I'm definitely on board with physical media. Almost all the vinyl I've bought comes with a download code anyway, and album artwork shines on a 12" x 12" canvas much more than it ever could on the tiny thumbnail you get on a music player app.
That being said, indie music stores like Bandcamp are digital only, but offer one-click DRM-free MP3 downloads for purchased songs/albums. The UX is focused on buying music first and supporting individual artists, rather than commoditizing their sound into an algorithmic playlist where they're lumped in with everybody else.
I honestly find Spotify and Apple Music bad for music discovery if your tastes aren't really adjacent to Top 40 (is that even a thing today?) style pop music. Back in the day, Last.fm used your iTunes/Foobar play history to show you bands you'd like. The algorithm was based on user-submitted tags, and the recommendations weren't limited to bands that had deals with the platform. I discovered a ton of new music across very different genres there. Unfortunately it doesn't look like the site is very active these days.
> I honestly find Spotify and Apple Music bad for music discovery if your tastes aren't really adjacent to Top 40 (is that even a thing today?) style pop music.
I strongly disagree. Spotify has dramatically increased the variety of music that I listen to and introduced me to lost of tiny artists with great music.
I'm looking at the official chart top 40 online and have to go down to 7th place to find an artist I know (Taylor Swift). Only one song on my "Release Radar" is in the Top 40 list (Sixteen by Ellie Goulding).
I think you get what you look for with Spotify. If you listen to a bunch of Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift, you'll be recommended a things like Aria Grande and AVICII. But if you listen to An Horse and Houndsmouth then you'll aparently get recommendations for The Mountain Goats and Me Not You.
> I strongly disagree. Spotify has dramatically increased the variety of music that I listen to and introduced me to lost of tiny artists with great music.
I've used a number of music recommendation applications over the last decade.
With Spotify, I've noticed that it will become "stuck" in what I describe as similar artist troughs and valleys. In other words, the Spotify recommendation engine will pigeonhole your recommendations into certain subgenres, niches, or related artists more so than say Pandora or Last.fm would.
Yup, I've had to work around this. I'll pick a song I like, and do "song radio" to find more like it. But this makes a playlist which is basically 6 more similar artists, and no variety beyond that. But I want to branch out more, several steps beyond that. So I'll open a particular song from that playlist, go to "song radio" for that, and drag a bunch of songs I don't recognize back into the first playlist. Repeat this for a few more songs. Then once I've added a bunch more variety, do "playlist radio" again.
It's super obnoxious. I wish they had a slider for "be more adventurous" versus "hew close to the line". Do I remember Pandora having something like that?
Spotify automatically creates a playlist from songs you've "liked" while they're playing on radio. So just start a certain song radio, like the kind of songs that go into the direction you want, and then start playlist radio on the "Liked from Radio" playlist.
Wholeheartedly agree. While my musical tastes are a bit all over the place, I can say that for the past month or so almost all my generated suggestion playlists consist of music I've not only listened to recently, but many I already liked and saved to my songs.
I can second this. Spotify has really helped me discover artists and bands I enjoy.
Years ago, I would have spent a non-zero amount of time linking through friends on Last.FM / Audioscrobbler. While this can be enjoyable, having it done by an algorithm is perfectly fine for me and I'm willing to pay for it.
> Spotify has dramatically increased the variety of music that I listen to and introduced me to lost of tiny artists with great music.
I can't speak to Spotify, but many years ago I picked up some agent software that does a rough analysis of the music I enjoy, then crawls the web looking for music that resembles it. I use that for recommendations.
The software is a bit crude in its analysis, but I think that's a feature, not a bug, because it ensures that in the mix of music that I certainly will like are random tunes that I would never have thought to listen to, and often those turn out to be gems.
Most of the music the crawler finds is from indie artists that aren't well-known at all. When I find a new one that I enjoy, I make it a point to seek them out and buy their music directly from them.
Anyway, this has been my solution for about 15 years now, and it works great for me!
Sounds like you made a little Music Genome Project (by Pandora) like system. Lately I've been thinking about building something like that using machine learning and the hopes that it would scale better than Pandora's effort did.
It's a freeware script that I picked over a decade ago. I don't remember where I got it or what it's called, though. I'm not able to access the server it's on at the moment, but I'll comment here once I can.
>I strongly disagree. Spotify has dramatically increased the variety of music that I listen to and introduced me to lost of tiny artists with great music.
