It's interesting that most/all of the available tools for playing digital music, a well-known and very popular activity... suck. Do we think that's enshittification or product managers misunderstanding the market? In a normal universe one might otherwise expect it to be saturated with options.

Most of the market of actual paying customers don't really care to have directories of FLAC files and terabytes of local data. And most of the people who have large collections of FLAC files probably didn't spend much to get those collections and aren't likely to bother paying for an app to be developed and supported. Most people I know with a local music library of thousands of FLACs spent $0 on that content.

And then there's a massive chunk of the market that finds the tradeoff of ads for "free" access to music an acceptable tradeoff. A few dollars a month in cost for access to music is way more than they're interested in spending, even $10 for a CD is more than they're usually looking to spend to acquire content. They're the kind of people who maybe only bought a handful of CDs or cassette tapes back int the day total and got a lot of their content from the radio.

Most of the paying customers for digital music tend to be generally OK or even prefer streaming services. And generally speaking, those streaming apps work pretty OK. Most work better than the early streaming/subscription apps back in the day (like old Rhapsody and Zune Music and non-pirating Napster). I still remember how long it would take to go from clicking Play on Zune to the time it would actually start playing the song compared to Spotify which felt nearly instant in comparison. Not having to reconnect my Creative Zen every few weeks refresh the DRM from Napster. Having all that content on demand from my wireless portable device. Practically all of what is available today is quite a bit better than what was, in terms of "I don't want to bother buying all of this content, I'm OK with renting a lot of it" standpoint.

I've got a collection of music I own, things I really care about. Mostly physical formats, a few hundred songs exclusively digital files. But for a lot of music I consume, I don't really care if I have it locally or have it forever. Its like listening to the radio, that song may never play again, that's OK. Buying all that content legitimately costs considerably more than what I pay for a streaming service, so the streaming service makes a ton of economic sense for what I'm looking for. I'm mostly looking for something in between a radio and a privately curated music collection, which is exactly what streaming is.

VLC has always been more than sufficient for me, or mp3blaster back in the day for a TUI app. I have trouble understanding why those or similar solutions are not sufficient for others....just interface preferences I guess?

It's hard to answer that question without understanding what specifically "sucks" in all the tools? I mean, the market is saturated with options, there are dozens of apps and streaming services well suited for "popular". It's the more advanced parts that are underserved, but that's just what you'd expect in any normal universe, you're rarely popularly saturated with greatness.

It's enshittification.

Software for playing audio used to be great even with far fewer engineering resources going into them. That suggests the reason they are getting worse is deliberate and stems from a misalignment between what software users want and what the producers want.

Most music software companies today are two businesses joined together:

1. A software company that makes apps to let people listen to music.

2. A content licensing company that pays artists and record labels to give them access to music and let people listen to it.

If they were only #1 then they would be agnostic to what music people listen to and how much of it. WinAmp didn't give a damn how big your music library was, what songs you listened to, or how often, because that was entirely between you and your MP3 collection.

But, say, Spotify has to pay someone every time you listen to a song and how much they pay depends on what you listen to and how often. That gives them a direct, perverse incentive to build an app that routes you away from expensive audio you might prefer towards cheap stuff that eats up your time but doesn't cost Spotify as much.

That's why every single time I open the fucking Spotify app I see a wall of podcasts even though I have literally never listened to one and never will. They don't put them there for my benefit, but for theirs.

For Spotify, the end game is routing people towards eventually-AI-generated musak that they themselves own the licenses for because it's free for them. This is directly analogous to why Netflix is now constantly pimping their own often-shitty produced shows over movies you might actually prefer.

The reason we aren't saturated with options is that producing a media app without also having deals that give the app direct access to media to play dumps a lot of work back onto users and most users these days simply don't have a local media library or want to maintain one.

And spinning up a new app that does off content directly has huge startup costs. You need an army of lawyers to go out and negotiate deals with every record label out there, and those labels probably hate you out the gate since they are still salty about not making anywhere near as much money as they used to make when they sold CDs.

The enshitification was completed when they convinced us to no longer want to own our own copies of music but to perpetually rent access to their content.

I think it's a combination of both scale and people's expectations.

As the size of your music library goes up, the UX changes. The original iPod UX was (at least for me) genuinely awesome. It became less awesome as iPods got 40, 60, and larger storage, and it was pretty much unusable when I modded one to have 1TB of storage.

And related but different, everybody's expectation of what "a large music collection" is varies wildly.

I don't necessarily think this is intentional enshittification, I lean more towards "there's no right solution for everybody, and there's probably not even a dozen different right solutions that encompass most people".

When billions of dollars are involved, never attribute to stupidity what could be adequately explained by malice.

Yeah I think a sibling has it right: DRM factors into this, and TPTB do not want another Winamp or VLC that gives freedom to users to play what we want.

The situation for me on Android would be hilarious if it weren't so saddening. Since I purchased a KitKat tablet in 2015, I've more or less stuck to the "Android Files" app to play music files. Yes, that has been the best solution: no app install required, bare bones, no feature demands from me. In fact, rather than making playlists, I would just copy out tracks to a new folder and play them in there. Want to repeat one? Make five copies of it!

On Chromebook I'm using the builtin app, Gallery. It's utterly barebones as well. All I want to do is listen to a track.

This has continued even to the present day, but you know what? Our days are numbered, because apps are staking out moats in terms of file types they will handle. They're looking to reduce generic handling of multiple file types.

I've been trying to conform to this "new normal" by using YouTube Music. With my Premium subscriptions I should be able to download any streamable track, and also listen to files on-device. This is working out poorly. The on-device management is abysmal and makes you want to die. The downloading feature just sort of... fills up my storage, and I don't really even use it. I still fall back on Android Files because Music is such a horrible app, except when I'm using it to stream.