[Cryptography] Music players that don't promote eavesdropping?

Chris Harrison charris5 at gmail.com
Wed Jun 15 13:20:00 EDT 2016


The Music Player Daemon (mpd) and an mpd client (I recommend ncmpcpp)
should work for you.  It is completely ncurses based so you /would/
technically need to run in a terminal session; but I find this a
non-issue personally.  It _does_ have the ability to fetch artist data
from last.fm; however this can be easily switched on/off. I'm not 100% sure,
but I don't believe the last.fm fetch is even enabled by default.

Here's a guide to setting up mpd and ncmpcpp on ArchLinux, but I've also
set it up on debian and Fedora systems as well, so no worries about
distro dependence.

http://www.linuxandlife.com/2012/01/simple-guide-to-set-up-mpd-with-ncmpcpp.html

Chris

Ray Dillinger <bear at sonic.net> writes:
>Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2016 08:43:52 -0700
>From: Ray Dillinger <bear at sonic.net>
>To: "cryptography at metzdowd.com" <cryptography at metzdowd.com>
>Subject: [Cryptography] Music players that don't promote eavesdropping?
>User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101
> Icedove/45.1.0
>
>
>Just out of curiosity, is there any such thing as a desktop music player
>(for Linux) these days, which can be configured to NOT use the Internet
>at all?
>
>Music playing is high on my list of things that have absolutely no need
>for an Internet connection.
>
>Every damn thing, even those considered "minimalist", wants to download
>f&*(%^ album covers from this, lyrics from that, track lists from
>somewhere else, internet radio listings from another place, etc etc etc,
>by unencrypted channels, and doesn't seem to have options to turn this
>obnoxious behavior off.  Even if I never ask it to do these things.
>
>And then next time I go to Amazon, it's clear that they know exactly
>which tracks I've been listening to within the last 24 hours, because
>they try to sell me more stuff by the same artists. Even terribly
>obscure artists whom I have played only on that one day out of the last
>six months.
>
>Maybe I would rather *NOT* allow every advertiser and snoop in the world
>to know what kind of music I listen to and when I'm listening.
>
>Just ... seriously, is there any way to shut these damn things up and
>still have a music player on the desktop, or do I have to abandon the
>desktop and use a console-only music player if I care?
>
>				Bear
>




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