EDIT: The only reason why I still had it at this point was because I could use it with other apps. However, now that my Spotify Subscription is cancelled, it doesn’t work with anything. It’s mildly infuriating because today, I can’t still use it with other apps like I was able to yesterday.
Please don’t make the same mistake I made. No one should buy this.
You purchased a device that presumably has no local storage and are upset that it needs you to login to a server that can then stream you the music?
Or is this an issue of not having a paid account?
I guess Spotify didn’t realize someone who didn’t pay for Spotify would be likely to pay 100 bucks for a device to stream Spotify, and in most cases I’d say they’re probably right.
I pay for a family account, but apparently that’s not the same as a premium account. I’d have the same problem using this device without having to upgrade my Spotify account.
A photo of a Spotify Car Thing with the text displaying on the screen under the Spotify logo: “Need a Premium account To use Car Thing you need to be logged in to a Spotify Premium or Premium Family account on your phone.”
[I am a human, if I’ve made a mistake please let me know. Please consider providing alt-text for ease of use. Thank you. 💜]
Yes he does. I got in an argument with him the other day and he called me the thought police for saying that people who get off to kids are mentally unwell lol
9.99/m is 119.88/y and it doesn’t stop. Maybe OP thought that the purchase was a one time purchase, and I don’t really blame him, since why would the thing exist if phones with a subscription can already do that it does?
He bought a piece of convenience tech designed for a specific piece of software, when said convenience tech is totally unnecessary to the function of that software, then got mad that he needed the software
I am shocked that everyone in this thread isn’t roasting this dude nonstop. He’s an idiot.
They just don’t consider personal responsibility to even exist. It’s the corporation’s fault they spent a hundred bucks on a thing your old phone and a 15 dollar magnetic mount could have done for you, because said device needs a subscription service.
I had a guy tell me in this thread that I had “privilege” for saying Spotify didnt expect people without a paid subscription to be spending money on such an overpriced device. OP is throwing hundo’s away on stupid shit but it HAS to be the corpos fault somehow, people will toss logic right out the window to keep the cognitive dissonance at bay.
Doesn’t stop? You sign on the dotted line for a lifetime of payments? You can’t cancel your subscription?
since why would the thing exist if phones with a subscription can already do that it does?
That’s the exact logic that would lead someone with an ounce of intelligence to go “oh yeah, this product is a completely stupid piece of shit that’s marketed toward people with more money than brain cells.”
Did it say anywhere on the package that it gets you a lifetime subscription to Spotify? No. Does OP understand that Spotify works on a subscription model? Probably, Saas isnt fucking new.
This is the kind of boy-who-cried-wolf bullshit that keeps corporations from actually being held accountable, because people who want better worker’s rights and taxes on corporations look like idiots when lumped in with children like you who consider personal responsibility and thinking for yourself to be too scawy.
They say never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect, ignorance or incompetence. But with a corporations I’m pretty sure its the other way around.
I’d usually agree but this product seems exclusively intended for someone who’s heavily into Spotify, and the marketing clearly states you need a subscription.
Knew what? That people buying the device already have one?
You still have it backwards. They didn’t sell you the device to get you on the subscription, they assumed only people with money to spend on a subscription would WASTE A HUNDRED BUCKS ON SOME DUMB SHIT LIKE THIS.
Am I missing something, or would basically any old smartphone work in place of this? I have a Pixel which sits in a cradle and takes care of anything I’d use this for. I guess a physical button or dial might be nice, but I have a volume dial on the car dash.
Seems plainly obvious that it’ll require a sub. It’s a Spotify box.
You’re correct, I have a five or six year old kindle fire i got for like 60 bucks that I rooted and installed stock android on, it’s just a really cheap tablet now. Works perfectly for stuff like this.
My last smartphone would also have worked.
This whole thread is just a bunch of moron-consumer apologists. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to hate corporations and their practices, but this is just a bad purchase and buyers remorse packaged as big corpos fault.
I mean, on all the purchase advertisements they said you must have Spotify premium to use this.
They subsidized the price the device based on the expected return from convincing people to keep their subscriptions. Since it supports other clients they probably also have to manage software updates.
