Astiga's new owner
Hello everybody, I wanted to introduce myself; I'm Dan, and I'm the founder and CEO of the new owner of Astiga. I run elsten software whose existing principal product is bliss.
TL;DR: Nothing changes in the short term. I want to start learning from you all as to the best way to develop Astiga in the future and to evolve it to become part of our suite of music library management tools.
What this means for Astiga
As this post is on the community forums and directed at you, the user/customer of Astiga, I wanted to address this first.
In the short term, there will be little effect on Astiga, apart from Koen slowly stepping away from the product (he has agreed to help in these early days of transition).
In the medium to long term... I still don't see the core offering changing in terms of the basics of what Astiga does - being a music player for cloud-stored music. As I write below, the development of the service will be driven partly by customer feedback and partly by the requirements of building a sustainable business.
Why we wanted to buy Astiga.
I thought it might be instructive to give you my thoughts on this.
Our existing product, bliss, is software to organise music collections. It's very much aimed at locally stored (within your home network) music collections. It's also an organisation-only app - it doesn't actually allow playback of your music. It is only for tagging, file organisation etc.
For the past ten-fifteen years people have been saying to me "everyone is just going to use Spotify". Well, if there's one thing that running businesses has taught me: "everyone" does not mean "everyone". There are still people (such as myself!) who prefer storing music themselves and embracing an ownership rather than a rental-based model for music listening.
But that doesn't mean the Cloud should be ignored. I say: let all tools be at our disposal! There are plenty of reasons using the Cloud makes sense for certain use cases. Things like remote playback, synchronisation, backup and more.
Our mission at elsten software is to make music libraries manageable. Because bliss only works locally, there are whole classes of problems that can be solved with cloud storage which bliss could not solve.
Being more ambitious: Internet speeds will only get faster. Eventually, I can see a point where the Cloud becomes the most convenient place, for some people (not all), for your "gold" master music library. Combined with powerful management tools and synchronisation, we could build a powerful, convenient, secure and sustainable service for music libraries.
So overall I see Astiga as very complementary to bliss. And this means, going forward, they can work together to solve a lot of problems and make a lot of music libraries more manageable!
Background of me and the company
Feel free to skip! But again, I thought this might be of some use.
I'm a computer science graduate who ripped my very first CD while studying for my (British) A levels back in 1995. After university I went to work programming for IT consultancies and then venture-backed startups in the financial sector. I began getting ideas which would lead to the bliss project in the mid 2000s and finally cracked open the code editor in 2009. bliss sold well, and I went full time in 2010.
Since 2010 I've been running the bliss project, plus OneMusicAPI (a music information provider) full time. As above, my company's goal is to make music libraries manageable.
The general ethos of the company is:
- Build tools to manage music libraries
- Do it sustainably (read: organically and profitably)
- Charge directly for the service delivered; don't hide behind advertising, data resale, etc.
Initial plans
Initially I and my team will be learning a lot. We'll be examining the existing infrastructure and working out how and whether we can make managing it more efficient for a (slightly) larger team.
I'm planning on trying to talk to any of you about Astiga. I'm interested in how it fits into your life, what you find useful about it, what you couldn't live without, and what you'd like to see it become.
At the moment, it's a bit of a blank page. I am not a believer in five year plans. I am a believer in getting quality, honest feedback from those that receive value right now, and using that to drive feature development, balancing it with the needs of supporting a sustainable business.
And a word of thanks
I owe a big word of thanks to Koen, the founder and previous owner of Astiga, both for what he has built and the way he has handled the sales transition. He has been very professional and very patient as I asked inane question after question.
That's it for now.
As I said, I'd like to talk to any of you (that want to!) about Astiga. You can also consider this thread an "AMA" (Ask Me Anything) about our company and our plans. However, remember much of this is open to change once I learn more about the Astiga userbase!
Comments
It's refreshing to see the new owner has experience, has been around for some time, and shares some of Astiga's core values. It'll be rather interesting to see where you take the service next.
I suppose the most important thing to me is that any core features that are currently free (so, the library and syncing, as well as the ability to link as many storages as you need) remain free. I see on your post on bliss's site that you're a believer in charging for products, which is something that makes me a bit nervous in this regard, as Astiga going premium-only would mean I'd have to stop using it entirely, as would many others. I do have intent to purchase Astiga Premium when I can, though I am currently in a bit of a financial situation so I won't be able to for some time sadly.
