I uploaded giga upon gigabytes of well-curated (tags, etc.) songs - the max was 400MB per file so you could just about fit a 1 hour DJ session into that as a single “song” as well. The desktop app was complete garbage but you could eventually get your entire MP3 collection uploaded as a massive recommendation seed for the engine to use “more like this!”. Or put 30 songs into a playlist and then say “make me a radio station based on these 30 songs.” and next thing you new you had a 500 long tracks playlist of similar music. sigh those were the good days.

Unfortunately it had a lot of internal track mis-labeling problems; a number of my saved playlists got destroyed when the conversion to YTM happened as the two services could not agree on what a given song was, so YTM thoughtfully made a mess of it. (as well as GM having songs YTM did not, so all those just disappeared too). This soured me on ever adopting YTM and pushed me back to Shoutcast/Icecast solutions.

Replacing any of the paid-for recommendation services is hard in my experience (I loved the Google Music recommendation engine, RIP). Anyways you sort of have two paths of travel to intertwine if you want to stay away from The Big Boys™:

(a) Find independent streaming sites like SomaFM, Big Sonic Heaven and DKFM ([1], amongst many others) which fit your genres as they routinely have “new tracks weekend” besides the broad exposure you get to hearing bands you’ve never heard as the volunteer DJs rotate their preferences. These are your old school original Shoutcast / Icecast streams run solely on donations, there are a lot of them out there for every genre.

(b) Look into something like https://audiomack.com/ - I don’t use it (maybe I should!) but it “feels like” it might be a fit for your needs based on your OP details. Maybe not, at least give it a glance and see what’s going on with it as it does look interesting. Something else might catch your eye at: https://bandcampalternative.com/

[1] some sites from various genres:

• https://somafm.com/
• https://www.bigsonicheaven.com/
• https://decayfm.com/
• https://thevoiceofdoom.com/
• https://darkasylum.co.uk/
• https://www.4zzzfm.org.au/
• https://brokenbeats.net/
• https://badradio.nz/

…and as solutions we have many companies who will do it all for you for $5/mo (more or less), the cost of running a basic cloud server. My time and energy in making sure my email is “always good” is worth paying $5/mo to let Fastmail handle the chore. $0.02

You might try a quick shell script to set NSPR_LOG_MODULES and NSPR_LOG_FILE to “all” debug mode to fish for some clues. https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/nspr/reference/nspr_log_modules.html#nspr-log-modules

To expand on this, there are two settings you can put in user.js / prefs.js (desktop) or via about:config (mobile), documented on the Mozilla Wiki:

user_pref("media.autoplay.default", 5);
user_pref("media.autoplay.blocking_policy", 2);

Two bonus settings if you want to get rid of the “do you want to enable DRM?” pop-in bar when hitting one of those sites:

user_pref("media.gmp-widevinecdm.enabled", false);
user_pref("media.gmp-widevinecdm.visible", false);

hth

I would love to find a Bill Watterson one, if anyone knows.

Here you go, I’ll throw in some bonus ones as they’re all linked together in the Bloom County sidebar:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

Lighthearted eye candy

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

Quick update for anyone still reading this thread:

@[email protected] As with any other app, we flagged Fennec and Mull with KnownVuln until the app is updated. Contributors fixed the issues that delayed versions 130 and later. Stand by for the build.

https://floss.social/@fdroidorg/113384089915217604

A bit of backstory on how we got here - in June 2024 Mozilla chose to (a) integrate the source tree of Firefox Mobile into their huge monorepo (“gecko-dev”), and (b) move the source off of Github onto their own git servers (“Mozilla Central”). You can read about it in the now-archived old repo:

• https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-android
• https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-android/wiki#upcoming-migration-to-mozilla-central

This was then compounded by a core Android build kit (“NDK”) choosing to remove parts of the toolchain which is/was used to build Firefox releases (ergo, forcing another change to build process):

• https://github.com/android/ndk/issues/2010

Together these have caused a bit of a kerfuffle in getting new releases compiled and released via the official F-Droid methodology. See the other comment about the Mull version in their private repo, they’re having to use a Mozilla pre-built clang (a compiler toolchain) now to make it work for the time being.

The link(s) to add their F-Droid repo if not running DivestOS: https://divestos.org/pages/our_apps.html#repos

I have been using Linux on laptops as main/only compute since around 1997 (started with an Inspiron 4000, PII-400 IIRC), Dell is generally extremely boring and very Linux/BSD compatible. I have been buying gently used Precision models (typically using local marketplace, Craigslist in USA) as they tend to have better build quality and non-janky custom parts (think “winmodem”). They last forever, pretty much every Linux/BSD distro works. The most important thing is to stay away from Broadcom chips and look for Intel eth/wifi. Stay away from Inspiron to avoid hardware problems, in modern times those are the bottom of the barrel janky hardware.

The Dell Latitude line used by businesses are even more boring than Precisions and really always have been - their BIOS has a somewhat unique charging profile “always plugged in” to extend battery life - I use two ancient E6330 models tuned to super low power modes as mini-servers (think anything you’d use a raspberry Pi for) that have been chugging away for probably 5+ years just running cron jobs, backups, Syncthing services and whatever I toss on them. Throw an SSD in anything and it just works - power goes out, batteries act as UPS. $100 USD each, “just work”.

Thinkpads have always been a Linux favorite, at least the old models when IBM owned the brand but not too sure about the Lenovo modern ones. Last Thinkpad I owned was a 32bit one back in like maybe 2010 and it worked just fine. They tend to be more expensive used than Dells (retain their purchase price better, like a nice used auto).