The Best Spotify Alternative For Desktop! (And How to Use it!!)
We live in an era where we really should start to stop using subscription/streaming services to hopefully as a collective start making dents in the pockets of billionaires and big corpos. One reason we should reduce using spotify includes the fact that the CEO has invested millions into military drones: read more.
The thing is, there is one really easy to use alternative that has been around forever and everyone has seemed to forget: Windows Media Player (Legacy vers).
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The benefits of using WMP are as follows:
Ownership of the music files (mp3s).
No distracting bells and whistles.
No internet needed to listen to the music.
Can also use it to burn cds: a feature spotify has never had as far as I'm aware and imo making WMP far superior (I will make a cd burning tut linked to this post in the near future).
Still has all the basic features wanted out of a music application; playlists, shuffle, repeat, skip etc.
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For this tutorial I'll specifically being showing how to transfer your music from spotify -> WMP.
1) Choose a spotify playlists or album (100 songs max), click on the three dots, then share and click copy link to playlist. The playlist has to be public for this to work.
2) Find a spotify downloader, such as the one below, and paste in the playlist link. Then click download zip and wait as this will take some time depending on the amount of songs. Some songs (especially by small artists) may be incorrect.
3) Find the zip file in your downloads and move it to a folder for music, windows usually has a default music folder for this. Then unzip/extract the file.
This is a good point to clarify that the playlist itself does not transfer over to WMP just the music within it. WMP does still have albums/sorted by artist. Because of this you will have to recreate your playlists.
4) Last step is to open up Windows music player and just drag the extracted folder with your music into WMP. Now you can have a free ad-free music listening experience!.
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Now to answer a few extra questions that you may ask!
Aren't you still using spotify doing this? Yes but only to transfer over current playlists/music. After that there are plenty of other ways to source mp3's for free or through sites such as Bandcamp if you want to support artists monetarily.
What if I don't use spotify and use something else (such as youtube)? There are plenty of youtube/other applications, mp3 downloaders just like the spotify one out there that do the exact same thing!
For more resources into sourcing free music look here.