I personally haven't been using Astiga as much lately because MEGA support was sunsetted, and MEGA was where much of my music was stored. It'd be nice to see it come back, but I'm not counting on it at all. I intend to buy a pCloud subscription when I'm financially able to though, which will enable me to use Astiga much more.
And I suppose one question I have for you is, did you use Astiga at all before you acquired it? Do you have experience as a user of the service rather than a developer of the service?
Hi @sks316
And I suppose one question I have for you is, did you use Astiga at all before you acquired it? Do you have experience as a user of the service rather than a developer of the service?
Not as a regular user, no. However, through 2020 (and a bit before that) I was growing increasingly interested in the use of the cloud for music library management. At the end of 2020 I kicked off a series of blog posts on self-stored cloud music, and then in February 2021 reviewed cloud music players. Astiga was, completely co-incidentally, part of this review, and so I got to try the service then.
At the time, I started following Astiga on Twitter. That's where I heard about the sale from. I was intrigued as to how I could make Astiga and my existing product fit together.
On charging: yes, I am a believer in charging for value directly - i.e. charging for the actual benefits a product or service delivers. I think this provides more aligned incentives between customer and supplier. It's the antithesis of "if you're not paying for the product you are the product". Yes, I know that's a bit of a meme now, but there's truth in it. Of course, it's also possible to pay and be the product, but that's where your own judgement comes in. Personally, it's product development I find most fun.
Business models can take many forms. I do provide free trials of my existing products and I expect that to continue with Astiga. In the B2C (Business to Consumer, sorry if that's obvious) space that tends to be required.
Note: I might appear a bit non-commital - for example saying things like "I expect XYZ" - that's because of what I wrote above about talking to the existing userbase. I don't really know where these conversations will go yet.
Hi,
I've been using Astiga for a little over one year now, as a fallback for the late Google Play Music. I even wrote a blog article on it at the time (in Dutch):
At the time, the only real alternative that I could find would have been iBroadcast, and after testing both, I chose for Astiga because you keep full control over your own 'master' repository in your own cloud service.
I agree that a good service deserves a financial return, so I subscribed to the yearly plan (which expires in five days, so I hope to hear from you ;). I use it regularly, several times a week, an I like the available features. The price for the yearly plan is very reasonable, but I must be honest about being cheap. Most fees for whatever tools you can subscribe to nowadays start at around 5 euro per month and at such rates I'm going for an alternative, because bills significantly add up that way.
Best regards to Koen and many thanks for devoting his time to this project, and good luck for you, for making this a future-proof product!
Best regards,
Vic
I understand, thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. I'm personally not a fan of a service offering core functionality for free in the beginning to rope users in, then later putting that core functionality behind a paywall therefore forcing the existing users to either cough up the cash or find an alternative service. It's always been seen as an incredibly-scummy and capitalistic move to me, even if a service was owned by someone else before it went premium-only, and it's one that I was quite worried about when I heard Astiga had been acquired. I do hope things don't go that way.
Here's another question: Let's say you started to charge for Astiga's core features sometime within the next year. It would directly impact me and everyone else who uses the service, and due to my financial situation I would sadly be forced to discontinue my use of it, potentially permanently. I'm sure many others who use this service would be put in the same predicament. What does or will Astiga offer that incentivizes me to pay for the core features of it instead of going to a competitor service like iBroadcast or YouTube Music, or even Media Leap, or to instead download my music and spin up a media server? I'm curious how you're going to incentivize the purchase of a media player when fully-featured, free alternatives exist.
@vicmortelmans Thanks for writing that blog post - all such 'publicity' helps spread the word!
I chose for Astiga because you keep full control over your own 'master' repository in your own cloud service.
Why is this important to you? If you didn't have control over where the data was actually stored, what wouldn't you be able to achieve?
Most fees for whatever tools you can subscribe to nowadays start at around 5 euro per month and at such rates I'm going for an alternative, because bills significantly add up that way.
Thanks for being honest, it adds 1 to N in my research, so to speak 😀
Best regards to Koen and many thanks for devoting his time to this project, and good luck for you, for making this a future-proof product!
Hear-hear!
@sks316
I understand, thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. I'm personally not a fan of a service offering core functionality for free in the beginning to rope users in, then later putting that core functionality behind a paywall therefore forcing the existing users to either cough up the cash or find an alternative service.
