I’ve been going through my own personal revival of physical media - mostly audio. I don’t miss streaming at all.
Every CD I buy gets ripped to a NAS that hosts the music behind Navidrone where I can stream to my vehicle using Play:Sub (thanks to Tailscale for enabling all of this to work for me!).
I am just so enamored with being able to get the best of both worlds - my own music, anywhere.
I do wish I could figure out some sort of recommendation system to find new magic, though. Obviously not to steam new/unowned songs, just to point me in a direction next time I go to the store.
I got myself an iPod Nano recently and love curating my songs to fit the 8GB [0]
But I have the same problem of trying to find recommendations. Whenever I talk about music with my brother and friends, that's when I discover the best music, but that happens rarely nowadays.
So with the help of Claude, I've revived my 10 year old project on finding music based on Spotify tracks and liked songs: https://noiseblend.com
Completely free, haven't shared it much because it's more of a personal thing than something I want public. But maybe it comes in handy for some people here.
I use spotify for convenience and social sake, my friends use it and its been the best mobile/android auto/desktop sync app but it's well known for not having literally the best albums/songs/eps/whatever that they can't monetize or license for whatever reason so you might want to expand your app to look at spotify for recs but factor in that even someone huge like mac miller has a ton of music not on spotify that a real fan would side-eye you for not knowing on a recommendation list.
Spotify is the disney land walled garden music app and right now Ella Langley is Minnie Mouse.
When you go camping or kayaking you can tell all the people using spotify, their playlists all blend into the same algosongs at some point.
Yep, I'm aware of that, I listen to a lot of live small room concerts of Jason Mraz for example, which aren't even on Youtube, I mostly get them from fan uploads on archive.org.
I mostly use Noiseblend to find such artists, or albums, and then I expand my search manually through Youtube, fan forums, archives. It would be a pain to try to integrate that into a web app.
> But I have the same problem of trying to find recommendations.
If you're buying music semi-regularly then the people at the record store are probably starting to recognize you and what you like and will probably be happy to recommendation stuff.
I suspect that the iPod nano is somewhat un-hackable, but the iPod mini and earlier models actually had physical mini EIDE spinning disks in them. The interface was electrically identical (or close enough) to CompactFlash cards that a little service I ran on the side for beer money was upgrading people’s iPods to CF. Nowadays you can get absolutely gargantuan CF cards. I put a 256GB CF card in my iPod mini and the firmware, to my surprise, had no trouble recognizing the capacity. I also personally love that form factor, but obviously, different strokes for different folks.
I do appreciate that you said that you enjoy curating your 8GB but I got tired with that way back in 2003 when I bought my first iPod. I never want to go back to that.
> I do wish I could figure out some sort of recommendation system to find new magic, though. Obviously not to steam new/unowned songs, just to point me in a direction next time I go to the store.
Or set up "soulsync" and just use the library scanning, scrobbling, and recommendations / artist watching features if you don't want to pirate the music as well.
And how many CDs can you buy per month for the price of a Spotify subscription? I am not going to be spending hundreds of Euros per month on physical media, and I also value my time too much to bother with ripping and converting these, just so I can end up with a worse experience for more money, while also producing a bunch of unnecessary plastic rubbish.
After ten years of Spotify subscriptions, you own nothing. Put that $12.99 or more per month into discs instead, and you'd have quite a nice music collection that's still yours ten years later.
You dont own those either. If you lose your copy, it's gone forever with no remediation or claim of ownership except at the specific retailer you did your transaction at. The source where it came from is unaffected by your loss, and they can decide at any time to stop selling their discs with or without your involvement. The nostalgic rose tinted pandering behind vinyls and old media conveniently forgets the introduction of digital storage to actually ensure reliable redundancy, and so "buying" physical media is just a smoke and mirrors way of saying the disc is for vain aesthetics while the actual mental relief comes from the secondary process being able to digitize it locally.
