I buy CDs occasionally and rip them, but it's 2019, there's no real need to amass a CD collection (unless you want to).
For most of my needs, spotify works out. I don't mind paying $10/mo since I use the offline listening so much. I only buy and rip CDs for my own collection if I -really- like that album or a song on it, and a web download isn't available. Occasionally spotify doesn't have a very specific version of a song–Legend of a Mind by the Moody Blues from the 1967? BBC recording sessions comes to mind. Or artists like King Crimson.
I don't buy through itunes because of drm and the lack flac/alac options–why would I buy an mp3/m4a/aac file that I'm stuck with and can't transcode if needed? Bandcamp is a great alternative if the band you want happens to be on there. The app isn't too bad either if you forgot to download and sync an album.
Other benefits of ripping a CD or downloading a flac/alac file include having a perfect lossless copy. I can then transcode to any format that I want, whenever I want, however I want, from now until forever (or at least until the storage goes bad/breaks), without losing any quality.
With spotify pro + ublock origin, I never see ads on spotify or youtube anyway.
I think CDs are still a very good option when you think about how you intend to maintain your digital collection in the next 30 years.
CDs I bought in the early 90s are there, in a box. I'd like to see people's iTunes collections in 30 years...
Yes, I know that CDs have a shelf-life and that real long term storage would involve backing them up. But CDs still seem a better option than the current alternatives.
Edit:
The issue even with a DRM-free local iTunes library is: how are people going to keep that over 30 years?
If you have a CD you only need to have a CD/DVD/Bluray player, which are still ubiquitous, and to push a button.
But for a local iTunes library you need IT admin skills to manage it, to back it up, to transfer it from one machine to the next, perhaps to understand that you can access the music without iTunes, etc. The vast majority of the public don't know how to do that.
People will subscribe to another service. But you mean the local iTunes library? Isn't that DRM free? I mean having DRM on it still makes it their music that you "rent", so basically a subscription service.
My father was so ethical and bought a lot of music from some service of his ISP (Planet music or something), it is all lost. I'd never pay for DRMed music. At least with Spotify you know you don't own anything and just pay for access to a lot of stuff as long as you pay.
> I'd like to see people's iTunes collections in 30 years...
I bought my first album from iTunes 10 years ago and it is right there in my external HDD since iTunes does not have any sort of DRM anymore (it was removed years ago). Unless computers in 20 years do not allow people to have local data and force them to use The Cloud (at which point i'd probably stop using computers altogether outside of necessity), i do not see them disappear.
If fact i rebought several albums i had in CD format because i lost some of the CDs after moving and a bunch of M4A files in a folder are more convenient than a bunch of CDs in a box (although TBH i do get the nice feeling of having something to look at that is physical... but only for things i really like and for me that is usually games not music).
Ways to enjoy music: stream it on Spotify or insert a CD. Pick one.
?????
I mean, DRMless, local media doesn't obviate streaming which has its own valuable niche, from discovery to the fact that my 200 GB music library cannot fit on my phone, but that library is on Dropbox.
In 30 years, the format might be unrecognizable, but... I don't get the problem either.
>But for a local iTunes library you need IT admin skills to manage it, to back it up, to transfer it from one machine to the next, perhaps to understand that you can access the music without iTunes, etc. The vast majority of the public don't know how to do that.
Oh, we're operating from an assumption of pre-Internet tech literacy. Then, yeah, I don't know. The computer-as-radio/physical-media dichotomy might be the way to go. Enjoy those CDs. uwu Put thing in thing and hear sound. Zug zug
Backing them up on MDISC DVDs or Blu-Rays is doable.
6 CDs per DVD if you want to store them bit-by-bit.
12 CDs if you go for losless compression.
Around 35 CDs per DVD if you do 256kbit/s MP3 or something like that.
I'd rather maintain a file system of FLAC files, and skip anything like iTunes that can potentially mess with the library. Then it's just data that gets backed up with anything else worth keeping. Add an extra 1MB of space for the FLAC source code if you're really paranoid.
Pressed CDs do quite well over time if you keep them in a dry and cool place. I do think finding optical drives will be the rub, they are already becoming niche products. With SSD prices as they are, it’s not hard to imagine a world without SATA connectors before too long. It’s really hard to imagine that there won’t be some Asian company selling optical drives with usb-x connectors or something but I expect people thought that about various floppy disks over the years too. And then there is the software to read and rip it, probably not super difficult but you never know.
There is an awful lot of music simply not streamed, if you live near a college town or in any city of say 80,000 people then there probably some local bands, chances are good they’ve recorded some stuff and outside of that run of CDs, the music is nowhere else. It’s not like we’re losing part of the Beatles catalog exactly but if you’ve bonded and heard that band a few times it might be meaningful.
I just pulled mine out of the attic after they had been sitting there for more than a decade. It's dry up there, but not cool at all. I'm in central Texas and in the summer you can only be up there for a few minutes at a time because it's so hot.
I bought dbPowerAmp and ripped them all to ALAC. Only a couple of them couldn't be accurately ripped and that's because of scratches on them (some of them are from the mid-80's and have had rough lives).
I guess what I'm trying to say is that they are remarkably durable.
Worth noting (not for you, just in general)--pressed CDs are very durable but CD-Rs, due to their organic ink, generally aren't. Don't rely on them for archiving.
> It’s really hard to imagine that there won’t be some Asian company selling optical drives with usb-x connectors or something but I expect people thought that about various floppy disks over the years too.
Well, you can buy a new 3.5" floppy disk drive for $15 right now. The problem are proprietary formats, like Zip disks - just avoid those.
>But for a local iTunes library you need IT admin skills to manage it...
If we're talking actual files, it's just basic file management skills, and maybe some simple knowledge of ripping (assuming we're not taking the EAC lossless route). Almost everyone in my office (which are mainly non-tech people) have the former.
>...how are people going to keep that over 30 years?
It's way more likely someone's going to burgle my remaining CDs than they are to destroy every instance of my virtual collection.
>The issue even with a DRM-free local iTunes library is: how are people going to keep that over 30 years?
Parts of my MP3 library are 20 years old. Why do you think keeping them spinning a few more decades will be any harder?
>But for a local iTunes library you need IT admin skills to manage it, to back it up, to transfer it from one machine to the next, perhaps to understand that you can access the music without iTunes, etc. The vast majority of the public don't know how to do that.
Honestly, I think that's why streaming is taking over. Apple's approach to solving the sync problem was to rethink the whole paradigm, and so we got Apple Music instead of smarter iPhone/iPod sync. Sure, they get service revenue in the bargain, but to me it seems like an easy play.
I ripped my CDs 20 years ago and kept that library, moving it between machines and backing up to the cloud. I don't see why I can't keep it alive for another 20 or 30 years. Over time this has become much easier as storage has become smaller and cheaper. I now have my entire music collection on a microSD card on my phone which as well as being handy is also another backup.
Only real problem is that I ripped them at 128Kbps. For some tracks I've gone back and re-done them at a higher bitrate.
iTunes does not have DRM and is the only reason i buy albums through them: after i download the album, i have a bunch of m4a files i can play with any player i want, in any device i want and store on my own external drive.
I have purchased some albums in the past on itunes and discovered with disgust that they had DRM. They were only playable on itunes. I returned them (a not very user-friendly process).
I have googled it a bit and it seems that DRM is not used any more on iTunes:
Nobody "considered" them, it was what the music industry demanded at the time.
In fact, as far as major services (e.g. major distributor and not some niche music market with "indie" artists only) iTunes was the one that spearheaded the un-DRM of music (with Steve Jobs' call to end music DRM: https://betanews.com/2007/02/06/apple-s-steve-jobs-calls-for... ).
Let's throw away marketing/PR part from what labels try to act and we'll see a simple fact:
these parasites should be dead like 10 years ago. Almost all of the profits for musicians in digital era are made by concerts and merchandise, individuals could make some through direct sells and Patreon. Major labels charge 70-90% of the income and exclusive copyright for masters, which is a bit overpriced service.
Countries in the EU were demanding that he do so if he wanted to sell product there. Jobs was not interested in dropping DRM until the countries started bitching. Norway banned the iPod due to the iTunes walled garden creating captive audiences without opportunity for choice in media vendor (due to incompatibilities with competition services) and France started slinging similar threats.
It all seems so altruistic in hind-sight, but really he (Jobs) was being pressured by the nation-states, and he had the opportunity to look like a pioneer by dropping DRM (an endeavor that Apple felt pretty keen about with FairPlay) -- making the competition look petty and selfish for having DRM, while simultaneously satisfying the desires of the nations with markets that he wanted to compete within.
The whole story is in that link you included. I got a different vibe from the article than you did, I think.
It makes sense to me. I evaluated it years ago (when it did have DRM), and simply moved onto different solutions. I never had a need to re-evaluate itunes because I haven't had any issue with the alternatives.
It looks like itunes has changed its ways in that regard.
However m4a files are lossy and thus not desirable for me. If I purchase music I want it in flac/alac format because I can transcode it to say, m4a if I need to in the future, or any other format. You can't do that with m4a without a degradation in quality.
Just wondering how you manage Spotify + your own music collection. Is there an app that can play both Spotify and imported files and present them in a single UI?
At the moment I can’t enjoy anything that’s not on Spotify simply because I wouldn’t be able to listen to them really. I have hours of music on Spotify playlists and I would only need maybe a dozen of songs that aren’t on there, so manually switching apps for those few times would be annoying.
Spotify allows you to import tracks from your computer and add them to playlists as if it was on Spotify. Obviously you can only access them on the computer you added them from though.
Not sure about the mobile app, I assume it will skip the missing tracks in a playlist as normal but it might be possible that it picks them up if they're present on the device somewhere.
You can share them to an Android or iOS device [1], but it's a little fiddly. I'd love for them to offer a cloud music system like Apple Music or Google Play does, as Spotify checks all the other boxes that those services don't.