In the general case I agree. I think I prefer models where you get the core functionality but for less data - e.g. a cap on the amount of music you can add. I realise there might be edge cases this doesn't reveal.
Here's another question: Let's say you started to charge for Astiga's core features sometime within the next year. It would directly impact me and everyone else who uses the service, and due to my financial situation I would sadly be forced to discontinue my use of it, potentially permanently. I'm sure many others who use this service would be put in the same predicament. What does or will Astiga offer that incentivizes me to pay for the core features of it instead of going to a competitor service like iBroadcast or YouTube Music, or even Media Leap, or to instead download my music and spin up a media server? I'm curious how you're going to incentivize the purchase of a media player when fully-featured, free alternatives exist.
First of all, I don't think free services will remain free. If they do, you'll be paying somehow else.
But however true I think that is, it sounds like question-dodging, so I'll answer more directly (with the caveat that you have proposed a situation that may not actually happen).
The truth is, no product can get all-the-users. As an indie developer, we tend to need to approach things in a more niche way. We don't have the marketing budgets to compete with YTM. So we have to offer something of value to particular categories/markets of users.
I'll be absolutely honest and say: if I were to make the decision you propose, to force charging, that would be because I have made the judgement that the service simply cannot support users that do not derive the value I (would be) charging. In other words, those users outside the categories I mentioned above. That would mean we would have to part ways. That's perfectly healthy, in my view, and is the sign of a competitive market, which is good for supplier and customer/user. The onus is on Astiga to communicate and provide the value that might convince you to pay. That also may involve coming up with a more innovative pricing model (but still one that charges for use). But it may also mean, for those that cannot afford anything, self hosting or using a 'free' service.
I hope you understand my honesty - as I said above, it is very much a theoretical situation you outline.
|| I chose for Astiga because you keep full control over your own 'master' repository in your own cloud service.
| Why is this important to you? If you didn't have control over where the data was actually stored, what wouldn't you be able to achieve?
My music collection is, to put it mildly, disorganized. My files are stored on my PC and synced to the cloud repository. When I edit my files (e.g. filling in metadata like artist, title, genre, which is often only to be found in the filenames), I do it locally. Then they're automatically synced to the cloud and from there to Astiga, without extra manual steps needed.
Best regards,
Vic
When I edit my files (e.g. filling in metadata like artist, title, genre, which is often only to be found in the filenames), I do it locally. Then they're automatically synced to the cloud and from there to Astiga, without extra manual steps needed.
Gotcha! Thanks.
Espero que vuelva el soporte a MEGA 😭
También me gustaría si pueden agregar soporte a TERABOX https://www.terabox.com/
O también a TELEGRAM. Mucha gente usa el chat para guardar su música.
Disculpa por el idioma. Mi ingles es pésimo
Thanks for that @david56048 . MEGA support certainly seems popular, but we have had trouble maintaining it in the past. We'll see what we can do.
Could you add TeraBox support here: https://community.asti.ga/categories/feature-requests ? If you don't mind, I'll also add an English translation.
Welcome Dan and thanks Koen.
I welcome the clarity on the way forward and your interest in music too.
I used Astiga free for a day or two, then once working well I subscribed to the premium paid service gladly.
I use Astiga everyday integrated with Pcloud which is a wonderful capability.
I've developed and run other music services in the past online legally, so welcome providing input wherever helpful.
Best wishes for the future everyone
Mark
Thank you Koen - you've done a great job with this app, it has been a godsend after Google Play Music shut down!!
Thank you, Dan, for taking the time to reach out to the community!
A history of how/why I use Astiga:
Features I love:
A couple of things that I would like to see would be in playlists:
I am already a premium subscription subscriber, so I believe it's $20/year. What kind of changes might existing premium subscribers see? Will there be multiple tiers - or possibly a change in the subscription cost (From what you can tell us)?
I hope this info is helpful; Thanks!
Thanks for that.
I am already a premium subscription subscriber, so I believe it's $20/year. What kind of changes might existing premium subscribers see? Will there be multiple tiers - or possibly a change in the subscription cost (From what you can tell us)?
I simply don't know yet - this is something I'm going to have a think about once I have had some more in-depth chats about the service. Expect me to get in touch privately 😀
I think I will echo many of the comments already made but my two cents.
I was originally a GPM user when it launched in 2011 so I could stream my collection while in work (and used an iPod on the go), I knew about Spotify but ignored it until I played around with a friend's account and saw that their selection had greatly improved and moved over to that in 2016.
