm heavily considering installing it onto my new PC when I build it in a week. I'm a noob at Linux but it seemed perfect for everything I'm looking to do on my PC.
I recommend Bazzite instead. It's based on Universal Blue (which is actually based on Fedora Atomic) and gives you a super easy and stable experience.
To be fair, next to no one bought this. And the people that payed $90 for this are probably not the sharpest knives in the drawer.
This is basically a dumb android device with one app - an auto friendly version of Spotify. To use it, you need to pair it to your phone via Bluetooth. So, yeah, it assumes you have a phone in your car with Spotify on it.
Also it costs about as much as a cheap externally mounted CarPlay or Android auto screen. So, yeah. Not great.
If you want to put auto friendly app UIs in an older car, go get a cheap CarPlay or AA display. Those are platforms that have been around for a decade, and Apple & Google have long partnership agreements with automakers that are likely to ensure those platforms will be supported for years to come. Hell, Apple is still supporting ancient iPod connection protocols 20+ years later.
This thing was the Rabbit R1, but for a music streaming app.
the people that payed $90 for this are probably not the sharpest knives in the drawer
maybe, but even stupid people should be protected from being taken advantage of.
They should at least get a refund of 50% of the purchase price.
Nope, I'm fed up with stupid people getting rewarded for their stupidity.
I knew that PPI was a scam years ago and I payed higher interest rates because of refusing to sign up to it. Years later all the stupids got their money back. So fuck 'em, fuck them all.
Also the stupids keep voting for Nazis
Yes I'm pissed.
Honestly this thing solved a very specific problem for me: My car has no good way to mount a phone for car usage so I've always kept it in the center console. Car Thing just put a remote on my dash for that with buttons for presets and easy song skipping.
I only got it for $10 though, and that was two years ago. It has convinced me to get a new head unit with Android Auto support on it for sure
A few months ago my wife wanted to buy an electronic picture frame and I had a hard time explaining this to her.
Edit: an internet connected picture frame.
Well ok, an electronic picture frame is not much of an investition and works without internet. Well, most of them. Ok, you have to research it before buying.
These fuckers disabled car mode in the android app to make you buy one of those and now they're killing it. I used car mode in my car and the moment it stopped working was when I cancelled my subscription.
When did they kill car mode on the app? I've been subscribed for years even before the Car Thing and I always have car mode on even outside of my car.
Mine doesn't have Car mode anymore, it stopped working a couple of weeks ago.
There's a setting to disable it, it always annoyed me so I disabled it auto going to car mode when it connected to Bluetooth
Seems they want to force you to use their "Car Thing" voice assistant. Probably to listen into your conversations....
What did car mode do? Was it when it switched to big old buttons? Mine used to do that until I got Android Auto in my new car...so up until about a year ago
Yep exactly that. My car back then didn't have Android Auto and this was the only way to skip tracks while keeping my eyes on the road.
so many comments here about adding regulations and "this should be illegal" and, yes, those may be a valid way to curb this behavior
but customers willing to leave a company for bad behavior, customers wary of new products without asdurances they wont just become useless, non-reusable e-waste could also effectively curb this behavior
just because you want to outsource all of your product and company research to a law or regulation, and want to be able to blindly buy products and just hope the company doesn't make bad choices in every regard but quartly profits doesn't mean it is the only effective check & balance
I downvoted the comment above because in the original comment they already mentioned that they are no longer subscribed to Spotify, which makes the "stop being a customer" comment exceedingly stupid and pointless.
whoops. maybe I should read the entire thing next time
All good, happens to everyone now and then. And I agree that some people on Lemmy are a little downvote happy.
Everybody buy your music. These streaming platforms are trash.
Yes, yes buy. Do not sail the high seas.
I want the bands to get some money. I buy from bandcamp when musicians are sensible enough to sell on there, or on their sites.
I wish list stuff until a Bandcamp Friday comes around where artists get all the money. I've stopped buying physical media, so waiting on a digital purchase isn't an issue for me.
My concert ticket stack is thicc though, and I have SOOOOO MANY hoodies, t-shirts, cups, and random bullshit. I’m not paying for DRM, but you can’t DRM a comfy zip-up!