Do you have an issue with playing local files in Spotify itself? I do this for the ~30 or so songs I have on my computer (in Dropbox, actually) and it works just fine.
The Sonos app does that for you. Likely their implementation of Spotify is not as slick as the native Spotify app, but you can for instance search for songs and see results from Spotify mixed with results from your local collection.
I think clementine (based on/inspired by Amarok 1.4) supports spotify - at least they say so on their website. However, I (used to) use it only for my local music and switching to spotify for, well, spotify.
For most casual music listening I use Spotify; one thing that annoys me there though is that there are some songs which have clear compression issues, the kinda wavy, watery sound from early low bitrate MP3s. I can only notice it in one or two songs with a lot of guitar distortion / wall of sound though.
Its recommendations, daily mix and automatic playlist generated after listening to a full album are getting VERY predictable though. That is, same bands and often the same song. I'm not saying Spotify needs to improve their algorithm per se, it just needs to add a bit more variety - switch up algorithms from time to time, shuffle, start way down on the list of matched songs, something like that. It's getting annoying to the point where I'm considering switching to Apple Music for a while.
Anyway, for physical music I buy vinyl nowadays. I don't even have a vinyl player (yet), just a box of collectables / memorable albums. I don't like CDs, the boxes feel far too flimsy; I've never owned any.
It’s not really Spotify’s fault. They are at the mercy of the master provided to them. For the most part Spotify sound quality is very good. Tidal has issues with poor masters as well - some songs sound worse on Tidal than Spotify, and vice versa.
While we're on the topic of prog, Spotify also has nothing by Henry Cow or Fred Frith in general, which combined with the lack of King Crimson is a dealbreaker for me.
Totally understand your pain :| They've recently added some very hard to find prog albums there, like Planet X, Andy West, Liquid Tension Experiment, Mahavishnu Orchestra, etc, but that obviously depends on what you like.
I dislike renting in general, especially something so important like access to music, but the only reason I do it in this case is indeed the availability of some hard to find rarities.
Successful ABX test only proves that no differences can be heard for some particular pieces of music, but not for all possible music material. There are edge cases (especially where noise is involved) that can never compress perfectly without overfitting the compression algorithm.
As I noted, my reason for flac/alac is for transcoding purposes. I mainly just transcode them to mp3 currently and play them in itunes anyways, but I have the freedom to transcode to any format in the future without a degradation in quality. You can't do that with lossy formats like mp3.
Double blind tests show that 320kbp/s mp3s are indistinguishable from flacs, barring very poor masters or some extreme edge cases. For a lot of music you could get away with 256kbp/s probably, but it doesn't cost you anything to just go with 320kbp/s.
> It then released, for one of the programs, an "uninstaller" that only un-hid the program, installed additional software which could not be easily removed, collected an email address from the user, and introduced further security vulnerabilities.
By default, Win96 would run that CD. You didn't tell it to. You had to go change the setting from the default. You had to tell Win95 to not autorun a CD.
It was also incredibly convenient - put game CD in drive, game launcher appears with INSTALL / PLAY (depending on the status). Also it was neat to give a DVD with some sliceshow/photos/videos/etc to your grandparents/aunt/uncle/etc who didn't knew much about computers and tell them "just put the disk in the drive and it'll do the rest".
But as usual, one rotten apple spoils the entire barrel.
The UX is certainly worse, especially on Win10 where it displays a tiny popup at the bottom right side (at least in Vista and 7 it had a popup at the center and IIRC the popup even had an icon of the game/program if autorun specified one). For most users it isn't a practical issue though, just a lesser experience. If you are comfortable with computers after a while you ghost through such popups :-P.
Having said that i did have my aunt (who is generally afraid that if she does something wrong the computer will break forever) spell me out the options in a popup (for a photo dvd she got from a photographer for a relative's graduation) over the phone once though, so i'm sure that, if nothing else, it can be a bit unexpected for less knowledgeable users.
IIRC there was some consumer association action in France back in the day against such hackish DRM practices mandating the labelling of such CDs with a notice that the thing you were just about to buy may not play at all as well as requiring them to drop the CDDA Phillips iconography, all because someone bought a CD and couldn’t play it in his car or whatever. After that one it seems like the DRM scheme was basically dropped around here.
My personal experience with this was with some import CDs (from Japan) that, from what I recall, messed with the error correction part of the data so that it skipped horrendously in my PC (so it was impossible to rip in cdex) but played fine in (most) standalone audio players.
"As the Copy Control discs do not conform to the requirements of the CD standard, they are not labeled with the CDDA logo, which is trademarked by Philips."
I came here to mention exactly this and am glad to see it at the top.
I, as a teenager bought a Sony BMG album with this rootkit.
At the time I didn't own a standalone music player, just my PC. I had a nice Creative sound card and some decent speakers, and an appreciation for audio quality.
To my surprise I found that the Sony album prevented you from playing back anything but some low-quality 128Kb MP3s stored in that data portion of the Disc if using a PC and there was zero chance I was allowing their crapware onto my machine.
I contacted them and they sent me out a replacement disc without the root-kit data rubbish but only upon me first posting back my own disc, without its case no less.
I know this statement of yours is somewhat of a meme, and you may even be saying it tongue-in-cheek, but, this is one of many tiny cuts over the years that caused me to switch entirely to Linux. I don't run Windows at home or at work for the best part of a decade now. I run bleeding edge hardware, I have a high-end gaming PC, my laptop is a 2019 model that only works if I use Linux 5.0 and my wife complains that Open/Libre Office sucks on her laptop.
Don't get me wrong, I have my issues, sometimes I have to fix things, but I would rather this any day than having to go back to using Windows.
Agreed. The only major problems right now are alternative clients and anti-cheat engines (many of which inject themselves into the Windows Kernel, yeah...) not working. Seems Valve may be leaning on publishers to fix that though.[0]
Not condoning piracy, but it is a great equaliser. Hackers and modders will find their way around anti cheats anyway, I believe there's nothing unethical about exploiting that to play through Linux.
But yeah Epic Games is terrible.
GOG/Humble have done wonders for Linux as alternative stores.
Hopefully, for people like myself, who really aren't into multiplayer, that'll be less of an issue. I'm not sure which games do and don't contain EAC but I've generally had good results with my catalogue on Stream Play the biggest limitation being those which use Windows-specific codecs for their cut scenes or sounds.
It obviously depends on what you're playing exactly, but many titles (from indie to AAA) run great on Linux, either natively or through Proton (Steam's integrated Wine distribution with DX11/12 support).
Never used the Epic Store or Origin though, so cannot speak to that.
Origin, Uplay and Battle.net are working fine. I play Battlefield 1 and Overwatch with friends on Linux. EGL works too, but I know nobody who is using it (except for the free giveaways and the engine).
It's not perfect, but thanks to Steam Play/Proton it's becoming viable, I've played several high end "Windows" titles on Linux through Proton (modified Wine), and then others like Tomb Raider have native ports. DOOM 2016 runs better on my Linux box with Vulkan than it does on Windows, where it averages 100FPS/4K/Ultra vs ~60FPS in Windows. I'll be honest, _what_ I play is more driven by what's available now than it used to be, but I'm not much of an online/multiplayer, I prefer single-player so there's no huge rush and I have a back-catalogue that'll keep me busy for years to come, with more being added faster than I can play them.
That didn't work for getting you access to the better quality audio. The PC's drive would just skip the audio section, even if you prevented it from installing the malware/rootkit.
A standard Red Book audio CD cannot install malware to your system. It was the data CD with music that Sony shipped made it possible.
This is why, I, sometimes a CD buyer, believe all listeners of Audio CD should try maintaining the status quo of CD, as defined by the Red Book, and resist/boycott any attempt by the industry to "make a better CD" (e.g. SACD, Audio DVD, Audio Bluray), or "add more functionalities" to the existing CD standards.
Technologically, I would be happy to see a Doubly 5.1 Bluray Audio CD playing at living room from my surrounding speakers (better channel separation allows improvements of sound reproduction even on speakers of moderate quality), or CDs with real filesystem and error correction (an Audio CD by its original design, only streams music in real time, as if it's a digital LP track. There is no way to even know if the data you've just read from the disc is correct or not [0]), or a FLAC-encoded stereo CD (it would allow 30% more songs to be recorded on a single CD).
However, I'd better to live without them, as history has shown: all the newer standards would definitely be more "consumer-unfriendly" at best (go to any AV forum, and see the compatibility issues caused by HDCP [1] for example...), and malware at worst. The Audio CD, even with its historical limitations, is good enough, it plays lossless music with 44100 kHz sampling rate, and it did/does this job well.
Also, you may have noticed the recent renaissance of LP discs, and some LP lovers' arguments of how analog has better sound quality. While I don't believe those arguments are persuasive, I'm highly supportive of the LP industry for the same reason - you cannot install malware on a LP disc.
Well, theoretically, "an Audio CD that exploits a buffer overflow of your music player on your computer and installs malware" is always a possibility, and a good intellectual challenge.
But doing it at an industrial scale and including an 0day exploit in all albums is a separate thing, I don't believe it would ever happen. On the other hand, creating an extension of the standard to "make a better CD" is a real threat, for example, a plausible example would be:
"a CD-based service that connects to a server to obtain metadata and lyrics of your music, like a proprietary version of MusicBrainz, but with ads and tracking added."
Everyone should have a reasonable expectation of privacy. That certain groups more frequently find this expectation violated does not mean that it is not a reasonable expectation.
Any recommendations for music stores which sell mp3's? I ordered Nokia 8110 4G and ditch my smartphone once it arrives. I think it only supports mp3's so I need to start buying albums and not rely on Spotify.