Following the same mindset of circumventing the traditional process, I could spend one single month ripping every single song I possibly can from Spotify and have the same claim of ownership over their files that you do with a much larger variety and without all the wasted physical space on assets that are immediately digitized. The only benefit to your method is that you feel like it justifies hoarding.
Presumably people also have some sense of fair exchange when buying the disc to rip vs. ripping from Spotify. If you want to be strictly rational you can of course skip the Spotify part too and just pirate it.
At least for a family plan ($22/mo), around 2-20 or so depending on the CD. That accumulates pretty quickly, and of course you don't have to worry about limitations like living at the same address.
This may be the main difference between consuming content and listening to music. For some people, more is not always better and the process of building a collection and putting time and energy into it is a big part of the experience.
I don't understand myself, what you actually gain from constantly buying new music. Either the music is good, or it's not. If it's not it's not a loss to not buy it, and if it is it's not going to stop invoking the emotions you like it for, or intellectually demand you. You can hear the same music for hundred of times and still discover some new aspect, instrument, melody or sound, you haven't noticed yet. (if it is good)
If I would try to chase, constantly, new music, I wouldn't be able to actually listen to anything, and thus wouldn't enjoy anything at all.
I'm far less ambitious, but I ripped my entire 100+-disc collection to FLAC years ago. I've set up a mutant shell script/Makefile hybrid that can transcode the entire FLAC tree to whatever format du jour makes sense (Opus these days), while doing it all in parallel and using all cores (really all but one to keep the system responsive). Album art in the FLACs gets carried over along with tags.
On the LAN, the FLACs just sit in an NFS share, while on the phone, Foobar2000 works nicely with the Opus files.
For me, the easy one is books. I love books, both for their content and as physical objects.
I love my pdf folder with a million papers, documents, etc. Sorted and easy available. But mentally it does not compare with my library.
In a trip I will bring my tablet to read books. It is practical and if a book does not click I have many more. At home I prefer the physical thing.
None of them comes, at least directly, from algorithms. I add books to my list of purchases when they get mention on YouTube, another books, news, or even here.
Many years ago I used Amazon book store suggestions because they were extremely good. But that was the time before enshitification when they were trying to give you the book the you will like the most not the one that will give them more profit.
I'm an avid tape collector, and I especially love the small 'mixtape' labels. Every month, I get two or three mixtapes from a handful of little labels. They can have anything on them. It's always exciting to get one in the post and sit down to listen to it.
I used to like to buy TDK tapes second hand and listen to the mixes. Almost every one had something obscure on it I loved but they have dried up over the last 12 months.
Yeah, it’s a strange window into someone else’s life.
A few years ago I stopped at an estate sale in a small town I was passing through, far away from home. Picked up an 8-track player and a few dozen cartridges, the majority of which were mixes.
It was just fascinating to listen to. I’m pretty sure it was mostly obscure 1970s and 1980s country with the odd Blondie song thrown in here or there.
You can escape algorithms by choosing what you consume, regardless of what platform you're using. I had digitized my CD collection 15 years ago. but I never listened to those. I purchase misic directly from artists (Bandcamp), I don't buy physical media. And if their stuff is also on Apple Music, that's where I listen.
I am a "media fan" and algorithms (going back to last.fm) have make me discover so much music that it's not even funny. The idea of "escaping algorithms" is a net negative for me.
I guess the point (at least for me) is a bit to get rid of weird intransparent algorithms that seemingly got worse over the past couple of years. Using a platform like last.fm where it’s clearer that recommendations are based on genres and similar listeners is still ok and encouraged, and probably as close to getting recommendations from real humans as possible.
When they are serving someone else, and manipulating your attention to push promoted content instead of stuff you might actually like, or serve you ads, or track your behavior so that information can be sold, then not so much.
The Spotify algorithm is pretty bad for me. It pushes a lot of stuff I have no interest in (especially podcasts and audiobooks). The Apple Music algorithm is a bit better, but it's almost too conservative.
That gives me an idea: a "CD player" that accepts the entire jewel case and has a camera inside that reads the barcode, retrieves the album, and plays it.