There was even a post on HN recently by a small artist talking about how the Discover algorithms brought listeners to his music that probably never would have found him otherwise.
I'm a big fan of the recommendation algorithms, so I set up a super basic site to wrap the Spotify API and let anyone get recommendations based on a single song link, rather than waiting for the Discover Weekly recs which are based off the blend of everything you listen to.
Honestly not sure since I don't know which APIs + secret sauce they put into Song Radio.
I personally found Song Radio a little lacking - I never usually liked the most of the related songs, it didn't allow me to reshuffle the recommendations.
The /recommend API I wrapped for the site is similar, in that I let it spit out 12 "similar" songs, but I'll probably only like one or two songs, but you can also re-submit to shuffle the recommendations. The site is definitely more for active discovery than passively listening. I made the site because:
1. I wanted to more actively discover songs
2. I'm a big Spotify fan and was curious about the guts of the recommendations algorithm
3. I had never deployed an actual site (I exclusively do backend programming at work) so it was good learning experience about things like setting up a little static site
Spotify has good suggestions. All you need to pick is the genre and then you go to song/playlist radio and you are good. I have found many bands and it often recommends bands with foreign languages( which I don't want). Then there is also your discover weekly which usually gives me at least 1 or 2 good songs.
I can confirm this. Pre-Spotify it was either listen to top 100 music or use up a lot of time downloading VS tracks. Now most my of music doesn't even chart.
I neither have the space, budget, or time to trade my music in the cloud for physical media. My online collection is much larger than either my Mp3 or physical media collection.
I only keep Spotify because of "Discover Weekly" playlist generated every Monday based on your taste. The algorithm is truly incredible. There are weeks I find myself saving half of the songs.
found a lot of greeat stuff on spotify. it has never sent me some topN track as an ad... :s never. jut dont search for these things if u dont want it to suggest it to u ;)
Spotify has never recommended a typical “top 40” mainstream artist to me. I looked at the top 100 Billboard list and while I recognize most of the artists, I don’t recognize any of the songs or albums since i don’t listen to those artists. The only exception is that I have listened to Offset’s songs recently.
The algo isn’t the best, but it’s not awful or just giving you the most popular music around. For example they never recommended Billie Eilish to me which would be a win for their algo not just recommending popular things that are sort of adjacent to music I’m listening to.
Checking the playlists Spotify created for me, they seem pretty decent. Nothing to do with top charting pop music.
Last.fm syncs with Spotify seamlessly too and many other platforms.
That's weird because for the first 6 weeks or so my "Discover Weekly" was all hits by bands I already knew. It did fairly quickly transition to deeper cuts and more obscure artists though.
Perhaps they did. I probably shouldn’t have been so certain in my wording. I likely did not check the Spotify playlists when I first got the service. It’s been a while now.
Badcamp has physical media as well. It's up to the artist to produce and deliver them.
Since I find mp3 unacceptable audio quality, especially on PA sound systems, I collect flac only. Many shops have a shitty policy on lossless, thanks bandcamp for being proper.
Bandcamp really is fantastic and will always have a special place for me. Just let me buy the stuff, choose my format, (even ogg!). Even let me sample it a good amount of times, and no obnoxious nonsense on their website. I hope they're doing really well.
That said, for a larger number of really major artists, I heard about something called HDTracks. I haven't tried them yet, but it seems that they sell FLAC in 24 bit audio.
>Almost all the vinyl I've bought comes with a download code anyway, and album artwork shines on a 12" x 12" canvas much more than it ever could on the tiny thumbnail you get on a music player app.
My dad was huge into music and had a vinyl collection of 300-400 albums. As a kid, I used to check out the album covers and inserts as I ate breakfast. One that I distinctly remember is cover for "The Wall"
Their recommendations were miles ahead of anything Spotify, Apple or Google have ever managed. So last.fm killed off the radio, the streaming, then started playing random Youtube vids for each track - very often a poor rendition, or a cover etc.
I gave up years ago, but still miss that recommendation engine that drove the radio stations - I discovered so many brilliant new-to-me artists through that. Scrobbling listens into a different platform or recommendation engine is the least useful part of what they did.