Good question. When I recently wanted to buy an album as plain MP3 download, I was surprised there was only Google Music and Amazon (and iTunes, though it's a hassle with the terrible iTunes app) left.
Bandcamp is truely the best music platform and one of the best websites there is today. It's fair to artists and its UX is in the rarest of states: done. I hope to god they never change a thing.
I think that's where CDs come in: for a lot of artists this is the only way to buy an album and end up with non-DRMed, not watermarked plain MP3 you can listen to on whatever you want. You end up with unnecessary plastic waste on your shelf, sure, but at least you have you own, independent music files – and at least you got more value than someone who straight up pirated it.
- CDBaby (https://store.cdbaby.com) has lots of stuff (they stopped offering flac downloads but if all you're after are high quality mp3 files that's not an issue).
- Magnatune (http://magnatune.com) has interesting stuff too (they changed their pricing since my last visit a while ago, now you pay once for the whole library it seems).
- Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (https://folkways.si.edu/shop) is an absolutely fantastic resource in my opinion.
I mostly buy my music via bandcamp nowadays and from time to time I buy a vinyl. I don’t believe in the idea of the superiour vinyl sound, but I like that it makes listening a concious ritual.
Because I DJ from time to time I like to have the stuff I like on my drive and so it ends up beeing either a download or vinyl. CD has totally fallen out of favour with me..
I once was chatting with a producer who worked for Disney for around 15 years. He said the so-called “warm” tone of vinyl vs the “harsh” sound of CDs is really that the vinyl format acts as a partial low-pass filter. So it’s really just that you’re hearing less high-freq sound on vinyl than on a CD.
Perhaps. I have heard they also master differently for vinyl since it can't provide the same dynamic, frequency, or stereo range as digital. Some listeners find the result more appealing.
That does highlight the one infamous issue with "loudness wars" bringing the quality into the toliet to keep the volume high when we all have perfectly good knobs and switches to regulate them.
Sometimes the vinyl master is in fact better, because it is less compressed, because a mastering engineer can assume that people listening to vinyl got a decent sound system, while mastering for "web" means people have phone speakers, laptop speakers, hifi systems, whatever.
That's interesting, but I'm not sure what you mean by "compress". Do you mean data compression, or a compressing audio filter?
Web distribution (iTunes/etc.) files come from running the CD master through an AAC/MP3/etc. converter which does data compression only. But a 256Kbps/16bit/44.1KHz AAC (like you'd get from iTunes) is a lot higher quality than vinyl.
You are right thats ambgious, but in this context compression refers to the dynamic compression of the adio wave (so essentially reducing the difference in perceived loudness between the loudest and the most silent parts of a recording).
Data compression doesn’t make much sense here, because you usually use uncompressed audiofiles anywhere unless it goes to the web.
Vinyl can't carry much bass, so it's cut with a special EQ curve - called the RIAA curve - that eliminates most of the bass and some of the mids.
Phono preamps have the opposite curve. In theory when the music comes of the preamp you get a flat response overall. In reality any added distortion warms up the bass a lot, the mids some, and the treble barely at all.
Because what's left of the bass is still cut close to the dynamic range limits of vinyl, it's always distorted. But because of the extreme EQ this rounds out the low end and gives the mids a boost.
The overall effect is a warm sound.
Vinyl isn't a true hifi medium. It's more like an Instagram filter for music. It can sound very nice, but it's a heavily processed sound, not a realistic one.
Digital has other issues. But for ultimate fidelity, personally I would always - no exceptions - prefer to listen to a lossless 24-bit digital recording of a master tape captured with studio-grade converters and streamed from hard disk than from vinyl, CD, or any compressed file format.
> it ends up beeing either a download or vinyl. CD has totally fallen out of favour with me
My best friend in school was quite eccentric, and used to have a wind-up gramophone and collect acetate 78s. He'd make his own player needles from cactus spikes. He completely skipped LPs and went to CDs.
What bugs me is that quite a lot of things are not available. I ripped my entire CD collection and uploaded into Google Music (not sure if that feature still exists). I have all this music available but I can not find it on other peoples google music. So if I share a song, they get an error. Most of this music is nothing special and quite mainstream but if I search on other peoples devices I can not find the songs only alternate versions from other people who made a cover version of the song.
I am also worried now that songs will just disappear. I no longer remember specific names but instead hit thumbs up to add them to a list. If the song gets removed from google due to license expiring or what ever that song just disappears from my list and in have no idea that I every had it on my list.
"or" here really simplifies things. Nowadays almost every 70s-90s album on streaming services is a remaster with overloaded levels and clippings. One has to resort to torrent sites to find rips from original CDs or vinyls.
This[0] is a good resource if you're interested in the dynamic range of remasters.
If you listen to anything that falls into the "progressive" genre, this[1] channel may interest you. Only high-dynamic-range versions of albums, often ripped from vinyl. Steven Wilson has been mixing everything he can get his hands on and most of it is both brilliant and faithful.
I thought copyright had been extended long enough that they don't need to do that? For example you don't see the same thing quite so much with other genres of music and music of the same age in those scenes haven't fallen into the public domain.
But the older work doesn't, and nearly all recorded music is already covered by Disney's forever copyright just because of the history of when the technology was invented.
I was passenger in a hydroplane car wreck while we listened to this song. No one was hurt though we were moving at highway speed it was just an accident. Everything moved so slowly as we went from parallel with the other cars to perpendicular at 65mph. Still love that song and album.
This is why it's so important that we resist pressure to upload everything to the cloud. Buy a 64 or 128GiB flash drive and put your whole collection there. (plus one probably for backup). Copy it to all your local machine(s). Copy the important stuff to your mobile.
Missing my 160GB iPod Classic honestly. But nowadays oddly enough Google Play Music has most of the music I want and when they dont as OP does I upload them. One thing I do is buy the music and download it locally. Google Play Music gives me proper high quality MP3s compared to Apples m3a or whatever those were.
Licensing deals are stupid. Also I do see smaller artists on Google Play Music being lumped together with half a dozen other smaller artists. I cant believe how broken that is and sometimes the artists songs I am looking for doesnt show up cause they dont even show albums featuring that artist in their album listing.
i mean...you can load a good chunk of your library on an 400gb sd card and play it on your phone. it seems more battery efficient than constantly streaming music from an online account even when the cache expires consistently
I wouldn't trust flash drives for a whole library of hard-to-replace music, they fail all the time and they're hard to recover once they do. Better to use a NAS, external hard drive, or cloud storage you pay for like S3.
RAID is not backup. It doesn't protect against accidental deletion, malware, fire, etc...
It only protects you against disk failure, and it is mostly used to make sure the data is still available as you change disks. Not for long term data protection. Overall, a RAID NAS is probably not that safer than a standard external hard drive. RAID is mostly there to make sure that you can benefit from high performance, high capacity and networking without sacrificing reliability.
If you have two disks and availability is not a problem (you can afford not to listen to music as you restore from backup), you are better off with an external hard drive used only for backup/restore operation and kept somewhere safe when not in use.
If privacy is not an issue, a dump feature solves this. Available for Google services and unofficial ones are there for many more. Clouds that don't provide such a feature are probably not worth using.
> This is why it's so important that we resist pressure to upload everything to the cloud. Buy a 64 or 128GiB flash drive and put your whole collection there. (plus one probably for backup). Copy it to all your local machine(s). Copy the important stuff to your mobile.
Collections are not static. I discover new music every once in a while. Syncing with cloud makes sense; it is just that you could be the owner of the hardware behind the cloud, to maintain privacy or you encrypt the data in the cloud (or both, and use one cloud as backup).
You could use rsync or something with a flash drive though. Android smartphones will happily eat microSD cards containing hundreds of GB of music.
Which means the iPod Classic 160 GB is finally obsolete. However I think you can hack those devices anyway, to put in a new 2.5" SATA SSD (if they eat SATA).
Yeah, that's pretty cool! I'll probably wait for the price to come down a bit, and to see what the real lifespan of the things are, before I start doing anything more than experimenting with them, though.
Man, I lost my precious childhood videos after "saving" on the cloud. Google deleted it because of some seconds of the background music of AC/DC's on the radio.
Were these on youtube? I wasn't aware that Google did the DMCA takedowns complaints for the rights holder - I thought the rights holder had to make a complaint, and that would necessitate them being somewhere the rights holder could view them.
I've learned to replace "the cloud" with "someone else's computer". Always worth repeating to yourself when you're considering uploading sensitive documents or something you can't afford to lose.
I wrote "deleted" but the truth is that I can see it on a small window, after navigating on my upload history to the very past, on some private Youtube account details page, and I can't download it anymore. I tried many many times. It's already have been years it is blocked from downloading it. I will try again soon if I can find a browser plugin that can help me with this.
I honestly prefer Spotify. The reality is that I have 1014 songs on my playlist at the time of writing, and it sets me back the equivalent of about $5 PM (Converted from ZAR), and I get to be picky about what I listen to frequently. In an album from someone, odds are that I might like 2 of the songs at most, so buying a CD for only 2 songs is a pointless activity for me.
This means that to collect 1000 songs that I like on CD I'll have to buy 500 CDS total. That's a lot of money.
I also enjoy being able to mix up my music and not having to swap out discs when I get tired of an artist. I understand privacy is an issue for some, but I don't really care if Spotify collects the data of who I listen to, it only improves their algorithm and makes my music discoveries easier.
The reality is that you're always connected to the internet, and even if you listen to CDs on your computer the media player is still collecting your data and behaviour.
Your comment about liking say 2 songs on a album is interesting.
I bought the double disk Led Zep Remasters CD in 1992 just for Immigrant Song. And since then have grown to love all of their stuff.
Sure, since ~1990 I have amassed lot of complete albums (almost 2,000 of them) which cost me a lot of money. Spotify Premium at €10/month for all those years is €3,480. Suspect Spotify is cheaper but I've developed this crazy distrust for anything I supposedly own but isn't DRM-free on my PC.