I was in shop the other day with my daughter and the walls were covered in cassette tapes as decoration.
I has to take SO MANY steps back to explain what they were.
I realised she thought all music was just magically created when you ask Alexa for it - so we had to start there to explain someone has to make the music first, and go back though streaming services, digital downloads, to having to literally go to a shop to buy a single song for £4 - which is probably about £20 now adjusted for inflation.
We are genuinely at the point now where you can just mostly summon this into existence with a coding agent.
I thought through the UI and tech stack and reasearched what would actually work first and then wrote a very detailed brief for Codex. And about 2 hours of back and forth and re-thinking later, it works.
One challenge was that the phone has to have the NFC UI on while looking for cards, but i wanted it to turn off while playing so I could have a hole in the box to a blank screen she can swipe to skip back and forward.
This stumped Codex - but I then had the idea to use the depth cam to detect cards placed on the phone, then only show the scan UI again when the card is removed.
So now it works really seamlessly.
1) Place card on, music instantly starts, even remembers where in the song and playlist you are.
2) Remove card, phone detects it can see at least a few cm, instant stop.
3) Place a new, or the same card on and that instantly plays from the last position.
It’s funny, I proposed essentially this idea on HN awhile back and the pigpile of commenters who said it was a stupid idea made me reconsider whether I really wanted to share ideas here. It’s great to see that you actually did it. I’d love to read a blog post if you ever get around to it!
I think streaming and physical media complement each other nicely. If you have the family plan streaming can end up costing less than $4 / month (Spotify) so it's pretty cheap.
If you start streaming at 20 and plan to live to 80, that's a total cost of $2,880 assuming the price never increases. The price will increase and you don't even get ownership.
I have a pretty large music collection that I am happy with and I haven't paid that much for it.
I enjoyed the social aspect of listening to music: talking to my friends about the latest release. But when everyone's has their little music bubble that's lost. I guess the music companies found that less profitable than having you plugged into their recommendations.
I’m going back to CDs and ripping them because I’m fed up of shit disappearing from streaming services. Plus having to pay for access. Plus the crappy offline experience. Plus the crappy apps you have to use. Plus the devices that play them have a million other distractions I want to avoid. Oh and all the shite that is promoted constantly.
I am so mad / ashamed that I tossed my big CD book not long ago. Now would be a perfect time to rip those CDs - especially as I am getting into DJ work on the side!
> I’m going back to CDs and ripping them because I’m fed up of shit disappearing from streaming services.
Back in the day you could buy a CD, listen to it for a few days, and then return it if you didn't like (just like returns for any other product). Then folks discovered ripping and returned them even if they liked them, so music retailers had to stop it.
I discovered a lot of new music in the 1990s by buying a stack and returning some but keeping others.
I think streaming could still be useful for discovery, but once you've discovered a musician/group that you like, pick up a copy of their music outside of streaming so that you can actually own it (even if 'only' MP3/AAC/FLAC/OGG files and not physical media).
personally have been ripping 60/90 minute youtube sets to cassettes using a really nice automatic cassette recorder/player i got for cheap because no one uses cassettes anymore i guess
Physical media (especially in the film space) remains sometimes the only option if you don't want to compromise on quality. Sadly you have to compromise in other ways: unskippable trailers/copyright warnings for example.
I do worry that Bluray is just becoming more niche and the studios/distributors will do away with it in favour of their own streaming platforms.
I apologise for the self-promotion, but I started https://www.dvd.club for this very reason, hoping to find a like-minded community of physical media enthusiasts, willing to share their collections with each other.
As a classical listener, I never really prefer streaming services. Each classical piece is usually dense and requires multiple passes to memorize and process. While one of the fun parts is comparing different interpretations by different musicians, we usually eventually settle on one or a few versions, like some folks, me included, prefer Furtwängler for anything Germanic, despite his recordings are more than 74 years old (albeit remastered multiple times). The only new recording I listened this year is Chris Thile's well anticipated Bach Sonatas & Partitas Vol. 2.
