Musicbrainz is fine; it’s just Lidarr’s usage of it that’s a problem. Lidarr uses its own mirror of Musicbrainz, plus its own custom search code, and it’s not as reliable.

Other apps that use Musicbrainz data, like Beets and Picard, don’t have the same issues that Lidarr has.

Yes, unstructured. Every script is its own special snowflake that does things a bit differently.

There’s no guarantee of the verbs that the script implements. start, stop and restart are common, but the implementation is up to each individual script. I’m most familiar with Debian where some service (but not all) implemented it with start-stop-daemon, but other distros and OSes handled it differently.

Basic, commonly needed functionality, like restarting a crashed service after waiting for some delay, need to be implemented per app.

When sysvinit was widespread, there was a reason a lot of people used systems line supervisord to deploy services, rather than dealing with sysvinit scripts. It was a pain.

Systemd units were a logical progression from supervisord services.

Thanks for the info. It looks like there’s no way to migrate from Conduit. If I reinstall from scratch using the same domain, and create an account again, will everything still work properly including federation with other servers?

My server is just for myself.

What did you end up doing? I’m still running Conduit at the moment.

Do you have any actual problems with systemd, or do you just want SysV init scripts to stick around forever?

Maybe systemd isn’t the best, but it’s way better than a bunch of mostly unstructured shell scripts, and more secure (it’s pretty easy to reduce privileges, sandbox the filesystem, restrict syscalls, etc per service just by editing the unit file)

I use chezmoi and chezmoi_modify_manager to keep my dotfiles (including some KDE configs) in a Git repo, and it works well enough.

I like Pushover too. I’ve been using it for over 10 years now.

Maybe they’ve cast Jack Black as Ganondorf lol

Chrome’s had it for five years, and I don’t recall any Webserial-specific vulnerabilities in it (but I could be wrong!)

not dependent on the server

It doesn’t have to be - a developer could also provide a HTML file that the user can download and open locally.

And to be honest, if someone had to build a user-friendly cross-platform GUI app for connecting to some sort of serial device, they’d probably just end up using web technologies (Electron or Tauri) anyways. May as well avoid the extra overhead of Electron.

You can completely disable the API in Chrome… I assume Firefox will allow this too.

IMO it’s fine since you need to explicitly grant permission for the site to use it, and also explicitly choose a device to allow it to communicate with. You can also configure your browser to always reject requests to use the API, if you never want to use it.

WebSerial is useful for the developer as they can build their webapp once and it’ll work consistently across platforms, and it’s useful for the user since the same interface will work across all OSes.

I prefer it over the other common approach for communicating with serial devices, which is often to only make a Windows app and to have some convoluted setup process involving sketchy-looking drivers, which then breaks when you have different devices that require different versions of the flashing software or drivers.

Why install a native app when a website can do it?

My guess is that they’d have a pool of accounts, and cache the most popular songs rather than streaming them from Tidal every time.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to say they’re the same. I meant to say that if all songs on an album are by one artist, the Artist and Album Artist will be identical. This is the case the majority of the time.

The major exceptions are collaborations (like you said), and compilations (which have “Various Artists” as the Album Artist)

Tidal would be seeing their site URL in the referer for the network requests.

Using it through Lidarr just uses the search feature in slskd, so it might not make it much better.

It’s even open-source! Nice site.

it had the ARTIST tag copied to the ALBUMARTIST tag

This isn’t wrong though - it’s a proper use of both tags. I think most of my music has both tags populated.

That site is pulling from Tidal, which is why the tags are good. All the legit streaming sites have well-tagged files.

Yes. The search results and music files are coming directly from Tidal, using someone else’s account. If you look in the network tab in the browser’s dev tools, you’ll see requests to Tidal.

Interesting design, since it’s trivial for Tidal to block something like this - they can see that the requests are coming from that site. I’m surprised they haven’t blocked it.

yt-dlp has a strict policy against cracking DRM

This is how it stays legal in the USA. Bypassing DRM is a DMCA violation (section 1201), but just downloading freely-available content is totally legal.

Its predecessor, youtube-dl, was subject to DMCA takedowns from the RIAA, and they had to get the EFF to help. yt-dlp doesn’t want to experience the same issues.