Spotify is a bag of dicks for a lot of other reasons but this really doesn’t seem to be one of them.
you can appreciate her cracking skills and still hate her for everything else she does, like running a cult and refusing to tell anyone else how to crack denuvo, even though she literally makes zero money off it so she’s literally just keeping it secret for clout (presumably to fuel the whole telegram cult thing)
Well I’m not a member of this cult, but I believe admiration for cracking skills always existed before her, now it’s different because she is more socially open than a average cracking group. The scene on the denuvo part is basically her so It’s easy to build a cult, as you said she keeps a monopoly.
Lmao if skip the real simps most people are there for drama only and ig she is the only cracker close to a community rest don’t respond directly to general audience. Though i feel her drama is over the top and waste of time.
Yes. My personal belief is they want account-bound services normalized by the time self-driving cars become viable. They would HATE for us to have the ability to lend our cars out to other people throughout the day without giving them more money
We are in the era that other than games, the companies have not yet caught up with anti-cracking techniques. I crack shit as a hobby and everything is fun and challenging until you start to mess with games. It’s insanely difficult, a CONSTANT cat n mouse run and sooooo damn time consuming
ok so first of all you need to know programming. nothing crazy but you should definitely know what a “function” “loop” or “variable” is and some basic HTTP knowledge (what is an HTTP reuest, what’s a header, etc.).
now, your target is to bypass the license check. there are many ways to go about that:
the web way: intercept the traffic between the app and the server. maybe the app tells the server “am i licensed” and the server responds “no” and if you just change that you’re golden. to intercept traffic the golden standard is “burp proxy”
the exported function way: I’m sure that you’ve seen that all the apps that you install come with various dlls. these are “libraries” which means that they’re a bunch of functions in a package. most times they also include the name of their functions and more often than not you’ll find a “is_user_licensed” that returns a 0 or a 1. hooking that to return 1 will hand you a win
the exe exported function way: same as the above but the function lives inside the exe. BTW exes are exactly the same as a DLL (and you can actually execute a dll or import functions from an exe!)
you can find any function that gets called and has a name (the names are called “symbols”) using frida-trace
afterwards you can write a frida script (javascript) that either replaces the entire function or append/prepend code to it. most times you want to append code that just returns a value as to not mess with the programs internals
if you have a .net app though the whole process is WAY easier as you can read all the code of the app using a decompiler - dnspyex is the gold standard
of course not all apps are that easy to crack. it’s more of a time/mind game and less of a skill one. sure, you get much more efficient and the solutions start to “smell”, but trying to crack an app that has stripped symbols (no function names) and everything is statically compiled (all the dlls are shoved into the exe to make it harder for us) can make your life much more difficult
since this is a “starter guide” i’m gonna leave anti-reverse, anti-debug and obfuscation completely out of the discussion. unless you get a moderately good grasp what the above terms mean, don’t bother
I also didn’t talk about actual reversing with a debugger/decompiler/disassembler as I think that it’s better to find out about them as-you-go. don’t start from that. it’s intimidating
Don’t get intimidated. You’ve got it. Remember that it’s not about skill (ok don’t go cracking IDA Pro or denuvo), it’s about patience and methodology As the hacker say: Try harder and happy hacking 🙂
NOTE0: ALWAYS ask chatGPT stuff. if it refuses to answer put the question in the context of “malware research” NOTE1: I think that someone somewhere may have told me that a very popular app owned by dickheads used in the 3d printing community is a very good starting point 😀 NOTE2: You’re more than welcome to ask anything - PMs or otherwise
EDIT: I forgot to mention reversing divas: since this is such a niche thing to do and you spend your life away from grass, some people involved are in the mindset of “this is not for everyone, you’re stupid and you can’t do it, etc”. Fuckem
I have the hobby of cracking stuff like that (but mainly windows apps to tell you the truth) and there are many-ish people out there with the same hobby. search around a bit and google stuff like “Spotify Car Thing github” or “Spotify Thing bypass” or jailbreak. Heavily rely on github and russian forums. Also random small blogs
If you’re so determined though and nobody else has done it and you’re fine not using it for 3+ months, there’s a very slim chance that I could find the time to bypass it
unfortunately I’ve not released any crack and the reason behind it is that I develop them in a way that you can read what they do (which function they hook, what do they expect and more) using frida.re so the crack ends being a javascript file that is run through a power shell script. so no “copy this dll” or “disable your antivirus” - super clean and you can always see what the crack does. my base is ALWAYS that you download and install the app from the manufacturer
due to that though I “can’t” release the scripts to the public as:
I’ll go to jail
the companies will start to implement anti-cracking measures as I give them exactly the way I crack their app on a silver platter
If you use anything by the monopolist assholes, you can totally expect to get enshitified. I swtiched over to Tidal a while back. They support artists, not hate speech. And the audio quality is better.
