• blamesoft 5 minutes ago

    Telemetry on by default in a CLI app seems very weird

    • Habgdnv 6 hours ago

      I remember with nostalgia the mp3blaster. I spent years listening to it in my terminal. At one point I used only cli without graphical desktop on slackware and one of my TTYs was dedicated to it.

      Turns out these times are forever gone - never to come back. The huge disappointment when I tried this on the first run to play a mp3 file from my local disk and it initiated outbound connection. Why a local CLI player needs outbound TCP connection to play a local file from my local disk?!?! The answer was in the source. It is called telemetry. Back then when I used mp3blaster we used to call this spyware, but the times had changed since then.

      • liendolucas 2 hours ago

        You can still set up an mpd server: https://www.musicpd.org/ that runs on your local files.

        • samplatt 5 hours ago

          The times haven't changed. It's still spyware, it's just been normalised.

          • tosti 6 hours ago

            OIC: https://github.com/bjarneo/cliamp/blob/main/telemetry/teleme...

            Should be easy to nerf, but the build instructions are kinda vague. Clone, and then what? Something like "go build" or something I guess.

            Looks cool though

            • userbinator 2 hours ago

              No personal data is collected

              IP address (which can be geolocated) along with a unique identifier is not considered "personal data"? This is basically a tracking cookie. It also seems to use HTTP, which is itself widely fingerprintable based on what request headers it sends.

              • gesis 5 hours ago

                There's a config variable and a cli flag to disable.

                That seems reasonable to me.

                • userbinator 2 hours ago

                  to disable

                  All such surveillance behaviour should strictly be OPT IN.

                • Habgdnv 5 hours ago

                  I saw it, it is NOT spyware. It just sends a random UUID. It is just a personal disappointment for the fact that it is something so simple as a console player and yet connects somewhere. But that's just me. I grew up in other times.

                  Also I just compiled mp3blaster and I am listening to it again. So cool!

              • jjshoe 4 hours ago

                Like others the telemetry is hugely undesirable nor necessary. Likewise if they truly don't collect your IP as they claim it's just ripe for endless abuse.

                • stutstev 4 hours ago

                  As someone who is fond of Windows music players and futuristically designed DIN stereos of the early-to-mid 2000s, the variety of console visualizations is wicked cool and very much welcome! This is easily the best feature of cliamp. I'd love the collection of visualizations as a separate program, akin to cava[1], that listens and responds to your default audio sink. I already use a Raspberry Pi for music while driving, so I'm already thinking about displaying these visualizations on my car's infotainment screen somehow.

                  As a friendly request, I'd love to be able to use up and down keys to seek one minute forward or backward during playback, like with mpv. I play a lot of mixes that are an hour or longer in length, so this functionality would be a nice-to-have. I'll likely submit this idea to GitHub, anyhow.

                  To share some honest criticism, I was disappointed to discover built-in telemetry. Although it can be disabled with a flag, I dislike how it's enabled by default and unknown to the user unless one specifies the -h flag. I don't understand why user diagnostics data is needed from a console music player. Make this anti-feature opt-in and instead rely primarily on bug reports, or make the user aware of this telemetry upon initial invocation and provide instructions on how to disable it. Constructively, know your audience.

                  But overall, thank you to all the maintainers for this cool software!

                  [1]: https://github.com/karlstav/cava

                  • sn0n an hour ago

                    Imagine telling your AI to include unsecured telemetry… all im the namesake of mother Russia and father China. Wait no, that’s the wrong message.

                    • samschooler 6 hours ago

                      The project is cool, the demo song is iconically AI not great, sorry.

                      • daytonix 5 hours ago

                        Just installed this, loving it so far! Thank you!

                        • Vaslo 6 hours ago

                          I’ve been using this in Omarchy, it’s really great - easy to use and can do any songs or playlist on YouTube, so I’ll pipe through those programming concentration playlists without visiting YouTube.