> even if you listen to CDs on your computer the media player is still collecting your data and behaviour
I'm not sure what OS or media player you use(d), but implying that it's somehow inherent to playing music on your computer in general is an overstatement, to put it mildly.
As a counterpoint to your argument: I tried Spotify and went back to offline music. I don't use CDs of course, it's all ripped to MP3 and sitting there on my hard drives, with some of it copied over to my phone.
The internet is always there except when it isn't – cross the border to a non-EU country with crazy roaming charges and suddenly you'd wish that you had stuff offline with you. On the other hand with online services the music collection you have “with you” is effectively infinite, as long as the data connection is up. There's ups and downs to everything.
The thing that ultimately turns me off from Spotify is the client: I've come to expect the ability to add a few albums to a makeshift playlist, shuffle the tracks, remove some of them because I don't like them, reorder a few songs whenever I feel like it etc. Whenever I try out Spotify it seems like my options are either to listen to whatever The Algorithm[tm] serves me or painstakingly create a custom playlist every time I want to listen to something non-standard. The “Play Queue” management in Spotify is next to nonexistent (or hidden so well in the UI that I couldn't find it), and compared to regular desktop players like Cantata it's just annoying to use.
I started using Youtube Music last year. Recently I flew overseas, and for this reason I had downloaded some music (300+ songs) with their download for offline play feature. During my layover I connected to some airport wifi, and almost instantly I lost access to offline play of most of my songs because of licensing issues with the country that I was in. I've since learned to always use a VPN that terminates in the US before launching Youtube Music.
I think this is more of a Youtube issue than a music issue.
I can't imagine Youtube Music is going to exist for long, given that 90% of the GPM subscribers I've talked to would rather swap to spotify than use YTM.
I run Spotify premium like I mentioned in the original post. This means that all songs I add to my libraries are automatically downloaded. Whenever my internet is down or my phone is away from WIFI I can continue listening to my music in the same way that you do, which is why I have no reason to use CDs for offline music
Does Spotify notify you in any way if any song that you have in your playlist is removed from their library? I have playlists on GPM and sometimes songs just disappear because they've been removed from the service. No notification or anything, I just realize the song's gone after I check for it. I'm considering switching and if this is implemented better I'd definitely go for it.
I've definitely had songs be deleted and then come back to the service under a different "identity", so that my playlist still contains the old deleted song and the replacement version of the same track on the same release of the same album is playable in the service but is not on my playlist.
Though they don't explicitly notify you, they keep the song on your playlist, they just gray it out. That way you can know when it's been removed, but unfortunately it's still inconvenient.
Agreed. I have Apple Music. $99/year, and it's easy to find $100 iTunes gift cards for $85 (sometimes even $80) each year to renew. So ~$7/month is a great value and less than a new CD each month.
I do have spotify and it's nice to have basically legal limewire, but I've started to buy vinyl too. My dad unloaded his amp and speakers on me so the start up cost was basically my first record and a stolen milk crate.
I used to build very intricate playlists years ago on itunes but I don't really have the motivation or time for that anymore and spotify radio and a lot of user playlists has me reaching to skip songs quite a bit.
I got into vinyl because there are a few artists I like where I prefer listening to an album all the way through (Kendrick and Frank Ocean in particular). It's not a smattering of random songs like a pop album, but a whole 45-1h narrative, balancing energy and calmness, transitioning from one emotion into another, telling a different story about the people in this world. It made me like songs I used to skip over because I had been listening to them without their necessary context. Pulling a record out of the sleeve and dropping the needle turned listening into a conscious ritual, forcing my engagement with the storytelling, and gave me a deeper appreciation for the efforts of the artist. When I dig through my crate I'm met with memories and feelings with each album I own, like going through a box of photos. Vinyl isn't cheap, but buying a record a month isn't much more than a spotify or netflix subscription.
How does the algorithm actually negatively affect your experience?
I use mostly Spotify, and in their case, their suggested playlists and discover weekly actually put me on to a lot of great musicians I wouldn't have known otherwise.
But who picks the pickers? The suits plan ahead and begin with the algorithm.
Part of the solo hobby of listening for me is discovering stuff and getting into a favorite artist's discog in depth. Having an algorithm just recommend stuff to you ruins the fun.
Plus, my taste is weird enough that my experience with streaming services is they either slowly nudge me towards either the mainstream where the algorithm can actually recommend stuff, or a weird overfitting where they end up playing the same stuff over and over because it can't grok the true form of my preferences. (To be fair, neither can I.)
I feel the same, but fondly remember the old last.fm recommendations. Those were pretty good (I hope that's not just nostalgia speaking). Plus browsing scrobbles [=playback history] of people with similar tastes was a good way to find more great music; or explore new genres.
A lot of people feel this way, and a lot of people feel the other way. I'm not sure how to quantify or measure this, except to say these algorithms have never worked out well for me.
I keep pointing this out, but Spotify's shuffle algorithm is absolute horrible. It plays the same 10 or so songs for hours on hours before it moves on to the next 10 or so songs.
Their offline feature has become rubbish. Every morning I have a 10 minute walk to the train station and I usually open spotify right after I lock my door. Throughout this walk, spotify has played for about 1 minute in total, on a good day this number might jump up to 4. Sluggish as hell. When I open any of the items (my songs/home/individual playlist) the first time I load up the app, it doesn't even load for several minutes. So until it loads, even that 1 min or so, I can't even choose a song.
I've been wanting to move away from spotify, and for me, the only other viable streaming platform is Google Music (does that still exist?). Having tried it for a few months, and completely cancelled spotify, it's the same shit but combined with an even worse UI. What gives? I have a Galaxy S9. One of the top of the range Android phones. I used to have a Xperia Z3 Compact. Which at the time was pretty powerful.
The annoying thing is, from here its hard to move away. The only thing I've found that makes it easy for me to move away is some project called spotitube, which matches songs against YouTube and downloads them from there and converts them. So sure, if I used it, I'd get the songs back, but now it's shit quality and it's illegal.
Perhaps it is another issue, but the fact that I've had it across multiple devices, I'd be surprised if it isn't Spotify's shoddy "algorithm" (if you even wanna call it that). I posted this a while ago on reddit on /r/Spotify[0] that shows two examples of the same song being chosen close to each other (one of which actually was listed one after the other). This is either terrible algorithm or an algorithm that benefits Spotify, not the consumer. The issues have been raised on Spotify's official platform, but they've just ignored it. There are literally thousands of replies[1].
Try putting your phone in airplane mode, or possibly Spotify's own offline mode. I've found that Spotify works great when you have a good internet connection or when you have none at all. It doesn't do well when you have 1 bar of edge reception, or your phone is struggling with cell/wifi handover.
I will try that. However, I don't think this is the case as this happens on WiFi as well. Additionally, on 4G with 5 bars it still happens. Everything else works fine and is instantaneous.
So I've had it on offline mode since you've mentioned it. It works much better. No sluggish start ups or sluggish song changes. This is really strange as I've got 1Gbps connection at home and it still does this when it on the WiFi. More reasons to get rid of it.
Another reason CDs are still worth considering: classical music and, to a lesser extent, jazz CDs often feature extensive and informative liner notes that have never been posted online anywhere. I myself typically rip all my purchases to FLAC immediately and then I listen through my media centre, so I often forget that I have the original physical release there on the shelf, but when I do go back and look at that CD I am often amazed how good the liner notes are.
Indeed. I not only rip my CDs immediately to FLAC, but also scan all the artwork in 600dpi on my CanoScan 9000f photographic scanner. These are then stored in a PDF file next to the music.
I agree. I mostly listen to classical music, although I also rip them but most of the time I still use cds. It seems current music players on computers never thought about creating classical music pieces playlist. I had to manually add pieces to create them with correct order or just add albums which is the same as just playing a cd.
In the end, I listen to music with CD players mostly, and still insist on buy a car with CD player
This is primarily the fault of later era CDs when the index marks were abandoned and small movements were separated by track breaks. Originally, Redbook audio was supposed to always have a silent pregap between tracks and indexes were for intra-track navigation. You will find this on early classical CDs. Then the problem is finding a player that supports skipping index marks.
Also because classical doesn't fit the CDDB style metadata format very well. The peformer and composer aren't the same person, and it's common to have many copies of the same piece, say a symphony performed by different orchestras at different dates. It just doesn't lend itself to a computer filesystem that well.
I recently discovered the Idagio app (https://www.idagio.com/). It has pretty amazing and well maintained database of classical pieces. You can for example list all renditions of such and such piano concerto sorted by year.
Instead or privacy terrors you have other terrors like wondering if the CD will even play, especially if you've listened to it a lot over 5+ years, even with good care.
I'm surprised the article doesn't cover a more relevant approach like just playing local mp3s from your computer. You get the same no ads, no privacy issues, no algorithms but you have the added benefit of not having to lug around a binder of CDs to play the songs you want.
This is how I've been listening to music for around 20 years and it works nicely. Been using foobar2000 since the beginning too (shortly after the Winamp rewrite that made it suck). It's a minimal mp3 player that uses about 5mb of RAM but has every feature I'd want for play back.
I'm curious why a CD would not work anymore after listening to it a lot? Is the laser powerful enough to damage it or is it the heat from the device itself which is degrading the material in the long term?
The polycarbonate substrate could degrade due to temperature, humidity, exposure to sunlight, and other environmental variables. These are concerns for institutions with large CD-based archives (e.g., Library of Congress). [1]
In practice, though, it's far more likely that the the disc will get corrupted from small scratches.
I have taken several CDs (mainly my Dad's, not my own) from unusably scratched to relatively pristine. The really bad cases need fine grit sandpaper (wet!) followed by plastic polishes. I generally start with Meguiar's plastic polish and work my way to Radtech Ice Creme. In my own collection I have CDs that are around 30 years old and are error-free. I'm not interested in formats or services that won't last at least as long or can't be backed up to my own NAS (nor am I interested in anything less than Red Book quality).