I largely agree, except that a few months back tidal changed the way they compensate artists so now it‘s exactly the same crap as the others. bandcamp is the way if you want to support artists.
they sent out an email in february saying that they stopped paying a share of your monthly payments directly to your most listened artists and instead will put more funding towards organizing concerts for „up and coming“ artists that they chose… which sounds just like advertising for tidal to me
I don’t understand the point of this device. Why not buy a replacement radio for the car instead? I bought a Pioneer one and it was a nice upgrade to my 2012 Mazda3 since I can plug in my phone to use Android Auto and get the screen to show Google Maps + pretty much any music app on my phone.
There’s plenty of 2010-2015ish cars with dogshit radios that are hard to find, expensive to get or literally impossible to find good replacements for, thanks to vehicle manufacturers killing of the DIN system.
Because buying a double DIN or even a single DIN radio can require buying a replacement bezel, disassembling your dash and often your center console as well, wiring in a steering wheel media control adapter, correctly wiring in the stereo, and having the knowledge to make adjustments when things don’t quite fit or go right.
“[just] buy a replacement radio” is not how it works at all.
Best Buy does this all for you for $80, assuming the person is in the US. I expect this is available most places for similar prices though. You can get anything from a BT only unit for $20 online to a much nicer unit with Android Auto/iOS’s thing. While the initial cost might be higher the opportunity cost of your thing being disabled is almost certainly much higher, as this thread’s existence seems to support. $150-$200 well worth it in the long run to do a head unit upgrade.
And then after I spend over $100 on a decent stereo, $50 for an adapter for my car, and the $80 to have some kid install it for me I’ll be $250 in the hole and still paying for a Spotify subscription so I can listen to music that’s not shit. Or for $100 I could buy a cheap ass tablet and shove it into my air vent.
Oh yeah, you nailed it. Clearly worked for the OP… I also didn’t put a value on said opportunity cost. Perhaps it’s greater than $250 depending on the individual. Subjective as opportunity cost can sometimes be. Not trying to ascertain or consider it is at best just short sighted, or perhaps at worst ignorant. Cheap junk, effectively rented according to the EULA, subject to the whims of the rights holders, is never the way.
I did it all by myself with no experience - wired up the wiring harness properly, installed the bezel, connected some sort of adapter so the car alert tones and steering wheel controls still work, etc. I bought the radio from Crutchfield who have lifetime phone support to assist with any issues (I didn’t need it though). I just followed the instructions they provided.
Car radios have become much more entrenched. My 13 Fusion has an external amp. Shit, my 96 Taurus did too. Plus if you have any phone, steering wheel, or other peripheral integration, you often lose those features. OP probably has integrated hvac buttons. Sometimes you can get adapters, sometimes the signals are buried in canbus lines
My 2012 Mazda3 has an external amp under the front passenger seat. I bought my Pioneer radio from Crutchfield and they included an adapter to make everything work. The amp works fine (most radios have a preamp output for this purpose), and the steering wheel controls work fine too.
My car just had a basic radio though. I guess it might be harder in newer cars with fancier radios. People that mount their phone or use things like this Spotify… thing usually have older cars/radios though. The newer ones just have Android Auto and Apple Carplay built in.
No need to sail them seas, but maybe still use a vpn, just on case. Fun fact i heard from a friend of a friend: Youtube starts rate limiting after 50,000 audio-only video downloads, until you have a new IP.
I’ve also noticed that sometimes it downloads the wrong versions of songs. While my Spotify playlist has the album version of a song, it might sometimes download a live performance audio or a reprise version.
I have hundreds upon hundreds of songs in my Spotify music library. Downloading them one by one sounds like hell. And then I wouldn’t be discovering new music either.