By the time COVID hit I had gotten disillusioned by the service (I genuinely believe it is helping kill independent music/artists) and it actually had some gaps in its back catalogue I couldn't ignore so in March 2020 (as I had some free time) I cleaned up my collection, went on a spending spree and moved back to GPM. Then Google announced they were killing that.
While a Spotify user I had ditched my iPod and gotten used to listening to music on my phone as well as the desktop via the same service and GPM continued that so I wanted that experience again.
As I was using Google drive I was able to test many of the other cloud players but the lack of desktop support (and their apps kind of sucked too) meant I plumped for Astiga.
After a lot of searching Astiga ticked all my boxes:
I initially messed around to see how it worked with a few folders then I uploaded all my music (bought extra google storage) and signed up for a one month premium account to give the "full-fat" service a month.
I was happy quite quickly so I bought an annual subscription and then set up my wife's music collection on Google drive and in Astiga and bought her an annual membership.
Our setup is:
I have not used the mobile app excessively (have not done much travelling) but what I have seen I am happy with.
I do half plan on my next phone having enough storage (or SD card support) so my collection can be stored locally there and synced via Google drive
Thanks to Koen for building an excellent service.
Thanks @neasan !
Congrats on the purchase, in Astiga you have an offering that is unique in the market. For whatever it's worth I'd very like to offer any assistance I can in understanding the product, and its place in the market. As a result of my needs for a music software, I have tested 90% + of the offerings claiming to allow for personal collections to be streamed from personal clouds.
My requirements are a bit extreme but here we go:
I have been collecting vinyl and cds for 30+ years and runs in the range of around 35K recordings. Over the last many years I have been digitizing my collection along with adding to it. Currently my collection runs 200TB expanding at a rate of approx 1TB per month. A basic requirement for me is the ability to access anything in my collection at any time. With the exception of FlacBox is the IOS world there is no other product that can meet the need.
I am a travelling lecturer and consultant. My job pre-COVID keeps me on the road a minimum of 300 dates per date, and usually it is alot closer to 300 days. I am often in countries where the internet has issues or one of more of the cloud services is not available typically due to embargo. Astiga works EVERYWHERE, and properly set up runs with little or no disruption on some truly horrific internet connections. FlacBox mentioned above fails this test because it downloads to play. No other application is agnostic enough with regards to the cloud service used to meet this requirement.
24 bit music is becoming more and more important. Astiga claims to be 24bit compatible, this claim i find a bit sketchy. It does something like 24bit, and there are solid work arounds when 24bit equipment is available. Suggest this may be something properly placed on a product roadmap.
Secondly, you had mention in the email that I do have several accounts. I do because updating drive names in a large list of clouds (mine is 22 cloud drives) tends to be a bit glitchy and patience is not my best quality.
How does Astiga fit into my day: I do an insane amount of writing for work, Astiga since I found it has been the only app I use. I'm guessing in use 6-8 hours per day 5 days per week. I'm told by my assistants I always have music on when working.
Thanks to Koen for developing this amazing service. Far and away best in class.
I am one of the migrants from Google Play Music. My library mainly consists of Japanese indie (doujin) music that streaming services like Spotify usually do not have, which is why Astiga fits my needs.
As a Linux user, what I like the most about Astiga is that it does one thing and does it well: playing music from cloud storages. I have the freedom to choose whatever cloud service I want and organize my library however I want locally. Astiga does not try to be 'smart' and suggest/advertise new music to me.
As such, I would like Astiga to just focus on being a good music player. It's already great, but there are a few features missing like ReplayGain. Better support for creating/editing playlists on the fly would also be nice.
I am currently a casual free user because I do not need any of the premium features, but I am willing to pay for premium if you will actively maintain and develop Astiga.
@00colin00 Thanks for that - really interesting to read how products fit into different peoples' very different lives. I can't imagine travelling that much and I can see how Astiga's a good fit.
Audiophilia is an interesting one. My previous product had a lot of usage by audiophiles and I'm fairly familiar with this area. That product was also embedded in some audiophile music servers. Audiophiles were partly drawn because of the large file sizes mandate local collections and the lack of streaming services offering hi-fi, but that is changing and as internet speeds increase this is less of an issue. So I think hi-fi may well be an interesting avenue.
Thanks again, I'll be in touch.
There're still a lot of things to be done in the transition so some of my fact-finding might have to wait a week or two!