I registered my account at last.fm in 2006 but stopped in 2015-2016 when they took away many of the most attractive and cool features of the site with the redesign despite an incredible amount of feedback on the forums (that were also taken away in favor of a survey...). I still can't believe what they've done. Last.fm has been neglected to a degree that surprises me to this day. I spent so much time posting in the discussion groups (also removed!), reading interesting journals about music that others had written (another feature removed).
I've since switched to Libre.fm. But it won't ever be the same. I think it's hugely disappointing to see what was such a transformative service tossed to the wayside at the hands of CBS.
The average person with a $10/month budget in 1997 (let's ignore inflation for now) is buying maybe 8-10 CDs a year. They're absolutely not long-tail discovering new stuff. They're buying what they hear on the radio.
It's basically an indefensible position that we're not discovering more and paying for more 'long tail' type media in the digital streaming era.
As someone that was in college in 1997, I think that estimate is way low. I bought ~4 CDs per month and so did most of the people I knew. You're forgetting that we traded and sold back discs, and that music was more actively discovered. If you cared about finding music, you'd find local deals and make connections that could stretch a dollar, and most young folks budgeted much more than $10/month. You heard about bands from magazines, friends, a mention in an artist interview, etc, and it was not uncommon to buy more randomly. Hell, I've bought albums simply because the cover looked cool and it was in the right genre.
My point is that music discovery, like all recommendation systems right now, is severely lacking in what made media discovery more meaningful in the 90s - that controlled chaos that led to surprises. Now everything collapses towards the mean of mediocrity. Sure you discover more 'bands' now, but they're belting out the same tracks with an extra half beat or a pitch shift, so I hardly call it 'discovery'. Long-tail used to be more fringe, but high-quality and related, unlike now, where it's the worst within the technical bounds of the algorithm. We're discovering more within our local minima, which is technically discovering more, but in the most frightfully boring way possible.
I would not have been exposed to at least half of the music I regularly listen to now if I had something like Spotify back then. I tried to use Spotify, Pandora, and Google Music, but after a month they each felt like I was listening to generic music station #342398 and I went back to purchasing albums. It's weird when a single album can be more diverse than a station with nearly limitless tracks to pull from.
And don't even get me started on how recommendation services have killed the idea of an 'album' - maybe the most rewarding facet of music production basically wiped out in less than a decade.
In 1997, I'd wager more people listened to college radio than they do now, simply because there weren't as many alternatives.
Their bookstores would likely also have had a few rock/alternative/electronic music magazines to offer choices outside of Top 40.
If they were lucky, they might also have had an indie music store in town where you could browse through the stacks and make conversation with the proprietors who'd turn you on to new stuff.
I listen pretty much exclusively to extreme metal and punk rock and Google Play Music has been doing an incredible job of recommending new music that I enjoy.
I actually sent a suggestion/complaint to Google regarding their recommendations. If I start a radio station based on e.g. a 2009 indie pop song I'll mostly hear songs made around that year, usually like 2006~2013, with newer songs just absent. If I make a station based on a 2019 indie pop song, for the most part it's all the same bands as the 2009 playlist, it's just that the songs are more recent. I don't really like this because it forces me into a time capsule instead of just playing indie pop songs from any decade.
DJs and Soundcloud help me discover new music more than iTunes or Spotify ever could. Human curation is better than algorithms. Bandcamp is consistently the best place to buy music, both high quality digital and vinyl.
>I honestly find Spotify and Apple Music bad for music discovery if your tastes aren't really adjacent to Top 40 (is that even a thing today?) style pop music.
I couldn't agree more. I have found new artists that I probably wouldn't have listened to with both spotify and last fm. But with last.FM radio alone I have discovered more genres.
Discovery on Spotify isn't terrible, but I think Pandora is just really good at that since that was part of its original purpose with the music genome stuff. Plus it aims for more variety, avoiding playing a single artist too heavily.
I posted this down below, but I want to share my personal method of music discovery.
Pick a few physical music venues nearby that you like, and make a list of all the artists playing shows there for the next month or two. Then take a song by each artist and chuck it into a playlist (could be youtube or bandcamp or spotify, whatever). Listen, and when you hear something you like, maybe listen to their latest release! If it's good, you've just found an artist you like, and guess what? They're playing a show nearby soon.
As far as I can tell, Last.fm is still quite active, but not as much as it was at its peak. I wonder if that's what you meant, or something else. Anyway, as far as I'm concerned it's active: https://www.last.fm/user/wyclif
I still buy CDs but mostly for artwork and nostalgic value. I remember going to friends' places and browsing their CD collections and trying various CDs.
