Reddit
//reddit.com/r/Music
Reddit harbours a growing list of music-related communities. User-contributed audio files or audio/video links can be found across almost two hundred subreddit boards. There's always a mix of new bands or fresh releases to be found, along with links to all-time favourites etc.
Around 620 subreddits are queried. That's just a selected part though. Most others do not see as many audio posts / or are just for discussion and news.
Besides youtube/mp3 files, this channel may also list Soundcloud/Mixcloud/Bandcamp links.
Radioreddit.com even provides streaming servers. Its categories are: main, random, rock, metal, indie, electronic, hiphop, talk, festival.
Thumbnails are slightly larger (32x26) than regular favicons.
All entries also show poster name and user votes.
See the config options if you want to keep regular webpage posts - instead of just showing playable content.
Status icons
Station entries may contain a status icon (leftmost; where usually the bookmarks ✩ star goes). It's a quick indicator of what type of content is linked:
- ▶
Directly playable entry (MP3, MP4, Youtube, MIDI)
- ▶▶
Walled garden (Soundcloud, Spotify, Bandcamp, Mixcloud) → playable
- ▮▮
Walled gardens without playback handler.
- 📄
Just a web-link. Those are kept with the ☒ keep all option.
Please note that Channel ▸ Reload category tree will retrieve a differently structured list of subreddits from the /r/music wiki.
Configuration
There's a few options for the reddit plugin:
- 🔟 Number of pages to fetch
Influences how many JSON requests are made to assemble a list of subreddit posts with playable content. (For this plugin that's configurable, because counting streams wouldn't work as reddit result lists vary wildly in their usable links.)
- 🔰 Filter walled gardens
-
Many music posts on reddit meanwhile point to one of Soundcloud, Spotify, Bandcamp, Mixcloud. Those are basically just links you had open in your browser. -- Now those are labeled "walled gardens" here, because they're hording user content behind a paywall/registration-wall, fiddly NIH APIs, non-standard audio formats, web-only players and sessioning.
There's a few players or tools for those better-known hosters. But smaller services fall under the radar. Which is why I think it's unfair to provide out-of-the-box support for just those four services. -- But anyway, you can disable filtering them, if you like. And then configure a custom player:
audio/soundcloud
audio/spotify
audio/bandcamp
audio/mixcloud
Obviously you want to pipe youtube-dl to an actual audio player again. VLC also supports a few services directly or via plugins.
- 💫 Keep all web links
Besides audio/video links, some subreddits link to album art or are just news feeds. Enable the "keep all" option to retain them. Such entries will open in your web browser instead of an audio player, of course.
To utilize Soundcloud links, there's an extra url_soundcloud plugin. It overrides the audio/soundcloud player config, and resolves such streams to MP3 urls (session typically times out quickly, so no bookmarking/export possible etc).