> I'm curious why a CD would not work anymore after listening to it a lot? Is the laser powerful enough to damage it or is it the heat from the device itself which is degrading the material in the long term?
If you handled everything with white gloves and carefully moved the CD around it would probably last forever under a realistic scenario (you left it in a closet, didn't move it around much, etc.).
I have a bunch of original CDs from my first music collection that still work after ~20 years based on spot checking some of them 5+ years ago. Even with hundreds of playbacks.
But, I do have a handful of CDs that I remember having issues. They skip in certain spots due to artifacts on the CD. The real world happens. I don't remember what happened exactly in each case, but I'm guessing they got scratched. Like maybe I didn't put it fully into the black binder that held 200 CDs and I hit a bump in my car which caused the binder to jump around and an edge of the CD got clipped by the zipper, who knows.
Also burnt CDs seem to have a much worse shelf life. They are much more susceptible to being damaged. I don't know exactly why at a technical level but for sure I've had more burnt CDs fail over time. That becomes an issue when you want to back things up.
With mp3s, I can just put thousands of songs on my computer and everything works all the time. I never had an mp3 not play or skip unless the file itself was corrupt initially. They are also a heck of a lot more portable. You can put your collection on your phone, throw in some earbuds and now you can go on a run, or a 6 hour plane trip. You ever try running with a discman[0]? I have. It doesn't really work too well haha.
I remember later discmans had internal audio buffers so the music wouldn't stop if you shook them, but I guess on a run the buffer would end up going dry and music would stop anyway.
My experience is that bit-rot with CDs is excessively rare.
Scratches and scuffs are rare "with good care". Even then, deep scratches are the real issue. Minor scratches are often irrelevant with the error correction.
So how does one need to wonder if the CD will even play?
I rip my CDs, store them on my NAS and then burn them back on a CD for playing in my car. The original stays in a closet in case my NAS ever dies and the burnt copy in my car lives as long as it lives, given the hot Florida sun.
Worth noting here that ripping a CD is a copyright infringement, yes even for individuals, here in UK. We had about 2 years when it wasn't.
Yes, that means Apple iTunes and the like provide tools for copyright infringement -- far worse than the young adult that got extradited to USA for providing links on a website (which is allowed in UK law) -- and in theory could be sued for contributory infringement.
Worth noting that the UK (along with Malta) is an exception in Europe. In the other European countries ripping a CD you own for personal use is completely legal.
Fair Dealing is extremely conservative. Could you expand on what you mean, give an example of the research situation and scope?
AIUI the CDP would probably allow you to do format conversion for private study if the matter wasn't available to buy in a format you needed for that study; they'd probably want to see some outputs to show it was study and not entertainment (remember in tort the consideration is balance of probabilities, they don't have to show you infringed just that it was most likely - without research outputs [eg study notes] then the likelihood is you copied for entertainment purposes.
In short, if you're thinking "I can pretend it was for study" then I think you'd find the court is not that naive.
> Could you expand on what you mean, give an example of the research situation and scope?
Well, if someone wanted to research a music discovery algorithm, then they would need to a have a large collection of music to test their algorithm, for example. Or perhaps someone wants to research differences between music preferences based on ethnicity, using some automated data analysis technique. This would also require a large collection of music.
Yeah those sorts of things come in to research, but there are FOSS and other out of copyright sources. If you're doing it commercially you'd need a license.
The grateful dead used to (probably still does) let people plop their tape recorders right next to the mixing tent at shows. As a result, pretty much every grateful dead show has been recorded by someone and passed around the community.
No. Borrowing a CD and ripping it is definitely copyright infringement in the US. I don't know if there's case law as to whether or not ripping your own CDs is legal, but apparently even the RIAA says it "won’t usually raise concerns" [1]
Pretty sure you're using 'mp3s' in a general sense, but I'm going to nitpick because I love audio format geekery.
If you're going to rip your CDs, you should consider ripping to FLAC and Opus. The only reason to rip to mp3 is that basically every legacy device out there understands the mp3 format and knows how to play it. If you're playing back on a phone or PC or a more modern device, you should use a modern format. Both FLAC and Opus are totally open source.
FLAC is lossless and will reproduce your source CD bit for bit, but in a compressed format. Listening to music in a FLAC format is the same as listening to the original CD. Opus is a lossy format, so you lose some fidelity by necessity, but if you make that trade it's the best quality you're going to get. A double blind test had it outperform AAC and Vorbis, and significantly outperform mp3.
I rip my CDs to FLAC and store those files on my NAS. Then I convert the FLAC files to medium quality Opus files and those go on the SD card in my phone. I don't use old mp3 players, so I can do without mp3s.
I guess it depends how much you trust the playback software.
For me, at the end of the day I might choose a cd or record because its just simple and works and I am tired of dealing with software.
I listen to a lot of japanese doujin music (self-released albums produced by amateur circles at conventions). This is often a couple hundred albums every year, between Comiket, M3, and other smaller conventions. The overwhelming majority of it simply isn't available as a physical release on typical online marketplaces, much less on streaming services. Importing the physical release + ripping or relying on community downloads is often the only way to listen to these.
These are arranges or sometimes heavily sampled albums that simply wouldn't pass on typical streaming platforms. Just something like Death Grips' cult Exmilitary album got removed from Spotify because it used a tad too many samples to their taste (although luckily it's available for free on their website).
Officially, not really. The 'scene' is a tad too big for that, although some circles publish on bandcamp sometimes (mainly those who can't attend the physical convention).
In the west, there used to be forums (like doujinstyle) dedicated to sharing new releases after every event, which turned into large discord servers in the past year. Otherwise, a lot of the releases can be found on Asia-oriented private trackers as well.
These are often the only way to get a chance of actually listening to the album, since there's generally a limited number of physical albums available for sale at the event, and reprints during the next edition of the convention are uncommon.
Most of the music I listen to is from Bandcamp
I like it because I can directly support the artists and I get to show off my collection online, while still keeping my (easily redownloadable) mp3/flac collection offline
I do like Spotify (even have a Premium subscription), but it's often missing the artists I like and the program itself is pretty terrible compared to something like Foobar/AIMP/PowerAmp
In addition, having local music files opens up a whole world of new possibilities, like being able to add them to videos, having fun mixing/editing them and playing rhythm games like Audiosurf and Riff Racer
Me too. In fact, I find the prices and especially the flac extra price something from the last millenium, when storage and bandwith where expensive.
Also the discography option is so wonderful, it helps with the backlog if you dive into something new.
I already got 2 or 3 labels to be there because there was no proper place to get their music :)
I feel like Bandcamp is also more geared towards artists. When I discover new music on Bandcamp, I see the custom-designed artist pages and make a connection between the music and the artist while on Spotify and YouTube it feels more like going from song to song, but not focusing on artists separately (which is not necessarily a bad thing, but I personally prefer the former)
I ripped my CDs ages ago and have listened to music in my car or on my motorcycle through iPods or my iPhone since then. I would love to be able to get rid of all the CDs that I have accumulated throughout the years. For the last few years all my purchases have been through iTunes with an exception or two done through Amazon. I even downloaded a few albums and tracks made available by the artists themselves.
The key to me is that I am pretty much set in my music preferences. I still hear and occasionally buy new music but for the most part its static and I am just fine with that. Now of the streaming or the one satellite service give me enough flexibility to hear only want I want to hear. Worse, why would I want another monthly bill? Radio, I used to use it for commute traffic only and for the most part its the only reason I can see using it. Even now my car can update traffic on the navigation frequent enough to let me know what I may encounter
> The key to me is that I am pretty much set in my music preferences.
I used to think that until I got a music subscription. I end up finding old music that is new to me. About the only genre I do not like is country, but even that isn't a hard rule. I also find it fun to just get lost exploring genres of music, but I understand that may not be a common thing to do.
> Radio, I used to use it for commute traffic only and for the most part its the only reason I can see using it.
For me, podcasts killed the radio. Terrestrial radio feels like it's more commercials than content. If I do turn on the radio and on the rare chance it's not on a commercial, one is coming in the next minute or so.
A couple years ago I took all my music back out of google music and restored from physical backups where necessary. Now, my audio player is an old laptop running linux, hooked up to some very nice speakers. (it can play podcasts too!)
The laptop just uses Rhythmbox, but you could obviously use whatever player you like. It's the best setup I've ever had. No terrible UI, no syncing, no garbage. I control what music is on there and where it's backed up. And most importantly, it has separated my music from general computer use. Yes it's technically playing on a computer it's the old linux laptop that's hooked up to the speakers. It barely uses any power and the keyboard is in an awkward position to type on. It's not convenient to watch videos or browse the internet on. It's not convenient to type on. It's really only good for listening to music. You can set it on and read, or do chores, or exercise, and never feel the urge to jump on HN, read the news, etc. If it weren't for the podcasts, it'd never even connect to the internet. And therefore it wouldn't matter if it were even updated or password protected.
So, do you buy each song separately digitally or physically? Also, after buying, how do you move it to your setup? For physical copies (CDs or Vinyls), do you rip and convert them to .flac or .mp3? For digital, do you remove the DRM?
It's smorgasboard. Some are MP3s I probably downloaded more than 20 years ago, others are ripped from CDs, others are bought from Amazon or other sources. The caveat with Amazon, Google play, etc is that they must be some DRM-free format. I'm not an audiophile, and medium-to-high quality MP3s are fine by me. I've actually got a record player, so most of the Vinyl stays in vinyl format.
As far as getting music to and from my setup, I'm usually pretty old fashioned. I have an external hard drive that I use for backup, and a thumb drive or two. Further, I have Owncloud set up on a Raspberry Pi, which is nice for moving a few files, but wouldn't be suitable for moving files of any real volume. Obviously, anyone could build a more mature and robust network drive if they liked, but this setup is more than suitable for my needs.