Don’t give them any ideas
Or pirate the music, then send some money in an envelope to the artists themselves.
Or pirate the music, then go to a concert or buy some merch.
Absolutely. Even if you pirate from some, and buy whole albums from a few when you can afford it, you're supporting artists instead of the shareholders of tech goon overlords.
Me too...I'm at 1500+ albums. But I do download them too for when the sad times to come...
If there was though, what do you think it would be called? I would like to avoid it at all costs and continue to buy subscriptions
I'm afraid that that information has had to be [redacted]. Choose another path.
Lidarr is pretty keen if you already have sonarr and radar running.
Am I the only one who finds it super annoying, that "detection through sound waves" (Sonar) does video things while "detection through light" (lidar) does the sound things?
WHY?! Swap names already! It's driving me nuts!
I find the choice of name for Readarr more annoying, since we already had Radarr
Why use a private tracker when soulseek allegedly exists? There are also Telegram bots that can allegedly download FLACs from Deezer
Private trackers are dope for very fast flac album downloads.
There are three morbillion songs and I have no idea which ones I like. Streaming platforms became popular for a reason
Yeah most people don't care to maintain a local music library. It's a lot of work and compared to streaming services that do it for you this offers no real benefit. If you listen to lots of new/different music all the time, streaming is actually far cheaper.
For me, discovery is the entire reason to use streaming services. I have a ton of hard drive space, and know how to find anything I want to download. I have a fairly large music collection from before the days of streaming. But streaming services help me discover all kinds of things I'd likely never hear otherwise. They still suck, as in they're greedy as hell and the quality is mid, but I don't know what I'd do if I had to listen to the same stuff all the time.
It's cheaper because the band doesn't get paid as much. The streaming service keeps most of the meager pay.
People make up for it by buying merch or going to shows. Margins on those things are much better for the artists.
In every service I know of, the platform takes a minority of revenue
"It is a lot of work"? I don't know, for me it always seemed far more convenient than being locked to a single service, single player app and following restrictions.
Yeah this is fucking peak internet snobbery. "Just spend thousands dollars on music" ok.
I love buying CDs on eBay.
I also love buying direct downloads from artists.
Plex[Amp] makes this work in my pocket
I just realised iTunes (store) is no longer a thing. Everything's just streaming now.
Time to bust out the walkman
iTunes was an unhappy medium. I liked how you can actually buy albums, but they gave the MP3s weird filenames to make it more difficult to move to another device. I did it anyway, but I had to find the right folder, figure out what track it was, and rename the track. I'm against it but it's still better than streaming.
You can still buy songs on iTunes and load them to an iPod, MP3 player, or in my case to my Navidrome instance for my own personal self-hosted streaming.
They should at least release data sheets and any bootloader signing keys, allowing people to reuse the devices for other purposes. If you could replace the firmware, I’m sure you could use it for controlling your home automation setup or displaying the weather/news/train times/other info (or possibly other tasks depending on what’s in the SoC). Now, alas, it’s just e-waste.
That doesn't help make money. The engineers are needed elsewhere.
Since that was their first attempt at hardware, I bet they don't have access and/or rights to share shit, as everything is owned by OEM.
Datasheets are copyrighted by the silicon manufacturer, not the product manufacturer, and usually covered by an NDA. Spotify probably couldn't release them even if they wanted to.
Even Google products have a longer lifespan 😖
I've since moved on to Tidal. Bought it at $30 when root mods started to be developed, but never really went anywhere.
Image alt:
2021-04-13: Interested in car thing
2022-10-18: order placed after discounted to $30
2022-10-21: shipped
2024-05-23: Discontinue notice
2024-12-09: Service discontinued
The bastards barely started selling it a few years ago. I feel like some responsibility should exist. It isn't a company that is going under, so it shouldn't be able to just casually kill the devices tied-service it only recently sold.
Agreed. Anything sold with the intention of being used with a subscription service should have 10 years of support.
Anything discontinued should stop being protected by copyright law, and the manufacturer should be forced to give every piece of information they have on that product.
Holy shit: "The company is recommending that customers do a factory reset on the product and find some way of responsibly recycling the hardware."