It is rare these days to browse anyone's music collection on their cellphone. The most we do is just search for music we want to hear or want our friends to hear.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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).
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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've got all my music ripped to FLAC, sitting on my file server, a little N40L microserver with 8tb mirrored storage (my music takes about 300gb total). On the server, I've got a script that uses ffmpeg to convert from flac to whatever format I want (currently aac and mp3, which my player devices support). The script also applies replaygain to keep the volume consistent. I run the script once and it processes the whole shebang.
This means that I control all of my music, stored in lossless format on a backed up server in my house, able to be deployed to any device I want whenever I want, in whatever audio format is popular at the time, in perpetuity.
I know it was not your intention but your comment reminds me of the infamous HN comment on why dropbox is useless and would never be successful.[1] :))
"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."
> I know it was not your intention but your comment reminds me of the infamous HN comment on why dropbox is useless and would never be successful.[1] :))
Except the context of the argument is different. OP is doing this for convenience and privacy reasons along with the availability and no-cost argument. While it's a slight point to make it is an important one these days. With the Dropbox argument the old HN comment was making the point without the context of privacy, security or even availability of which we all have to consider today. We know service providers have removed or deleted purchases by users. Some providers remove content and make it paid for during adventageous times of the year (e.g. holidays) and, well, privacy doesn't need much expansion here. We also know vendors can lock you into hardware ecosystems through file formats. Finally if we all stop DIYing our media/files/etc the options will turn into expert level oniy. So the continuation of this being a thing keeps the open side of the conversation right side up. Lest we all end up boiled frogs.
> I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
I googled for 'dropbox financials', and soon ran across a TC article about its IPO last year [1] which says:
> The company’s prospectus warns it has “a history of net losses”; anticipates increasing expenses and slowing revenue growth; and notes that it “may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability.”
I'm still not sure that snarky 10-year-old comment was far off.
Dropbox has been operating at a loss since its creation and is currently not making a profit, so the jury is still out on whether it is actually successful (or just a VC-subsidized service that got advertised a lot).
You are correct, but the metrics of success have always been different in tech. Regular businesses would be considered failures if they had 10 years in the red. But if you get a "unicorn" valuation and manage to IPO without even making a profit, well, that's the dream for a lot of HN'ers. If somebody out there makes you a multi-millionaire based either on faith in your company or in their ability to shift the risk to the next sucker, who're you to say no?
This gives me concerns about legacy. Henry Ford is still well known and quoted today not only because he built a well known company and iconic products a century ago, but because his company is still building cultural icons today (F-150 and Mustang).
I would much prefer to build a Ford than a Yahoo/Tumblr/Compaq, even if it meant my personal fortune was 10x or 100x lower.
>the metrics of success have always been different in tech.
It hasn't always been that way at all, but it certainly is now. I think this is one of the huge red flags about the modern incarnation of the tech industry.
If dropbox only had a high valuation on paper, but employees/founders/investors couldn't actually exchange that into real $ in their bank account then sure, you can say the jury is still out.
But that's not the case. They built a product, have tons of paying users, and have IPO'd with a market cap over $10B. It's not money that only exists on paper. Founders and employees can sell their shares for real money and buy real things.
Their shareholders aren't just a handful of VC's anymore - they are public. The jury has decided, it's successful
Hypothetically, what if it never begins earning more money than it spends each year? At some point wouldn't it be unable to borrow any more (from banks or investors) and be forced to shut down? And if so, we still don't know if it can be profitable, right?
It’s successful to me as a user. Beats the heck out of that whole “set up an FTP server” recommendation. And how much is their loss due to growth focused investment?
My setup is far simplified from the parent's--I simply have all my music backed up onto an external HDD that is attached to my HTPC (roughly 2TB of MP3s and FLACs). The "Music" folder is shared over the network via the Windows share option, and all of my Linux machines are able to trivially mount the directory as well using a SMB/CIFS share.
There's so little effort required that I'd barely consider it a DIY solution, considering that most of the OS's can see it and access the drive without leaving the file explorer.
I also discovered it happily continues to work when my ISP had an outage, since all of the IPs were local and still accessible provided that the router was up.
Actually, I'm rather shocked that there isn't an all-in-one solution like what I've cobbled together. It's not like there's any super secret magic involved; you'd just need a nice user interface on top of it all.