We've reached a point where compressors and maximizers cannot really add any more loudness to the music. So the war is over and the result is that many genres of music have no dynamic range.
I think people are missing the point - his point is simplicity. This is actually why I've stopped buying albums and switched entirely to streaming internet radio like di.fm. I spent way too much time and effort managing my mp3 library over the years. (ripping, tagging, file naming, album art, etc)
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadFor most of my needs, spotify works out. I don't mind paying $10/mo since I use the offline listening so much. I only buy and rip CDs for my own collection if I -really- like that album or a song on it, and a web download isn't available. Occasionally spotify doesn't have a very specific version of a song–Legend of a Mind by the Moody Blues from the 1967? BBC recording sessions comes to mind. Or artists like King Crimson.
I don't buy through itunes because of drm and the lack flac/alac options–why would I buy an mp3/m4a/aac file that I'm stuck with and can't transcode if needed? Bandcamp is a great alternative if the band you want happens to be on there. The app isn't too bad either if you forgot to download and sync an album.
Other benefits of ripping a CD or downloading a flac/alac file include having a perfect lossless copy. I can then transcode to any format that I want, whenever I want, however I want, from now until forever (or at least until the storage goes bad/breaks), without losing any quality.
With spotify pro + ublock origin, I never see ads on spotify or youtube anyway.
CDs I bought in the early 90s are there, in a box. I'd like to see people's iTunes collections in 30 years...
Yes, I know that CDs have a shelf-life and that real long term storage would involve backing them up. But CDs still seem a better option than the current alternatives.
Edit:
The issue even with a DRM-free local iTunes library is: how are people going to keep that over 30 years?
If you have a CD you only need to have a CD/DVD/Bluray player, which are still ubiquitous, and to push a button.
But for a local iTunes library you need IT admin skills to manage it, to back it up, to transfer it from one machine to the next, perhaps to understand that you can access the music without iTunes, etc. The vast majority of the public don't know how to do that.
Might look different and be called different, but I bet there is some service offering most music in existence in 2050.
My father was so ethical and bought a lot of music from some service of his ISP (Planet music or something), it is all lost. I'd never pay for DRMed music. At least with Spotify you know you don't own anything and just pay for access to a lot of stuff as long as you pay.
If you get deep into any small/independent music scene you’ll find CDs are still king.
I bought my first album from iTunes 10 years ago and it is right there in my external HDD since iTunes does not have any sort of DRM anymore (it was removed years ago). Unless computers in 20 years do not allow people to have local data and force them to use The Cloud (at which point i'd probably stop using computers altogether outside of necessity), i do not see them disappear.
If fact i rebought several albums i had in CD format because i lost some of the CDs after moving and a bunch of M4A files in a folder are more convenient than a bunch of CDs in a box (although TBH i do get the nice feeling of having something to look at that is physical... but only for things i really like and for me that is usually games not music).
The same place and way you keep all your other digitally purchased music. Just like the music I buy from bleep, Bandcamp or directly from artists.
What’s the problem here?
Ways to enjoy music: stream it on Spotify or insert a CD. Pick one.
?????
I mean, DRMless, local media doesn't obviate streaming which has its own valuable niche, from discovery to the fact that my 200 GB music library cannot fit on my phone, but that library is on Dropbox.
In 30 years, the format might be unrecognizable, but... I don't get the problem either.
>But for a local iTunes library you need IT admin skills to manage it, to back it up, to transfer it from one machine to the next, perhaps to understand that you can access the music without iTunes, etc. The vast majority of the public don't know how to do that.
Oh, we're operating from an assumption of pre-Internet tech literacy. Then, yeah, I don't know. The computer-as-radio/physical-media dichotomy might be the way to go. Enjoy those CDs. uwu Put thing in thing and hear sound. Zug zug
MDISC are supposed to last for 100 years or so.
There is an awful lot of music simply not streamed, if you live near a college town or in any city of say 80,000 people then there probably some local bands, chances are good they’ve recorded some stuff and outside of that run of CDs, the music is nowhere else. It’s not like we’re losing part of the Beatles catalog exactly but if you’ve bonded and heard that band a few times it might be meaningful.
I just pulled mine out of the attic after they had been sitting there for more than a decade. It's dry up there, but not cool at all. I'm in central Texas and in the summer you can only be up there for a few minutes at a time because it's so hot.
I bought dbPowerAmp and ripped them all to ALAC. Only a couple of them couldn't be accurately ripped and that's because of scratches on them (some of them are from the mid-80's and have had rough lives).
I guess what I'm trying to say is that they are remarkably durable.
Well, you can buy a new 3.5" floppy disk drive for $15 right now. The problem are proprietary formats, like Zip disks - just avoid those.
If we're talking actual files, it's just basic file management skills, and maybe some simple knowledge of ripping (assuming we're not taking the EAC lossless route). Almost everyone in my office (which are mainly non-tech people) have the former.
>...how are people going to keep that over 30 years?
It's way more likely someone's going to burgle my remaining CDs than they are to destroy every instance of my virtual collection.
Parts of my MP3 library are 20 years old. Why do you think keeping them spinning a few more decades will be any harder?
>But for a local iTunes library you need IT admin skills to manage it, to back it up, to transfer it from one machine to the next, perhaps to understand that you can access the music without iTunes, etc. The vast majority of the public don't know how to do that.
Honestly, I think that's why streaming is taking over. Apple's approach to solving the sync problem was to rethink the whole paradigm, and so we got Apple Music instead of smarter iPhone/iPod sync. Sure, they get service revenue in the bargain, but to me it seems like an easy play.
Only real problem is that I ripped them at 128Kbps. For some tracks I've gone back and re-done them at a higher bitrate.
iTunes does not have DRM and is the only reason i buy albums through them: after i download the album, i have a bunch of m4a files i can play with any player i want, in any device i want and store on my own external drive.
I have googled it a bit and it seems that DRM is not used any more on iTunes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairPlay#iTunes_Store_DRM_chan...
In fact, as far as major services (e.g. major distributor and not some niche music market with "indie" artists only) iTunes was the one that spearheaded the un-DRM of music (with Steve Jobs' call to end music DRM: https://betanews.com/2007/02/06/apple-s-steve-jobs-calls-for... ).
of which at that time there were only 2 or 3.
Why did Jobs do this?
Countries in the EU were demanding that he do so if he wanted to sell product there. Jobs was not interested in dropping DRM until the countries started bitching. Norway banned the iPod due to the iTunes walled garden creating captive audiences without opportunity for choice in media vendor (due to incompatibilities with competition services) and France started slinging similar threats.
It all seems so altruistic in hind-sight, but really he (Jobs) was being pressured by the nation-states, and he had the opportunity to look like a pioneer by dropping DRM (an endeavor that Apple felt pretty keen about with FairPlay) -- making the competition look petty and selfish for having DRM, while simultaneously satisfying the desires of the nations with markets that he wanted to compete within.
The whole story is in that link you included. I got a different vibe from the article than you did, I think.
However m4a files are lossy and thus not desirable for me. If I purchase music I want it in flac/alac format because I can transcode it to say, m4a if I need to in the future, or any other format. You can't do that with m4a without a degradation in quality.
At the moment I can’t enjoy anything that’s not on Spotify simply because I wouldn’t be able to listen to them really. I have hours of music on Spotify playlists and I would only need maybe a dozen of songs that aren’t on there, so manually switching apps for those few times would be annoying.
Not sure about the mobile app, I assume it will skip the missing tracks in a playlist as normal but it might be possible that it picks them up if they're present on the device somewhere.
[1] https://support.spotify.com/us/using_spotify/features/listen...
Spotify can play and sync your own files. You add them in a list of folders it checks.
https://www.clementine-player.org/ Hm, but the last version is from 2016.
...but it's a background service with a web UI, so how easy you'll find it to set up depends on your technical expertise.
Its recommendations, daily mix and automatic playlist generated after listening to a full album are getting VERY predictable though. That is, same bands and often the same song. I'm not saying Spotify needs to improve their algorithm per se, it just needs to add a bit more variety - switch up algorithms from time to time, shuffle, start way down on the list of matched songs, something like that. It's getting annoying to the point where I'm considering switching to Apple Music for a while.
Anyway, for physical music I buy vinyl nowadays. I don't even have a vinyl player (yet), just a box of collectables / memorable albums. I don't like CDs, the boxes feel far too flimsy; I've never owned any.
I dislike renting in general, especially something so important like access to music, but the only reason I do it in this case is indeed the availability of some hard to find rarities.
I do understand the sentiment though.
Double blind tests show that 320kbp/s mp3s are indistinguishable from flacs, barring very poor masters or some extreme edge cases. For a lot of music you could get away with 256kbp/s probably, but it doesn't cost you anything to just go with 320kbp/s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
Only combined CD-ROM/CD-R + CD-DA formats together with the unfortunate eagerness of Windows to auto-execute everything allows such rootkits.
So if you feed a music CD to a real old CD player, or to (say) a properly configured Linux computer: No privacy terrors.
FTFY
By default, Win96 would run that CD. You didn't tell it to. You had to go change the setting from the default. You had to tell Win95 to not autorun a CD.
More on u3: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U3_(software)?wprov=sfti1
0: https://forums.hak5.org/topic/2843-usb-hacksaw-development/
1: https://forums.hak5.org/topic/2361-usb-switchblade-developme...
But as usual, one rotten apple spoils the entire barrel.
Having said that i did have my aunt (who is generally afraid that if she does something wrong the computer will break forever) spell me out the options in a popup (for a photo dvd she got from a photographer for a relative's graduation) over the phone once though, so i'm sure that, if nothing else, it can be a bit unexpected for less knowledgeable users.