So they're not offering to dispose of it, or even giving any advice on how to dispose of it responsibly. Just suggesting
people should probably do that.
If companies are allowed to behave this way we're all screwed. Any efforts by the average person to avert the environmental damage caused by the waste they produce is completely futile and any politician who claims that they're doing their best to try to hold companies accountable is a liar.
I hate to break it to you but we’re way past screwed already.
We passed screwed like 25 years ago
We need new laws y’all. All these companies should be forced to collect all their e-waste as part of their products lifecycle.
If a company produces any product and the company has a market cap over $1billion, then they should be responsible for collecting and recycling all their trash.
I don't know how accurate this is or if it's still true but I remember hearing like twenty years ago that Germany has laws like that, including dealing with waste packaging, with the result that companies suddenly found ways to use more sustainable packaging
Spotify is an evil company. Bad for artists, bad for consumers. I’m glad to have quit using their service.
What do you use instead?
Local SSD
Plex/Plexamp/synfonium + Tidal + QoBuz + Bandcamp
If you care about artists not being screwed over, Tidal is usually the first recommendation.
I use a combo of streaming stuff I bought on Bandcamp with their app and playing local files. In addition to albums and EPs, I have bought a lot of singles on Bandcamp. I put all the singles in a giant constantly growing playlist on the Bandcamp app and then set it to random shuffle. It takes more effort than using something like Spotify, but I personally like it a lot more because it's only full of music I know I like and I feel satisfied because I supported the artists I like.
Currently using a combination of Plexamp, WinAmp, Bandcamp and Apple Music.
This was predictable. Everyone has a phone. Phones have CarPlay and Android Auto.
The fact that they named it “Car Thing” made it clear that it didn’t have much of a valid use and that they didn’t really have a lot of confidence in it.
It’s annoying that they even created it in the first place. It’s more annoying that they now predictably are not supporting it anymore. It should be illegal.
Remember kids, never place buttons for a service on a remote if you don't know if the remote will last longer than said service :)
It's a little annoying how the article only gives much of a hint as to what exactly a Car Thing is, beyond a "dashboard accessory", in the last paragraph of the article:
the product was more of a remote control for Spotify on your mobile phone than any kind of standalone player
It's worth noting that it was quite cheap and therefore a very good budget option to MacGyver music streaming into older cars.
Car Thing is basically the Rabbit R1, but for music. In other words, a cheap Android device, with one app (a car dashboard variation of Spotify), a scroll wheel, and a some shortcut buttons.
It works by connecting to your phone via Bluetooth. So, yeah, instead of using the phone for the auto friendly UI, it pipes that UI to a second cheaper mobile device.
It’s truly stupid, and it cost about the same as an external CarPlay / Android Auto screen… which could display an auto friendly Spotify UI, and much much more.
I bought this for my old Cadillac that only had a tape deck and it was amazing (with a Bluetooth cassette). I haven't used it since I got rid of that old Cadillac about two years ago now. Pretty limited use case but it still sucks to kill shit for no reason.
I didn't know Bluetooth cassettes were a thing, although if I think about it then of course they are. What's the sound quality like?
The sound is honestly not bad, better and less hassle than an FM transmitter. There are 3.5 mm ones too that work pretty well but I had a few of them and they fail where the cable meets the cassette. I passed it on to a friend with a whole house cassette system when I got my new Cadillac
Stop feeding these parasites.
Either buy physical or self host!
Both. Buy physical media, rip the audio files and put them on your selfhosted music server (e.g. Navidrome). Or pirate the music and buy some merch to compensate the artists.
I'm waiting for some FOSS developers to hack this thing and run custom firmware on it. Or someone who creates their own "Car Thing" using an Arduino or Raspberry Pi.
imo they should refund everyone who bought one and collect all the devices to recycle.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Customers who bought the Car Thing are receiving emails warning that it will stop working altogether as of December 9th.
Unfortunately for those owners, Spotify isn’t offering any kind of subscription credit or automatic refund for the device — nor is the company open-sourcing it.
“We’re discontinuing Car Thing as part of our ongoing efforts to streamline our product offerings,” Spotify wrote in an FAQ on its website.