There are even music streaming servers that you can deploy on a VPS (or locally) pretty easily. Pop in a little rsync script to move your converted lossy files to the streamer and you're set. It's just that nobody's built something that integrates everything yet, thus my Frankenstein setup.
Plex doesn't convert files for storage on a portable device, nor does it replaygain. It also has a terrible music selector interface and doesn't firewall punch.
Streaming is only part of the issue. I'm talking about the whole lifecycle, from backed up lossless to lossy-on-device in whatever format, or to a streaming service that integrates with your player devices, all from a single source of truth that you control 100% with no silly DRM or ads or restrictions.
As the MIT / New Jersey schism taught us decades ago, there is no one concept of "simple". Simple in design? In implementation? For the user? For the architect? To set up? To troubleshoot?
Which is simpler: a pile of files on a hard disk, or a playlist in an online music service? It depends.
It's like asking what's the simplest mode of transportation: a 1985 Toyota, a 2018 Toyota, a Lyft, a bus, or a bicycle. You could make a good case for any of these, depending on your situation. I know people who can't operate a manual transmission, so the 1985 Toyota would be problematic for them, but on the other hand, I've never fixed a 2018 Toyota (or a bus) with just the tools in my backpack and a water bottle.
I use git annex for my library. This way I can easily replicate my 3 TB archive to multiple devices. Since my notebook is size constrained, I can clone my archive and just pull the files I actually need.
Having CD's that go back to their launch (plus records/cassettes from before), I had to rip a couple of thousand CDs to FLAC so I'm totally with you on this one. Unfortunately a lot of people don't understand what's thrown away when converting to a lossy format, and the consequential horrible degradation that comes with converting from one lossy format to another. It's not like storage or bandwidth is an issue now (soon even the 2:1 or 3:1 lossless with FLAC won't be worth it). Just save the raw data and move on.
Of course it's more 'convenient' to trust cloud service X but (as recently discussed here) 'convenient' services can turn out to be pretty venal - not to mention short-lived (Microsoft Zune,various google services, random shuttered startups etc).
I do something similar (ripping to FLAC, putting on a tiny fileserver, except mine is an Antec ISK-300 with a single 6TB disk and external backups), and then use Logitech Media Server to serve it out to other machines.
"Squeezer" is excellent as a remote control for this, and I just have a stream URL I point players at to all play the same thing, or they can use DLNA and slurp music from the archive.
Works nicely, but does require more setup than most users will want to do when they can just plug in a "smart" speaker and stream from Spotify or whatever.
My current setup is a Docker container[0] with a musikcube[1] daemon in an ARM board (ROCK960 Model C) and on my phone I use the musikdroid client. At first, it was an investment of time, but now requires almost no maintenance.
You've solved the storage/archival half of the problem. What do you use on the UX side for playback? Do you just stream everything, or use some sort of an app for choosing which songs to pin to your mobile devices? Personally I use syncthing and keep a complete copy of all my mp3s (only ~5GB in my case) on my phone. I'm curious what others use though.
That's what I'm using. A central machine (that has an output to main audio system), with it being controllable from anywhere using various MPD clients. I tried to go the streaming route with MPD to enable music to be played in multiple rooms, but it was very finicky and susceptible to network problems. Instead, another output of the main machine goes to an FM transmitter, and any other audio system can pick it up. The sound quality is not pristine, but it's acceptable. Music in any room, all properly synced and centrally controllable.
I ripped my 1000+ cds in about 1 month. I specifically designed my scripts so that ripping was a separate task from "meta data" inputting. I'd bring a stack of 50ish discs to work and start ripping. The cd tray would open when it was done and I'd put in the next one and close the tray. That's the only interaction, and I could just deal with switching them all day. Then at night when I got home I'd do a meta-data pass, collecting the info from cddb/etc and finalizing everything.
I'm not going to say it's not work, but holy cow it's worth it in the end.
If you're running linux, just riping the CDs is fairly hands-off once it's configured:
abcde can be configured to save a flac with an embedded cue-sheet. You can make it totally non-interactive, and a simple "eject -t; abcde; eject" will load the tray, rip the CD and eject the tray.
Then just load a CD in every time the tray ejects. I ripped a bit under 300 CDs in a week with the only extra time spent on it being setting everything up.
Slowly and gradually. The music I love, I love. I don't like playing chase.