@AKSoo Thanks.
I'm interested in what you say about library organisation:
organize my library however I want locally
Can you give some examples of this? Why is this important? Is there a way that Japanese music is organised that is different to Western contemporary music (artists - album - tracks - genres etc)?
Can you give some examples of this? Why is this important? Is there a way that Japanese music is organised that is different to Western contemporary music (artists - album - tracks - genres etc)?
There isn't much particular about Japanese doujin music other than groups (album artists) self-publishing and artists often belonging to multiple groups. I am sure the same is true for Western indie scene.
I just like using folders to group things for my own needs.
@AKSoo Thanks - do you mean folders in your storage? If so, do you not use the Library browsing?
Yes, local folders synced to cloud storage.
I rarely use Library to browse. A folder organization view of the library would be nice. (edit: and that exists under Storage!)
Thanks!
Hey Dan, thank you for introducing yourself. Gives me a good feeling to see someone so passionate about music taking over Astiga.
I use Astiga mainly because I want to have full control over my music collection. I could use spotify but to be honest at least 30% of my music collection is not available on spotify. Those mainly consists of vinyl rips, older music or bandcamp releases.
😊
@cch Thanks for responding - sounds like gaps in streaming services are a common issue.
I really like Astiga for a number of reasons:
1. I ripped my CDs to mp3 and use media monkey to curate and play at home. Therefore the files contain the information I want and not what iTunes or Spotify want.
2. There are always tracks and albums missing from streaming services (eg early De La Soul). I have these files
3. I keep my files on an external HDD and back up to Dropbox. I love that Astiga connects to Dropbox in the way it does
4. I love the sync between the desktop and phone app too.
Having just had a short conversation with Dan I'm quite confident the team mean to keep working and improving the app.
PS I pay monthly, so please ensure I can keep accessing my 110000+ files! 😀
Cheers.
K
I think given the flexibility of Astiga everyone will have their own unique use-cases, but figured I'd post my 2 cents!
I'm a new user (signed up for a one-off month just to try it out). My priorities are:
I'm yet another Google Play Music orphan. It fit the bill perfectly because I could add music on my computer or my phone, or change meta data and it would apply everywhere.
Additionally I could select to download albums and playlists on my phone for offline listening. Critically (for me) this also applied to the "Liked" auto-playlist, so if I liked a track on my PC, it would automatically be downloaded on my phone in the background, so my phone would always contain an offline selection of favourite tracks. Awesome!
Astiga is frustrating because it seems so close to what I want, but feels like it falls down at the final hurdles:
I know I could probably work around the meta-data editing issue (for example) by setting up some sort of google drive local sync on my PC and editing it locally, then manually force refresh the Astiga library, but this is slow, painful and I have 3 PCs that I use regularly that would need setting up. Time is important, and I'd be happy to pay for a service that solves these problems!
Take my money somebody please!
I'm not a avid community user, so was very surprised to have read the mail on this acquisition just now.
But first of all, I have to say, I really appreciate the transparency in how this is being communicated. I understand Koen's point of view (having read it) and I understand where you are coming from Dan.
I know of Bliss too, but never tried it out. I'd be happy if Bliss would become an integrated part of Astiga player (I'd even happily pay for it, already being a premium Astiga member today).
Having tried a lot of services before, like GPM and Spotify, Astiga best fits my needs. I want to keep control over the music I can listen to (not being dependend to something like Spotify who decides when to add (or remove) media) and how this music is presented to me (by managing the tagging of files myself (although some AI/automation on this part could be helpful)). I used to listen locally, but being able to sync my music on all my devices (phone, pc, laptop) without the hassle of keeping this all synced myself is such a big asset. I do this through pCloud, of which I'm very happy with as well.
Here's to hoping for a great future.
@MikeRippon Thanks for that. Wow, it sounds almost like you are describing the use case I have tentatively suggested - "gold" online music libraries, with organisational and sync capabilities. Just a matter of writing it now :-D
It's interesting how, in a way, your use case seems similar to @00colin00 's - on the road usage.
But overall, it sounds like the underlying requirements you have are to be able to organise/manage your collection online and have it sync between your devices for offline. What apps are used for this might be up for discussion...
@nononolimits Thanks for your comment.
Regarding control, I see a lot of discussion about withdrawn tracks on YTM and other services, often for licensing reasons. I wonder if this will continue, or if the growing power of such platforms will allow them to strong-arm publishers...