“We understand it may be disappointing, but this decision allows us to focus on developing new features and enhancements that will ultimately provide a better experience to all Spotify users.”
The company is recommending that customers do a factory reset on the product and find some way of responsibly recycling the hardware.
Car Thing was initially made available on an invite-only basis in April 2021, with Spotify later opening a public waitlist to buy the accessory later that year.
The original article contains 306 words, the summary contains 145 words. Saved 53%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Xmanager is calling everyone's name. Thank me later 😁
Edit: really? I get downvoted for helping? 😂
I love you all, too!
What does Xmanager do? I read the site, but nowhere does it seem to describe the product
If it is what I think it is then they are intentionally being vague about what the app does so they don't draw attention from the service that it works with. If you put that in context with the article then the answer to your question is clear.
Idk who needs to hear it, but stop buying this shit. If it has a computer inside, but you can't flash your own software onto it, just pass. If you're unsure, look around, find the nearest Linux user and ask for help.
You won't even have to ask if they use Linux, they'll tell you.
Nobara btw.
Arch users, assemble!
And my Arch!
And my... hang on, I just need to apply this tweak from the wiki...
And my axe!
I am ashamed to say I'm an ex-Arch user. I really liked Arch, but if you go long periods without updating it it becomes really painful when you do eventually apply updates. I got tired of finally booting some system I hadn't touched in a year to work on something or other attempting to apply updates to it, and then spending the next 6 hours fixing everything that broke because one of the updates from last week applied before one from 10 months ago that it depended on, or some config file I touched once 3 years ago changed and needs manual fixing now.
Yeah I was a Gentoo user a long time ago so when I finally installed Arch I had a little mental note in the back of my head to update every week unless I wanted to sort out things I shouldn't have to sort out.
It's been months since I've updated my system, I'ma be in for a ride
Have my babies, EndeavourOS!
Gentoo users, start compiling for the assembly next month!
(I don't use gentoo btw)
So, is that a right away thing, or does that mean 2 or 3 weeks from now?
j/k
Shouldn't it be Desbian?
Hey, not all of us Debian users are lesbians.
It would be more accurate to call us lovers of lesbians.
...yet.
Oh yea. There's definitely still time.
Got any tips or tidbits for Nobara? I'm heavily considering installing it onto my new PC when I build it in a week. I'm a noob at Linux but it seemed perfect for everything I'm looking to do on my PC.
I recommend Bazzite instead. It's based on Universal Blue (which is actually based on Fedora Atomic) and gives you a super easy and stable experience.
To be fair, next to no one bought this. And the people that payed $90 for this are probably not the sharpest knives in the drawer.
This is basically a dumb android device with one app - an auto friendly version of Spotify. To use it, you need to pair it to your phone via Bluetooth. So, yeah, it assumes you have a phone in your car with Spotify on it.
Also it costs about as much as a cheap externally mounted CarPlay or Android auto screen. So, yeah. Not great.
If you want to put auto friendly app UIs in an older car, go get a cheap CarPlay or AA display. Those are platforms that have been around for a decade, and Apple & Google have long partnership agreements with automakers that are likely to ensure those platforms will be supported for years to come. Hell, Apple is still supporting ancient iPod connection protocols 20+ years later.
This thing was the Rabbit R1, but for a music streaming app.
maybe, but even stupid people should be protected from being taken advantage of.
They should at least get a refund of 50% of the purchase price.
Nope, I'm fed up with stupid people getting rewarded for their stupidity. I knew that PPI was a scam years ago and I payed higher interest rates because of refusing to sign up to it. Years later all the stupids got their money back. So fuck 'em, fuck them all. Also the stupids keep voting for Nazis Yes I'm pissed.
Proton Pump Inhibitors?
Producer Price Index?
Plastic Pipe Institute?
Sorry payment protection insurance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_protection_insurance
Thanks!
Honestly this thing solved a very specific problem for me: My car has no good way to mount a phone for car usage so I've always kept it in the center console. Car Thing just put a remote on my dash for that with buttons for presets and easy song skipping.