So sometimes they played a show/concert with an artist I already like. Sometimes it just comes up in the YouTube feed. Sometimes somebody points me to something and it takes.
I took a few local venues that I like, and put the top song from each of their headliners for the next month into a spotify playlist, then just listened on shuffle while I was doing something else. Occasionally a song jumps out, and like that! I've discovered a new artist I like, and I can go to their upcoming show to boot!
Same way I have for the past 30 years. I listen from time to time to stations that play the kind of music I like. Sometimes I check out various places that have top 100 charts. If I find something I like, I go get it and add it to my collection. Rerun the script and resync my devices.
> I listen from time to time to stations that play the kind of music I like.
You're lucky! In my area, there are no such stations. All of the stations are essentially top 40 (in each of the major genres -- top 40 country, top 40 pop, etc.), talk, and sports.
Internet radio may be able to solve your problem. Music podcasts, and internet radio sites/apps mean geographic location is no longer the limiting factor for what you can listen to.
There are big names like iHeartRadio and SlackerRadio but lots of smaller radio stations have internet streams and/or apps. Podcasts are nice because they can focus on niche genres or provide more information about artists/releases. Mixcloud is one of my favorite sites for listening to radio shows.
* Use the Shazam app on my phone to identify music I hear in public places
* Go on Rateyourmusic.com, look up an album I like and find what "lists" RYM users have put that album on, or what message board posts have cited that album. It's a much more "human-centric" approach compared to websites where algorithms generate the recs.
You realize that those algorithms used by Spotify and whatnot are basically doing the same thing, right? “What songs did people who like your songs also like...”
They're not doing the same thing. I have no insight into how Spotify's algo works. When I go on RYM, I am reading human-written message board posts about WHY they're recommending this album. That additional context is far more valuable to me than a generic "Users also liked..." message that Spotify shows me.
I attended a somewhat notable music festival this year and I noticed that the bands on the line-up had all the other bands from the same festival in the "similar" section, despite not being similar at all - (I'm assuming) just because other people interested in the festival were checking them out.
I'd like to know too. I also don't consider this off-topic considering we're contrasting streaming music with CDs, and one of the "value adds" of streaming is discoverability.
I was wondering if some media server [1] set up in local network and serving audio and media files in popular formats from an external USB drive would do the job for me. Don't have the time to experiment even with such a simplified setup.
I just have all my music on Dropbox in max-quality MP3s. I use TuneBox on iOS to get a music player experience, and whichever MP3 players on my desktop OSes. Not lossless, but a simpler setup.
How much money do you realistically see this generating? With how much effort for marketing and polishing? I would be impressed if OP could calculate even 1 dollar per hour and come out with a profit.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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]
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.
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.
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."
> 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.
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.
Where are my Rockbox users at? My tiny plastic Sansa Clip+ MP3 player has been going for years, I'd be nothing without it. >10hrs playback, supports >128 GB microSD, plays OGG/FLAC/MP3/AAC/anything. The Rockbox firmware is still being developed, albeit at a slow pace.
By far the best combination of hardware+firmware I own. Unlikely to replace it for another few years. Sadly not produced any more :(
My tiny plastic Sansa Clip+ MP3 player has been going for years, I'd be nothing without it
I have three iPod Shuffles I keep in my work bag. The blue one has my most recent music, the red one has various work-related playlists, and the orange one has crooners and relaxing music.
I have the same music on my phone, but it's just not the same. The shuffles bring CD/cassette/album intimacy and focus to the music in a way that a do-everything contraption can't.
I was a happy user of a Sansa Clip+ circa 2009-2011, but I think like most others, once we started getting decent smartphones, carrying a dedicated music player just didn't seem worthwhile anymore, except maybe for a long plane ride where preserving my phone's battery life was critical.
I suppose with headphone jack and SD slot becoming an increasing rarity in the Android world, the Clip might become more relevant again. But I hold out for the models that keep both.
Just today I thought how much I appreciate that exact setup and that I should donate considerable money to the project.
So hereby I pledge that I will send 100 dollars this weekend. This is not even 2 dollars per months that this project provided me with a perfect portable media player setup.
Found my circa 2007-2008ish Sansa the other day. Gave me that wonderful feeling "this was a quality purchase" that only seems to come along every so often. The default firmware was actually pretty solid, but I had Rockbox installed a week after buying it.