I guess it'll come across as obnoxious if I say I never actually used streaming services. I just never liked having to be connected to the internet at all times, and I liked having all my music collection on my private device. When I feel like I want to stream music, I use online radio. I have a few gems in my library that are hard to come across online (because nobody else cares but I do). I've always been a digital hoarder.
I'm not a fan of movies and shows, so I can't share my opinion here.
You're not alone ;) There's so much music that's in my collection which is unavailable on streaming services, and having to be online to listen to music sounds like a poor value proposition to me anyway. I just carry my collection on my phone's SD card rsynced with my PC and it's exactly what I need.
I personally never stopped. I had my collection I've been building since before I owned a Zune, and never wanted to give that up. Local media is infinitely higher quality than streaming anyway.
If you self-host, you owe it to yourself to set up Navidrome.
Personally, while I understand the importance of discovery both for artists and for many listeners, it’s not at all how I listen to music. I know what work I want to hear, by what artist or ensemble and I want that exact thing. It’s not that I’m not open to other interpretations; it’s just in the moment that I want to listen, it’s a particular thing. That my ripped CD collection is such an infinitesimal representation of all that’s out there is a feature for me, not a bug. And the problem of ephemerality on some of these platforms is yet another problem.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 68.4 ms ] threadEvery CD I buy gets ripped to a NAS that hosts the music behind Navidrone where I can stream to my vehicle using Play:Sub (thanks to Tailscale for enabling all of this to work for me!).
I am just so enamored with being able to get the best of both worlds - my own music, anywhere.
I do wish I could figure out some sort of recommendation system to find new magic, though. Obviously not to steam new/unowned songs, just to point me in a direction next time I go to the store.
But I have the same problem of trying to find recommendations. Whenever I talk about music with my brother and friends, that's when I discover the best music, but that happens rarely nowadays.
So with the help of Claude, I've revived my 10 year old project on finding music based on Spotify tracks and liked songs: https://noiseblend.com
Completely free, haven't shared it much because it's more of a personal thing than something I want public. But maybe it comes in handy for some people here.
[0] https://files.alinpanaitiu.com/ipod-nano.mp4
Spotify is the disney land walled garden music app and right now Ella Langley is Minnie Mouse.
When you go camping or kayaking you can tell all the people using spotify, their playlists all blend into the same algosongs at some point.
I mostly use Noiseblend to find such artists, or albums, and then I expand my search manually through Youtube, fan forums, archives. It would be a pain to try to integrate that into a web app.
If you're buying music semi-regularly then the people at the record store are probably starting to recognize you and what you like and will probably be happy to recommendation stuff.
I do appreciate that you said that you enjoy curating your 8GB but I got tired with that way back in 2003 when I bought my first iPod. I never want to go back to that.
Navidrome can scrobble to https://listenbrainz.org/ which has a recommendations mechanism
Or set up "soulsync" and just use the library scanning, scrobbling, and recommendations / artist watching features if you don't want to pirate the music as well.
Following the same mindset of circumventing the traditional process, I could spend one single month ripping every single song I possibly can from Spotify and have the same claim of ownership over their files that you do with a much larger variety and without all the wasted physical space on assets that are immediately digitized. The only benefit to your method is that you feel like it justifies hoarding.
If I would try to chase, constantly, new music, I wouldn't be able to actually listen to anything, and thus wouldn't enjoy anything at all.
It's all on youtube (at least for things I listen to). So I listen once and if I like it I buy the CD.
On the LAN, the FLACs just sit in an NFS share, while on the phone, Foobar2000 works nicely with the Opus files.
I love my pdf folder with a million papers, documents, etc. Sorted and easy available. But mentally it does not compare with my library.
In a trip I will bring my tablet to read books. It is practical and if a book does not click I have many more. At home I prefer the physical thing.
None of them comes, at least directly, from algorithms. I add books to my list of purchases when they get mention on YouTube, another books, news, or even here.
Many years ago I used Amazon book store suggestions because they were extremely good. But that was the time before enshitification when they were trying to give you the book the you will like the most not the one that will give them more profit.