My personal experience with this was with some import CDs (from Japan) that, from what I recall, messed with the error correction part of the data so that it skipped horrendously in my PC (so it was impossible to rip in cdex) but played fine in (most) standalone audio players.
"As the Copy Control discs do not conform to the requirements of the CD standard, they are not labeled with the CDDA logo, which is trademarked by Philips."
Redbook CD-DA has one subcode byte and eight error correction bytes per frame.
I, as a teenager bought a Sony BMG album with this rootkit.
At the time I didn't own a standalone music player, just my PC. I had a nice Creative sound card and some decent speakers, and an appreciation for audio quality.
To my surprise I found that the Sony album prevented you from playing back anything but some low-quality 128Kb MP3s stored in that data portion of the Disc if using a PC and there was zero chance I was allowing their crapware onto my machine.
I contacted them and they sent me out a replacement disc without the root-kit data rubbish but only upon me first posting back my own disc, without its case no less.
Don't get me wrong, I have my issues, sometimes I have to fix things, but I would rather this any day than having to go back to using Windows.
Is gaming a thing on Linux now? I was given to thinking that if you're into PC gaming you're really stuck with Windows ...
[0] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/apparently-valve-are-...
But yeah Epic Games is terrible.
GOG/Humble have done wonders for Linux as alternative stores.
Never used the Epic Store or Origin though, so cannot speak to that.
This is why, I, sometimes a CD buyer, believe all listeners of Audio CD should try maintaining the status quo of CD, as defined by the Red Book, and resist/boycott any attempt by the industry to "make a better CD" (e.g. SACD, Audio DVD, Audio Bluray), or "add more functionalities" to the existing CD standards.
Technologically, I would be happy to see a Doubly 5.1 Bluray Audio CD playing at living room from my surrounding speakers (better channel separation allows improvements of sound reproduction even on speakers of moderate quality), or CDs with real filesystem and error correction (an Audio CD by its original design, only streams music in real time, as if it's a digital LP track. There is no way to even know if the data you've just read from the disc is correct or not [0]), or a FLAC-encoded stereo CD (it would allow 30% more songs to be recorded on a single CD).
However, I'd better to live without them, as history has shown: all the newer standards would definitely be more "consumer-unfriendly" at best (go to any AV forum, and see the compatibility issues caused by HDCP [1] for example...), and malware at worst. The Audio CD, even with its historical limitations, is good enough, it plays lossless music with 44100 kHz sampling rate, and it did/does this job well.
Also, you may have noticed the recent renaissance of LP discs, and some LP lovers' arguments of how analog has better sound quality. While I don't believe those arguments are persuasive, I'm highly supportive of the LP industry for the same reason - you cannot install malware on a LP disc.
[0] Why I Ripped the Same CD 300 Times
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17649374
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1689823
I don't think I'd ever be so confident as to say that given some of the incredible hacks I've seen ;o)
But doing it at an industrial scale and including an 0day exploit in all albums is a separate thing, I don't believe it would ever happen. On the other hand, creating an extension of the standard to "make a better CD" is a real threat, for example, a plausible example would be:
"a CD-based service that connects to a server to obtain metadata and lyrics of your music, like a proprietary version of MusicBrainz, but with ads and tracking added."
It simply got this bad.
- Magnatune (http://magnatune.com) has interesting stuff too (they changed their pricing since my last visit a while ago, now you pay once for the whole library it seems).
- Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (https://folkways.si.edu/shop) is an absolutely fantastic resource in my opinion.
Because I DJ from time to time I like to have the stuff I like on my drive and so it ends up beeing either a download or vinyl. CD has totally fallen out of favour with me..
Web distribution (iTunes/etc.) files come from running the CD master through an AAC/MP3/etc. converter which does data compression only. But a 256Kbps/16bit/44.1KHz AAC (like you'd get from iTunes) is a lot higher quality than vinyl.
Data compression doesn’t make much sense here, because you usually use uncompressed audiofiles anywhere unless it goes to the web.
Vinyl can't carry much bass, so it's cut with a special EQ curve - called the RIAA curve - that eliminates most of the bass and some of the mids.
Phono preamps have the opposite curve. In theory when the music comes of the preamp you get a flat response overall. In reality any added distortion warms up the bass a lot, the mids some, and the treble barely at all.
Because what's left of the bass is still cut close to the dynamic range limits of vinyl, it's always distorted. But because of the extreme EQ this rounds out the low end and gives the mids a boost.
The overall effect is a warm sound.
Vinyl isn't a true hifi medium. It's more like an Instagram filter for music. It can sound very nice, but it's a heavily processed sound, not a realistic one.
Digital has other issues. But for ultimate fidelity, personally I would always - no exceptions - prefer to listen to a lossless 24-bit digital recording of a master tape captured with studio-grade converters and streamed from hard disk than from vinyl, CD, or any compressed file format.
My best friend in school was quite eccentric, and used to have a wind-up gramophone and collect acetate 78s. He'd make his own player needles from cactus spikes. He completely skipped LPs and went to CDs.
I am also worried now that songs will just disappear. I no longer remember specific names but instead hit thumbs up to add them to a list. If the song gets removed from google due to license expiring or what ever that song just disappears from my list and in have no idea that I every had it on my list.
Try some jazz like Coltrane or Miles Davis. It seems they never stoped issuing albums - remastered, Coltrane for lovers, Miles for cooking.
It is next to impossible to find original album or remastered original.
Yesterday on Youtube Music oldest Coltrane album was from 2015.
If you listen to anything that falls into the "progressive" genre, this[1] channel may interest you. Only high-dynamic-range versions of albums, often ripped from vinyl. Steven Wilson has been mixing everything he can get his hands on and most of it is both brilliant and faithful.
[0]http://dr.loudness-war.info/
[1]https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCXL-7ZVrR7wf7Nf5-FcUVRw/about
This is only done to prevent copyright expiration and having the album become public domain.
You’ll see they only do it for “oldish” albums. It’s quite a scam.
(this is a question rather than statement)
The remaster acts as a new, “derivative” work and thus gets whatever new copyright protection is offered by newer laws.
And programming?
https://ektoplazm.com/ is a great place to start sampling this type of music for free.
I was passenger in a hydroplane car wreck while we listened to this song. No one was hurt though we were moving at highway speed it was just an accident. Everything moved so slowly as we went from parallel with the other cars to perpendicular at 65mph. Still love that song and album.
Licensing deals are stupid. Also I do see smaller artists on Google Play Music being lumped together with half a dozen other smaller artists. I cant believe how broken that is and sometimes the artists songs I am looking for doesnt show up cause they dont even show albums featuring that artist in their album listing.
But 128GB phones have enough storage for most music collections
for line breaks on HN.
The lack of an SD card slot is a dealbreaker in a phone for me, regardless of price.
It only protects you against disk failure, and it is mostly used to make sure the data is still available as you change disks. Not for long term data protection. Overall, a RAID NAS is probably not that safer than a standard external hard drive. RAID is mostly there to make sure that you can benefit from high performance, high capacity and networking without sacrificing reliability.
If you have two disks and availability is not a problem (you can afford not to listen to music as you restore from backup), you are better off with an external hard drive used only for backup/restore operation and kept somewhere safe when not in use.
Collections are not static. I discover new music every once in a while. Syncing with cloud makes sense; it is just that you could be the owner of the hardware behind the cloud, to maintain privacy or you encrypt the data in the cloud (or both, and use one cloud as backup).
You could use rsync or something with a flash drive though. Android smartphones will happily eat microSD cards containing hundreds of GB of music.
Which means the iPod Classic 160 GB is finally obsolete. However I think you can hack those devices anyway, to put in a new 2.5" SATA SSD (if they eat SATA).
That's too small for my collection! (I use a 64 gig card for taking my music on the road alone). My music collection is stored on a 1Tb drive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19919163
why use CDS?
I do a similar thing: I buy CDs, smell the paint, rip them into mp3, put them on a shelf and never touch them again. Everything nicely managed by MPD.
This means that to collect 1000 songs that I like on CD I'll have to buy 500 CDS total. That's a lot of money.
I also enjoy being able to mix up my music and not having to swap out discs when I get tired of an artist. I understand privacy is an issue for some, but I don't really care if Spotify collects the data of who I listen to, it only improves their algorithm and makes my music discoveries easier.
The reality is that you're always connected to the internet, and even if you listen to CDs on your computer the media player is still collecting your data and behaviour.
I bought the double disk Led Zep Remasters CD in 1992 just for Immigrant Song. And since then have grown to love all of their stuff.
Sure, since ~1990 I have amassed lot of complete albums (almost 2,000 of them) which cost me a lot of money. Spotify Premium at €10/month for all those years is €3,480. Suspect Spotify is cheaper but I've developed this crazy distrust for anything I supposedly own but isn't DRM-free on my PC.
Yoar approach is easier, no doubt.
I'm not sure what OS or media player you use(d), but implying that it's somehow inherent to playing music on your computer in general is an overstatement, to put it mildly.
As a counterpoint to your argument: I tried Spotify and went back to offline music. I don't use CDs of course, it's all ripped to MP3 and sitting there on my hard drives, with some of it copied over to my phone.
The internet is always there except when it isn't – cross the border to a non-EU country with crazy roaming charges and suddenly you'd wish that you had stuff offline with you. On the other hand with online services the music collection you have “with you” is effectively infinite, as long as the data connection is up. There's ups and downs to everything.
The thing that ultimately turns me off from Spotify is the client: I've come to expect the ability to add a few albums to a makeshift playlist, shuffle the tracks, remove some of them because I don't like them, reorder a few songs whenever I feel like it etc. Whenever I try out Spotify it seems like my options are either to listen to whatever The Algorithm[tm] serves me or painstakingly create a custom playlist every time I want to listen to something non-standard. The “Play Queue” management in Spotify is next to nonexistent (or hidden so well in the UI that I couldn't find it), and compared to regular desktop players like Cantata it's just annoying to use.