I have an Xduoo X3, which has a community Rockbox port, and supports 2 x 200GB cards. Imagine the Sansa Clip+, but double the size, double the capacity, and double the ports (it has line out as well as headphone out).
But it's so much easier to listen to music on my phone, because:
1. Spotify's UI makes it easy to find something to listen to, so time I would spend navigating folders is instead spent listening to music.
2. My phone works with my Bluetooth headphones. Sure, the headphones also support a wired connection, but wireless literally just gets out of your way.
I once had a little red mp3 player manufactured by ilo. One of the most reliable pieces of hardware I every owned - the thing just worked. Drop some files on it, and it played them. That simple. Wish it were as easy on my smartphone.
I really loved the Sansa Clip but the battery in it failed on me and I never did replace the thing. Sad to hear that they stopped making them because being reminded about it makes me want to pick up a new one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My daughter got a record player for Christmas last year and it caused me to think about my relationship to music. After she got the record player, I've taken her to the record store a few times and it was like stepping out of a time machine. I loved everything about it (Waterloo Records in Austin is pretty fantastic).
I ended up buying a CD player and pulling my collection out of the attic. I had forgotten how good music from a CD sounds on a big stereo.
These days, I'm mostly listening to entire albums (even when I use a streaming service). I've also started buying CDs again. When I stopped buying CDs, they were usually between $15 and $25. In the past four months I've bought a bunch and haven't paid more than $8.
I know CDs are dying and now that I'm back into it, it kind of makes me sad. It's shocking to me to think the format was defined 40 years ago. The Philips and Sony engineers did a fantastic job.
I had a similar experience last winter when I popped a CD into my desktop. Probably the first time I had heard music with a bitrate higher than Spotify’s 320kbps in a few years. Within a day I was off buying my favorite albums on FLAC and making a CD wishlist. Made me remember why I bought nice speakers in the first place.
And I’ve thought this for a while: With gigabit internet connections spreading, video streaming services that soak up bandwidth (10-20+ Mbps all day), WHY are companies stingy about audio bitrate? My connection can stream multiple 4K videos, yet audio is the same (or worse) bitrate than what I burned on CDs in 2003.
Tidal offer a "CD quality" 1411kbps option. I tried their trial but I honestly couldn't tell the difference vs Spotify when I got the other half to test me. And at twice the price I couldn't justify it. Perhaps that says more about my ears and my audio setup but that's just my findings.
I think the bitrate stingyness comes from the fact that people tend to watch Netflix at home over wired internet and they listen to streaming music over a more expensive wireless connection, often on crappy headphones.
There are higher bitrate services out there. Deezer will stream FLAC and there are probably others.
Where are you buying FLAC files from? For now I'm still happy with physical CDs although I have ripped them to ALAC. I'm not sure what the difference is, but when I scroll through my library on iTunes there's never anything I want to listen to, but if I look through my physical discs I always find something I want to put on.
CDs are so cheap these days, and Amazon has AutoRip for many albums and will retroactively add it if you bought it from them and they add it to Amazon Music later.
I miss longboxes though. It was terribly wasteful packaging but I loved them, especially the ones that had unique art just on the longbox.
> CDs are so cheap these days, and Amazon has AutoRip for many albums
I usually buy MP3s from Amazon's Digital Store (I've never bought into the streaming stuff). What's funny is that occasionally, it's actually cheaper to buy the physical CD with AutoRip than it is to buy the same MP3 download-only format Amazon sells. I've had a couple instances where I bought the CD, got the digital downloads with it, and tossed the still-shrink wrapped physical CD on eBay.
The longbox was the original standardized packaging format for CDs, but since the longbox itself was disposable -- the actual CD was stored in a plastic "jewel case" inside, you were supposed to keep the plastic case and throw away the longbox -- there was an outcry against them as wasteful packaging. (See for instance this article, from 1990: https://ew.com/article/1990/04/20/whats-cd-longbox/)
The recording industry loved the longbox, because it supposedly made CDs harder to shoplift. But for an industry that generally likes to consider itself progressive, being the target of protests by environmentalists was a bad look. So by the early '90s they'd given up on the longbox, dropping it completely and just shipping the CD in the plastic "jewel case" by itself.
The longbox CD package format meant that retailers could use their existing LP storage bins to sell CDs as well during the transition period. The CD jewel case was visible above the shelves below it.