Note that I do still stream and buy digital on Bandcamp though.
A few years ago I stopped at an estate sale in a small town I was passing through, far away from home. Picked up an 8-track player and a few dozen cartridges, the majority of which were mixes.
It was just fascinating to listen to. I’m pretty sure it was mostly obscure 1970s and 1980s country with the odd Blondie song thrown in here or there.
YMMV
When they are serving someone else, and manipulating your attention to push promoted content instead of stuff you might actually like, or serve you ads, or track your behavior so that information can be sold, then not so much.
By now the Spotify algorithm has been good for me. The day it starts being bad I’ll badmouth it. It’s not the time yet.
For me, Pandora gets it just about right.
The inverted commas are because it’s actually all MP3s that are stored on a phone.
But the phone is in a box
Connected to a speaker
Running an app I made that plays playlists when she places an nfc card on the box
Basically it’s a bootleg Yoto / Tonie box but completely free, and our own music.
Also got a desktop app where I download stuff, make plays lists and it auto syncs to the phone.
She actually really likes it. Having a physical sense of what you own feels good!
I wish I could take all the credit but Codex helped, a bit…
It's so dumb and so functional at the same time.
My favourite ideas usually hug that Pareto frontier.
https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/release/?query=barcode:50997465...
This was the first CD I ever owned
* https://gnudb.org
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB
* https://github.com/RecursiveForest/py-cddb
I has to take SO MANY steps back to explain what they were.
I realised she thought all music was just magically created when you ask Alexa for it - so we had to start there to explain someone has to make the music first, and go back though streaming services, digital downloads, to having to literally go to a shop to buy a single song for £4 - which is probably about £20 now adjusted for inflation.
People born before WWI had to feel similarly when WWII started.
One thing I love most about old tech is that it is single purpose = no distrations!
This is becoming more and more true.
I thought through the UI and tech stack and reasearched what would actually work first and then wrote a very detailed brief for Codex. And about 2 hours of back and forth and re-thinking later, it works.
One challenge was that the phone has to have the NFC UI on while looking for cards, but i wanted it to turn off while playing so I could have a hole in the box to a blank screen she can swipe to skip back and forward.
This stumped Codex - but I then had the idea to use the depth cam to detect cards placed on the phone, then only show the scan UI again when the card is removed.
So now it works really seamlessly.
1) Place card on, music instantly starts, even remembers where in the song and playlist you are.
2) Remove card, phone detects it can see at least a few cm, instant stop.
3) Place a new, or the same card on and that instantly plays from the last position.
I have a pretty large music collection that I am happy with and I haven't paid that much for it.
There is no possible acceptable article with this title.
It’s a race to the bottom and I’m done with that.
Back in the day you could buy a CD, listen to it for a few days, and then return it if you didn't like (just like returns for any other product). Then folks discovered ripping and returned them even if they liked them, so music retailers had to stop it.
I discovered a lot of new music in the 1990s by buying a stack and returning some but keeping others.
I think streaming could still be useful for discovery, but once you've discovered a musician/group that you like, pick up a copy of their music outside of streaming so that you can actually own it (even if 'only' MP3/AAC/FLAC/OGG files and not physical media).
Do you want the car to drive you? Or do you want to drive the car?
I do worry that Bluray is just becoming more niche and the studios/distributors will do away with it in favour of their own streaming platforms.
I apologise for the self-promotion, but I started https://www.dvd.club for this very reason, hoping to find a like-minded community of physical media enthusiasts, willing to share their collections with each other.
I'm not a fan of movies and shows, so I can't share my opinion here.
If you self-host, you owe it to yourself to set up Navidrome.
I'm not so sure that's true anymore... It might be as good, but from an audio perspective, not better.
A lot of the artists I follow (bandcamp) stopped offering CDs (yes, vinyl is often an option, but I'm not a hipster).
Side note, Sony introduced the CD player on 10/1/82, 44 years ago yesterday.