I only got it for $10 though, and that was two years ago. It has convinced me to get a new head unit with Android Auto support on it for sure
A few months ago my wife wanted to buy an electronic picture frame and I had a hard time explaining this to her.
Edit: an internet connected picture frame.
Well ok, an electronic picture frame is not much of an investition and works without internet. Well, most of them. Ok, you have to research it before buying.
These fuckers disabled car mode in the android app to make you buy one of those and now they're killing it. I used car mode in my car and the moment it stopped working was when I cancelled my subscription.
When did they kill car mode on the app? I've been subscribed for years even before the Car Thing and I always have car mode on even outside of my car.
Mine doesn't have Car mode anymore, it stopped working a couple of weeks ago.
There's a setting to disable it, it always annoyed me so I disabled it auto going to car mode when it connected to Bluetooth
Seems they want to force you to use their "Car Thing" voice assistant. Probably to listen into your conversations....
What did car mode do? Was it when it switched to big old buttons? Mine used to do that until I got Android Auto in my new car...so up until about a year ago
Yep exactly that. My car back then didn't have Android Auto and this was the only way to skip tracks while keeping my eyes on the road.
Edit: looks like they brought it back later: https://www.xda-developers.com/spotify-car-mode-testing/
So stop being their customer.
I did 4 years ago
downvotes are not to express disagreement!
so many comments here about adding regulations and "this should be illegal" and, yes, those may be a valid way to curb this behavior
but customers willing to leave a company for bad behavior, customers wary of new products without asdurances they wont just become useless, non-reusable e-waste could also effectively curb this behavior
just because you want to outsource all of your product and company research to a law or regulation, and want to be able to blindly buy products and just hope the company doesn't make bad choices in every regard but quartly profits doesn't mean it is the only effective check & balance
I downvoted the comment above because in the original comment they already mentioned that they are no longer subscribed to Spotify, which makes the "stop being a customer" comment exceedingly stupid and pointless.
whoops. maybe I should read the entire thing next time
All good, happens to everyone now and then. And I agree that some people on Lemmy are a little downvote happy.
Everybody buy your music. These streaming platforms are trash.
Yes, yes buy. Do not sail the high seas.
I want the bands to get some money. I buy from bandcamp when musicians are sensible enough to sell on there, or on their sites.
I wish list stuff until a Bandcamp Friday comes around where artists get all the money. I've stopped buying physical media, so waiting on a digital purchase isn't an issue for me.
I’ve almost never paid a cent for music.
My concert ticket stack is thicc though, and I have SOOOOO MANY hoodies, t-shirts, cups, and random bullshit. I’m not paying for DRM, but you can’t DRM a comfy zip-up!
Don’t give them any ideas
Or pirate the music, then send some money in an envelope to the artists themselves.
Or pirate the music, then go to a concert or buy some merch.
Absolutely. Even if you pirate from some, and buy whole albums from a few when you can afford it, you're supporting artists instead of the shareholders of tech goon overlords.
Me too...I'm at 1500+ albums. But I do download them too for when the sad times to come...
What.cd
I'm so glad nothing has replaced what.cd yet...
If there was though, what do you think it would be called? I would like to avoid it at all costs and continue to buy subscriptions
I'm afraid that that information has had to be [redacted]. Choose another path.
Lidarr is pretty keen if you already have sonarr and radar running.
Am I the only one who finds it super annoying, that "detection through sound waves" (Sonar) does video things while "detection through light" (lidar) does the sound things?
WHY?! Swap names already! It's driving me nuts!
I find the choice of name for Readarr more annoying, since we already had Radarr
Why use a private tracker when soulseek allegedly exists? There are also Telegram bots that can allegedly download FLACs from Deezer
Private trackers are dope for very fast flac album downloads.
SLSK is godly for rare stuff.
No need for Telegram bots. There are both proprietary and open source apps that you can use to do this yourself. Check out https://rentry.org/firehawk52 and https://ripped.guide/Audio/Music/
RIP what… was there for a decade. It was godly. Your other reply knows what’s up. So does the god Orpheus, he knows some heady chunes
Oink. Waffles.