No but direct downloads are all the rage. Here are my two favorite sites for free music. Every track is available in either 320k MP3, or FLAC lossless. So they’re even better than Limewire ever was:
I’ve been pretty happy with YouTube music. I got legacied in due to Google Music shutting down and thought I would hate it, but I’ve had zero complaints. Plus, it comes with free YouTube Premium, so I haven’t seen an ad in years.
I have so many complaints, Google Play music was fine. It did exactly what I wanted it to.
YouTube music is like an alien looked at that app, and tried to recreate it exclusively by smashing it’s forehead against a keyboard until an app that started most of the time came out.
I would actually argue that Google Play Music was the best music streaming app that I’ve used. It was great being able to upload music from CDs of small local bands and have it right in there with the other streaming music.
Just today I had a hankering to listen to a specific song through my android auto, and instead of just being able to verbally ask the unit for that song, or even being able to search through the atrocity that is the YouTube Music interface on my head unit, I had to pull over, pull out my phone, search for the band, then click the uploads tab (because uploaded music does not show with the regular search results) and then click the song to get it to play.
It’s not optimal, and I would like for uploaded music to just show up in the regular search, but there is a top navigation bar where you can just switch between where to search (uploads being one of the options). Also YTM has the upside of showing YouTube uploads as well, I could always find obscure bonus EPs that only came with the physical CD because someone uploaded it, which is really handy
Yes and the glorious “playing near you” feature of Play Music. That made the best recommendations for local shows, and I mean local, within a few miles, not just bands I’d listened to but always relevant and often small shows! That feature, I found several new bands I liked that way and good live music. YouTube has nothing like that. Also interface not as intuitive, more cluttered. My kids like it better because they do like having the videos available, but as I do not give a fuck about that but do like live music this is still not as good as the Play Music.
YouTube music is like an alien looked at that app, and tried to recreate it exclusively by smashing it’s forehead against a keyboard until an app that started most of the time came out.
You think they that much care and attention into the app?
But seriously, yeah, I had pretty much the same experience -Google Play Music just worked beautifully, whereas YouTube Music was a steaming turd on Android. I gave up after six months and two phones and went to Deezer, never looked back
I would say the same myself. They don’t do the worst job for music discovery either which is important to me. Amazon Music drove me nuts constantly recommending Cage the Elephant and other well-known (profitable) artists instead of obscure music similar to my tastes.
Same. Honestly, I expected YTM to make things worse. That’s usually how those kinda things go. But it actually did get better for me. I jumped to Google Play Music because it had better selection than Spotify (at least back then). YTM kept that, but fixed the issues I was having with the desktop browser player sometimes getting stuck. And the more recent support for lyrics that are synced to the music is great.
Their queueing system sucks. All I want to do is queue up some songs but instead YTM fills my queue with tons of crap I’ve never listened to before because that’s how they make money. They put my manually queued songs at the END of the queue so I have to move them up 20+ spaces. There’s literally no way to do it other than creating a custom playlist every time I listen to music, and they intentionally made that take more clicks/taps than queuing. I don’t get how people are ok with the YTM app, it’s terrible.
I hate YTM and I hate that I can’t cancel it because they bundle it with YouTube premium, which my partner uses every day. Screw Google and they anti-consumer manipulative bs.
Their queueing system sucks. All I want to do is queue up some songs but instead YTM fills my queue with tons of crap I’ve never listened to before because that’s how they make money. They put my manually queued songs at the END of the queue so I have to move them up 20+ spaces. There’s literally no way to do it other than creating a custom playlist every time I listen to music, and they intentionally made that take more clicks/taps than queuing. I don’t get how people are ok with the YTM app, it’s terrible.
wrong.
you can disable automatic queuing by hitting the ‘auto-play’ switch in UP NEXT
you can queue songs by long-pressing and hitting ‘play next’ (which will put it in front of the queue) or ‘add to queue’ (which will put it in my the end
No, I’m not wrong. Option 1 does not exist on my phone. There is no switch.
And the “play next” feature also sucks. I don’t want to “play next”. I want to build a queue like literally any other music app and that isn’t what “play next” does.
Edit: I don’t see that “auto-play” switch on the web app in Safari either.
No. I’m not wrong, and I don’t appreciate you repeatedly telling me I am when you obviously have no clue what I’m looking at.
It isn’t there. I’m on Android 13 with the latest version of the app. There is no “auto-play” toggle anywhere. I’d upload screenshots to prove it but lemmy is throwing exceptions. I’ve checked every tab and settings page as well.