I can't imagine Youtube Music is going to exist for long, given that 90% of the GPM subscribers I've talked to would rather swap to spotify than use YTM.
I like that because a playlist is also a knowledge repository; and if the song ever comes back it will hopefully be reinstated.
I used to build very intricate playlists years ago on itunes but I don't really have the motivation or time for that anymore and spotify radio and a lot of user playlists has me reaching to skip songs quite a bit.
I got into vinyl because there are a few artists I like where I prefer listening to an album all the way through (Kendrick and Frank Ocean in particular). It's not a smattering of random songs like a pop album, but a whole 45-1h narrative, balancing energy and calmness, transitioning from one emotion into another, telling a different story about the people in this world. It made me like songs I used to skip over because I had been listening to them without their necessary context. Pulling a record out of the sleeve and dropping the needle turned listening into a conscious ritual, forcing my engagement with the storytelling, and gave me a deeper appreciation for the efforts of the artist. When I dig through my crate I'm met with memories and feelings with each album I own, like going through a box of photos. Vinyl isn't cheap, but buying a record a month isn't much more than a spotify or netflix subscription.
Part of the solo hobby of listening for me is discovering stuff and getting into a favorite artist's discog in depth. Having an algorithm just recommend stuff to you ruins the fun.
Plus, my taste is weird enough that my experience with streaming services is they either slowly nudge me towards either the mainstream where the algorithm can actually recommend stuff, or a weird overfitting where they end up playing the same stuff over and over because it can't grok the true form of my preferences. (To be fair, neither can I.)
Their offline feature has become rubbish. Every morning I have a 10 minute walk to the train station and I usually open spotify right after I lock my door. Throughout this walk, spotify has played for about 1 minute in total, on a good day this number might jump up to 4. Sluggish as hell. When I open any of the items (my songs/home/individual playlist) the first time I load up the app, it doesn't even load for several minutes. So until it loads, even that 1 min or so, I can't even choose a song.
I've been wanting to move away from spotify, and for me, the only other viable streaming platform is Google Music (does that still exist?). Having tried it for a few months, and completely cancelled spotify, it's the same shit but combined with an even worse UI. What gives? I have a Galaxy S9. One of the top of the range Android phones. I used to have a Xperia Z3 Compact. Which at the time was pretty powerful.
The annoying thing is, from here its hard to move away. The only thing I've found that makes it easy for me to move away is some project called spotitube, which matches songs against YouTube and downloads them from there and converts them. So sure, if I used it, I'd get the songs back, but now it's shit quality and it's illegal.
Perhaps it's some other issue?
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/spotify/comments/966nx7/uhh_dear_sp... [1] https://community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/Implement...
In the end, I listen to music with CD players mostly, and still insist on buy a car with CD player
I'm surprised the article doesn't cover a more relevant approach like just playing local mp3s from your computer. You get the same no ads, no privacy issues, no algorithms but you have the added benefit of not having to lug around a binder of CDs to play the songs you want.
This is how I've been listening to music for around 20 years and it works nicely. Been using foobar2000 since the beginning too (shortly after the Winamp rewrite that made it suck). It's a minimal mp3 player that uses about 5mb of RAM but has every feature I'd want for play back.
In practice, though, it's far more likely that the the disc will get corrupted from small scratches.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/08/18/34...
https://www.nature.com/news/2001/010628/full/news010628-11.h...
If you handled everything with white gloves and carefully moved the CD around it would probably last forever under a realistic scenario (you left it in a closet, didn't move it around much, etc.).
I have a bunch of original CDs from my first music collection that still work after ~20 years based on spot checking some of them 5+ years ago. Even with hundreds of playbacks.
But, I do have a handful of CDs that I remember having issues. They skip in certain spots due to artifacts on the CD. The real world happens. I don't remember what happened exactly in each case, but I'm guessing they got scratched. Like maybe I didn't put it fully into the black binder that held 200 CDs and I hit a bump in my car which caused the binder to jump around and an edge of the CD got clipped by the zipper, who knows.
Also burnt CDs seem to have a much worse shelf life. They are much more susceptible to being damaged. I don't know exactly why at a technical level but for sure I've had more burnt CDs fail over time. That becomes an issue when you want to back things up.
With mp3s, I can just put thousands of songs on my computer and everything works all the time. I never had an mp3 not play or skip unless the file itself was corrupt initially. They are also a heck of a lot more portable. You can put your collection on your phone, throw in some earbuds and now you can go on a run, or a 6 hour plane trip. You ever try running with a discman[0]? I have. It doesn't really work too well haha.
[0]: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41305EZ51FL...
Scratches and scuffs are rare "with good care". Even then, deep scratches are the real issue. Minor scratches are often irrelevant with the error correction.
So how does one need to wonder if the CD will even play?
Yes, that means Apple iTunes and the like provide tools for copyright infringement -- far worse than the young adult that got extradited to USA for providing links on a website (which is allowed in UK law) -- and in theory could be sued for contributory infringement.
AIUI the CDP would probably allow you to do format conversion for private study if the matter wasn't available to buy in a format you needed for that study; they'd probably want to see some outputs to show it was study and not entertainment (remember in tort the consideration is balance of probabilities, they don't have to show you infringed just that it was most likely - without research outputs [eg study notes] then the likelihood is you copied for entertainment purposes.
In short, if you're thinking "I can pretend it was for study" then I think you'd find the court is not that naive.
YMMV, this is not legal advice.
Well, if someone wanted to research a music discovery algorithm, then they would need to a have a large collection of music to test their algorithm, for example. Or perhaps someone wants to research differences between music preferences based on ethnicity, using some automated data analysis technique. This would also require a large collection of music.
1: https://www.riaa.com/resources-learning/about-piracy/
- Storage cost is trivial even with multiple backups
- Can be better quality than streaming
- Available offline, forever, at no extra cost
Sure, in some jurisdictions it's not legal to rip CDs you own but it's easy enough to defend morally if you're doing it for private use.
If you're going to rip your CDs, you should consider ripping to FLAC and Opus. The only reason to rip to mp3 is that basically every legacy device out there understands the mp3 format and knows how to play it. If you're playing back on a phone or PC or a more modern device, you should use a modern format. Both FLAC and Opus are totally open source.
FLAC is lossless and will reproduce your source CD bit for bit, but in a compressed format. Listening to music in a FLAC format is the same as listening to the original CD. Opus is a lossy format, so you lose some fidelity by necessity, but if you make that trade it's the best quality you're going to get. A double blind test had it outperform AAC and Vorbis, and significantly outperform mp3.
I rip my CDs to FLAC and store those files on my NAS. Then I convert the FLAC files to medium quality Opus files and those go on the SD card in my phone. I don't use old mp3 players, so I can do without mp3s.
Sorry. I'm not interested in participating in discussion guided by some authoritative mouthpiece of pre-approved water cooler banter.
These are arranges or sometimes heavily sampled albums that simply wouldn't pass on typical streaming platforms. Just something like Death Grips' cult Exmilitary album got removed from Spotify because it used a tad too many samples to their taste (although luckily it's available for free on their website).
In the west, there used to be forums (like doujinstyle) dedicated to sharing new releases after every event, which turned into large discord servers in the past year. Otherwise, a lot of the releases can be found on Asia-oriented private trackers as well.
These are often the only way to get a chance of actually listening to the album, since there's generally a limited number of physical albums available for sale at the event, and reprints during the next edition of the convention are uncommon.
I do like Spotify (even have a Premium subscription), but it's often missing the artists I like and the program itself is pretty terrible compared to something like Foobar/AIMP/PowerAmp In addition, having local music files opens up a whole world of new possibilities, like being able to add them to videos, having fun mixing/editing them and playing rhythm games like Audiosurf and Riff Racer
The key to me is that I am pretty much set in my music preferences. I still hear and occasionally buy new music but for the most part its static and I am just fine with that. Now of the streaming or the one satellite service give me enough flexibility to hear only want I want to hear. Worse, why would I want another monthly bill? Radio, I used to use it for commute traffic only and for the most part its the only reason I can see using it. Even now my car can update traffic on the navigation frequent enough to let me know what I may encounter
I used to think that until I got a music subscription. I end up finding old music that is new to me. About the only genre I do not like is country, but even that isn't a hard rule. I also find it fun to just get lost exploring genres of music, but I understand that may not be a common thing to do.
> Radio, I used to use it for commute traffic only and for the most part its the only reason I can see using it.
For me, podcasts killed the radio. Terrestrial radio feels like it's more commercials than content. If I do turn on the radio and on the rare chance it's not on a commercial, one is coming in the next minute or so.
The laptop just uses Rhythmbox, but you could obviously use whatever player you like. It's the best setup I've ever had. No terrible UI, no syncing, no garbage. I control what music is on there and where it's backed up. And most importantly, it has separated my music from general computer use. Yes it's technically playing on a computer it's the old linux laptop that's hooked up to the speakers. It barely uses any power and the keyboard is in an awkward position to type on. It's not convenient to watch videos or browse the internet on. It's not convenient to type on. It's really only good for listening to music. You can set it on and read, or do chores, or exercise, and never feel the urge to jump on HN, read the news, etc. If it weren't for the podcasts, it'd never even connect to the internet. And therefore it wouldn't matter if it were even updated or password protected.
As far as getting music to and from my setup, I'm usually pretty old fashioned. I have an external hard drive that I use for backup, and a thumb drive or two. Further, I have Owncloud set up on a Raspberry Pi, which is nice for moving a few files, but wouldn't be suitable for moving files of any real volume. Obviously, anyone could build a more mature and robust network drive if they liked, but this setup is more than suitable for my needs.
Seems like people actually have no idea what that word means.