Wait…..
piracy is not stealing if buying isn’t owning
Or both Bandcamp for the win
There are three morbillion songs and I have no idea which ones I like. Streaming platforms became popular for a reason
Yeah most people don't care to maintain a local music library. It's a lot of work and compared to streaming services that do it for you this offers no real benefit. If you listen to lots of new/different music all the time, streaming is actually far cheaper.
For me, discovery is the entire reason to use streaming services. I have a ton of hard drive space, and know how to find anything I want to download. I have a fairly large music collection from before the days of streaming. But streaming services help me discover all kinds of things I'd likely never hear otherwise. They still suck, as in they're greedy as hell and the quality is mid, but I don't know what I'd do if I had to listen to the same stuff all the time.
It's cheaper because the band doesn't get paid as much. The streaming service keeps most of the meager pay.
People make up for it by buying merch or going to shows. Margins on those things are much better for the artists.
In every service I know of, the platform takes a minority of revenue
"It is a lot of work"? I don't know, for me it always seemed far more convenient than being locked to a single service, single player app and following restrictions.
Yeah this is fucking peak internet snobbery. "Just spend thousands dollars on music" ok.
I love buying CDs on eBay.
I also love buying direct downloads from artists.
Plex[Amp] makes this work in my pocket
I just realised iTunes (store) is no longer a thing. Everything's just streaming now.
Time to bust out the walkman
iTunes was an unhappy medium. I liked how you can actually buy albums, but they gave the MP3s weird filenames to make it more difficult to move to another device. I did it anyway, but I had to find the right folder, figure out what track it was, and rename the track. I'm against it but it's still better than streaming.
You can still buy songs on iTunes and load them to an iPod, MP3 player, or in my case to my Navidrome instance for my own personal self-hosted streaming.
I recently encountered a song I could only stream but not buy anywhere without DRM. Kinda wild because it has over 5 million YouTube views.
If anyone knows how the buy Slow Song by The Knocks, lmk.
YT + Music is worth its weight in gold.
Everybody
buypirate your music. These streaming platforms are trash.Also this. But I want the bands to get paid.
Ok that's reasonable
They should at least release data sheets and any bootloader signing keys, allowing people to reuse the devices for other purposes. If you could replace the firmware, I’m sure you could use it for controlling your home automation setup or displaying the weather/news/train times/other info (or possibly other tasks depending on what’s in the SoC). Now, alas, it’s just e-waste.
That doesn't help make money. The engineers are needed elsewhere.
Since that was their first attempt at hardware, I bet they don't have access and/or rights to share shit, as everything is owned by OEM.
Datasheets are copyrighted by the silicon manufacturer, not the product manufacturer, and usually covered by an NDA. Spotify probably couldn't release them even if they wanted to.
Even Google products have a longer lifespan 😖
I've since moved on to Tidal. Bought it at $30 when root mods started to be developed, but never really went anywhere.
Image alt:
The bastards barely started selling it a few years ago. I feel like some responsibility should exist. It isn't a company that is going under, so it shouldn't be able to just casually kill the devices tied-service it only recently sold.
Agreed. Anything sold with the intention of being used with a subscription service should have 10 years of support.
Anything discontinued should stop being protected by copyright law, and the manufacturer should be forced to give every piece of information they have on that product.
Holy shit: "The company is recommending that customers do a factory reset on the product and find some way of responsibly recycling the hardware."
So they're not offering to dispose of it, or even giving any advice on how to dispose of it responsibly. Just suggesting people should probably do that.
If companies are allowed to behave this way we're all screwed. Any efforts by the average person to avert the environmental damage caused by the waste they produce is completely futile and any politician who claims that they're doing their best to try to hold companies accountable is a liar.
I hate to break it to you but we’re way past screwed already.
We passed screwed like 25 years ago
We need new laws y’all. All these companies should be forced to collect all their e-waste as part of their products lifecycle.
If a company produces any product and the company has a market cap over $1billion, then they should be responsible for collecting and recycling all their trash.
I don't know how accurate this is or if it's still true but I remember hearing like twenty years ago that Germany has laws like that, including dealing with waste packaging, with the result that companies suddenly found ways to use more sustainable packaging
Spotify is an evil company. Bad for artists, bad for consumers. I’m glad to have quit using their service.
