After using spotify for many years, I decided to try switching my music service a few months ago. I was finding that any time I put on shuffle, spotify would eventually direct me back to funk and soul music from the seventies. I generally love those styles of music, but for a service that is supposed to provide discovery, it wasn’t really working for me.
I compared the various services available in Canada on the following criteria:
- Library
- Sonos Support
- iOS Support
- Mac Support
- CarPlay Support
- Google Home Support
Tidal met most of my needs, so I gave it a try. It’s a good service, kind of lacking in the polish I got used to with spotify, but the library was good and I could listen on most of my devices. I even found it has an app for my roku TV, which I never really used. I was a bit disappointed with the CarPlay app, but it was okay. The real sticking point was no Google Home, so when my trial ended, I signed up for a youtube music trial.
One thing I will say for tidal was the discovery was like a bresh of fresh air coming from spotify. I found a lot of really great stuff on there.
Youtube Music doesn’t have a real mac app, but there is a “web native” app, which is basically what “chrome apps” are now, from what I can tell.
When I left spotify, I exported my thousands of Liked songs with the hope of importing them to whatever service I settled on. Unfortunately Tidal’s API is worse than almost any I’ve seen, and Youtube Music doesn’t even have an api. There is, however, an unofficial API for Youtube Music called ytmusicapi.
It’s a bit of a kludgey library, working by pretending to be a client in a browser, but overall it worked great. Youtube Music seems to have some kind of protection in place to prevent abuse so if you just fire off a tonne of requests using the library, you will see a lot of timeouts. The usual way to deal with something like this would be to use a retry decorator But I decided to roll my own, which I thought was nifty and worth sharing:
def retry_backoff(fn, args, i=1):
try:
return fn(*args)
except ReadTimeout:
time.sleep(10 * i)
return retry_backoff(fn, args, i+1)Then you can call this with something like:
retry_backoff(ytmusic.rate_song, [video_id, 'LIKE'])Obviously would be more useful if the Exception type and sleep multiplier were configurable, but it worked for me. I got all the Likes imported. I may move off youtube music, maybe even starting a new spotify account, but for now I am happy.