So I finally figured it out. this is how that toggle works:
it only appears when you manually search for a song or select a song from certain groups on the home page.
it does not appear to appear if you select a song from “listen again” or “quick picks” in which case the app forces you to listen to whatever is in their queue unless you manually clear the queue.
oh yeah, you are right-ish. it doesn’t show up if you launch a “radio”, which innately is a automatic, end-less playlist of similar music. I do agree though that this should be more visible in the UI
You literally can’t buy them anymore! Spotify quietly canned the project. Support pages are still up but I can’t find a purchase option anywhere.
I bought one pretty early into launch and even then they were already heavily discounted. It was a weird choice for a peripheral, but personally I really wish they had tried a bit harder instead of giving up outright
They never even came over to the uk and I really wanted one. Nobody else makes anything like it either. I don’t know why they canned it, I’ve only ever seen praise for it on YouTube and the like
Sometimes you don’t want to use your phone for everything. Plus car thing to me seemed much more interesting outside of the car. Like to use as a media control panel in the kitchen etc.
There’s a niche. I’ve only ever driven older cars with less than stellar stereo setups for phone play. The idea is getting a small-footprint and quick to navigate stereo interface without actually having to replace whole ass stereo, and I find it pretty appealing!
For me the problem was connectivity. I assumed the car thing would act as a go-between for my phone and stereo, and it would remain always connected to the car audio system. Instead it’s just another thing you’re connecting to. It actually slowed me down significantly more than it helped.
If it could send/receive audio and just used your phone as a source, that’d be ideal for me. Like a suped up bluetooth receiver with spotify connectivity.
I just tossed my headphone plug to cassette adapter for my truck because i recently updated my phone and nothing has headphone sockets anymore. luckily the bluetooth to FM transmitters have come a long way as well.
lol My wife and daughter recently got excited about vinyl and bought the new Taylor swift album, so I had to get Back In Black to balance things out. We are constantly trying to “declutter” and I fear the collection will keep growing.
I don’t own one. But having real buttons is always an advatage for me when driving a car. I think my car can do everything the “Car Thing” did via the buttons on the steering wheel and the screen of the radio (or multimedia screen or whatever we call those nowadays), but if I had an car that can’t I might have been interested.
This type of shit is why I just want a vehicle with a CD player that can hold multiple discs. Then I could just burn my favorite music onto a few discs and not have to worry about not having paid to have access to the music I want and don’t have to worry about a song I dislike popping up randomly.
You might really enjoy Plex + Plexamp. You own the library and choose your media but you don’t burn CDs and can instead stream/pin (for offline) songs or playlists like you’d expect from a paid music service.
My car has a SD card slot that it will read music off of. The first week I had it, I loaded up a disc with as much music as I could. I haven’t switched it out in 3 years.
It has been quite nice. Until this post, I had almost forgotten where my music was coming from.
But an android head unit is more open and less susceptible to cloud companies stopping their service because its media player can work offline with local media, and you can still sideload apk into the unit even if play store no longer work on the unit.
You could buy portable DVD and CD players back in 2005 that would keep playing without a hitch even if you dropped them. Admittedly this was mostly down to them caching the content in RAM and spinning down to save battery power…
I haven’t used a CD deck in over a decade. I literally don’t know how CDs would even sound in my car’s deck, because it’s a dead technology. I genuinely cannot believe anyone in a developed nation would still purchase a CD.
The only reason to purchase a CD nowadays I think is memorabilia, or to support an artist/group… aside from that it’s pretty much as you say, physical media is a dying format.
Vinyl is an outlier, but even then modern vinyl players are noticeably worse than ones manufactured several decades ago
One that can take a USB storage device or an SD card would be much better. Same result, but no messing around with discs and it can hold way more music.
There’s a lot of better ways to do that like for me I typically ether just plug my phone into the line in port or if there isn’t one I just pair my phone and play mp3s off of my MP3 player app and if your car demands you use a service just get a Bluetooth radio transmitter so your car thinks it’s just listening to ordinary radio
I got an old beater with a tape player and discovered they make Bluetooth adapters just like the old fm adapters i used years ago. Combined with a gig hdd dedicated to music on my phone and it feels like the old days again of burned cds and pirate bay
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