What do you use instead?
Local SSD
Plex/Plexamp/synfonium + Tidal + QoBuz + Bandcamp
If you care about artists not being screwed over, Tidal is usually the first recommendation.
I use a combo of streaming stuff I bought on Bandcamp with their app and playing local files. In addition to albums and EPs, I have bought a lot of singles on Bandcamp. I put all the singles in a giant constantly growing playlist on the Bandcamp app and then set it to random shuffle. It takes more effort than using something like Spotify, but I personally like it a lot more because it's only full of music I know I like and I feel satisfied because I supported the artists I like.
Currently using a combination of Plexamp, WinAmp, Bandcamp and Apple Music.
This was predictable. Everyone has a phone. Phones have CarPlay and Android Auto.
The fact that they named it “Car Thing” made it clear that it didn’t have much of a valid use and that they didn’t really have a lot of confidence in it.
It’s annoying that they even created it in the first place. It’s more annoying that they now predictably are not supporting it anymore. It should be illegal.
Remember kids, never place buttons for a service on a remote if you don't know if the remote will last longer than said service :)
It's a little annoying how the article only gives much of a hint as to what exactly a Car Thing is, beyond a "dashboard accessory", in the last paragraph of the article:
It's worth noting that it was quite cheap and therefore a very good budget option to MacGyver music streaming into older cars.
Car Thing is basically the Rabbit R1, but for music. In other words, a cheap Android device, with one app (a car dashboard variation of Spotify), a scroll wheel, and a some shortcut buttons.
It works by connecting to your phone via Bluetooth. So, yeah, instead of using the phone for the auto friendly UI, it pipes that UI to a second cheaper mobile device.
It’s truly stupid, and it cost about the same as an external CarPlay / Android Auto screen… which could display an auto friendly Spotify UI, and much much more.
I bought this for my old Cadillac that only had a tape deck and it was amazing (with a Bluetooth cassette). I haven't used it since I got rid of that old Cadillac about two years ago now. Pretty limited use case but it still sucks to kill shit for no reason.
I didn't know Bluetooth cassettes were a thing, although if I think about it then of course they are. What's the sound quality like?
The sound is honestly not bad, better and less hassle than an FM transmitter. There are 3.5 mm ones too that work pretty well but I had a few of them and they fail where the cable meets the cassette. I passed it on to a friend with a whole house cassette system when I got my new Cadillac
Stop feeding these parasites.
Either buy physical or self host!
Both. Buy physical media, rip the audio files and put them on your selfhosted music server (e.g. Navidrome). Or pirate the music and buy some merch to compensate the artists.
I'm waiting for some FOSS developers to hack this thing and run custom firmware on it. Or someone who creates their own "Car Thing" using an Arduino or Raspberry Pi.
imo they should refund everyone who bought one and collect all the devices to recycle.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Customers who bought the Car Thing are receiving emails warning that it will stop working altogether as of December 9th.
Unfortunately for those owners, Spotify isn’t offering any kind of subscription credit or automatic refund for the device — nor is the company open-sourcing it.
“We’re discontinuing Car Thing as part of our ongoing efforts to streamline our product offerings,” Spotify wrote in an FAQ on its website.
“We understand it may be disappointing, but this decision allows us to focus on developing new features and enhancements that will ultimately provide a better experience to all Spotify users.”
The company is recommending that customers do a factory reset on the product and find some way of responsibly recycling the hardware.
Car Thing was initially made available on an invite-only basis in April 2021, with Spotify later opening a public waitlist to buy the accessory later that year.
The original article contains 306 words, the summary contains 145 words. Saved 53%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Xmanager is calling everyone's name. Thank me later 😁
Edit: really? I get downvoted for helping? 😂 I love you all, too!
What does Xmanager do? I read the site, but nowhere does it seem to describe the product
If it is what I think it is then they are intentionally being vague about what the app does so they don't draw attention from the service that it works with. If you put that in context with the article then the answer to your question is clear.
https://github.com/Team-xManager/xManager
No ads Spotify.
What it do
Spotify premium for free. No ads, you can skip as many times as you want, you can pick songs and it works with Android Auto.