As retailers installed dedicated CD shelving systems, the longbox format was abandoned.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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).
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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
>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.
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.
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... ).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
This headline smacks of fear mongering. Privacy TERRORS. ALGORITHMS! Walking, talking murder bots! Seriously?
Please. If you pay for your streaming service, you don't have ads. Privacy concerns are an abstract existential concern that don't have practical effects at least in the context of music streaming. And algorithms? I don't understand what the fear is here. Just a general anti-technology sentiment? Why not make a playlist of your own or simply listen to and album from beginning to end?
Maybe we've lost a little something moving into the realm of the purely digital, but that is the essence of change. It involves tradeoffs. And change is inevitable.
Face change with courage - not by dearly holding onto everything that was.
I agree with everything you just said, but I want to add a counterpoint. About a year ago, YouTube Music started playing ads for depression medication for me constantly. My music choice is...err...not particularly happy most of the time. I actually first noticed the ad after listening to a song called "Happy Pills." I have no evidence that I was profiled based on my music choice aside from this one coincidence, but it was enough to make me question if I want Google to know everything I listen to.
Music gives insight into the emotional state of a person, so it could become a very real privacy concern, if it isn't being exploited already.
My phone has this feature where it periodically checks if I'm still looking at it, to turn off the screen if I'm not. It doesn't take the opportunity to spy on my facial expression, but I reckon it won't be long.
Some of us care about privacy. "Privacy terrors" is granted a bit extreme. I differ from the author in that I prefer to listen to random songs from my collection of curated favorites that I have built up over the years rather than listen to individual cds. I've tried streaming services and that whole paradigm is just not what I want. I prefer to know that the next song is one I want to listen to, and I'm OK with not randomly finding that the next song is a new favorite. I have other ways I discover music. I prefer to control the music files I listen to and don't trust the cloud to keep them safe. When I was younger I listened to cassette tapes and cds more than I listened to radio.
Am I afraid of this new technological world? Well, no, probably not, since I've spent most of my spare time (and later, my work life as well) programming or otherwise interacting with computers since at least 1978 or so.
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 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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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've been collecting CDs for a few years now. I rip them for archiving and for easy playing (iPhone, etc.), but also enjoy handling the real object. I like the experience of simply listening to album the way it was originally intended by the artist, in the original order, with the production values intended at the time, not mixed up with other songs. Streaming, or even shuffling, often makes me tense and anxious (radio did too).
Because it's a bit of a pain to get music to the iPhone (with ALAC conversion, etc.), I recently experimented with matching albums with Apple Music and just using that version. However, I've been disappointed that many of those albums aren't actually the same ones as my CDs! (Again, this is Apple Music: other streaming services might be different.)
For example, tracks might be remastered (sometimes for good, sometimes not), and often the album is a 'deluxe' version with extra tracks. If there was a way to 'hide' those extra tracks, I'd be okay with it, but sadly it feels like the original intent of the artist has been corrupted by the record label to sell more content.
So I'm slowly returning to my first method, and only listening to ripped music, an album at a time, in its original order.
I agree with most of what you said, but so many albums include awful filler music between hit songs. This was one of the reason mp3 downloads became so popular. Everybody knew record companies were just adding filling to get to a certain album lengths.
For typical single-based pop/top-40 that could be true.
But for the long tail of most album-oriented music (including the fairly obscure stuff I listen to), its the producer and musician(s) working together to create a coherent artistic work.
Obviously that doesn't always result in an album of consistently great songs, but in my experience as as an occasional musician, recording engineer, and producer, there's always more material than will fit on the album. Part of the creative process is to build that into a form that best expresses the concept of the work as a whole. That usually involves selection & curation, not adding extra filling. My opinion, of course.
> Everybody knew record companies were just adding filling to get to a certain album lengths.
Sometimes. Maybe even often. Never always. To me the highest achievement a recording artist can make is an entire album that is a good coherent work of art best enjoyed as a whole. Some artist actually deliver this.
CDs are massively inconvenient. When I get a music cd, I just rip it to FLAC.
From that point on, I have a file. Much more convenient to work with, and easily backed up with all the other files. Having a good backup strategy, I'm more likely to be hit my lightning than lose a flac file.
As for buying DRM'd music online, I haven't so much as considered it. It just won't happen, ever.
I have been buying CDs lately but only because of market irrationalities - bizzarely at times CD + autoripped MP3s are cheaper than just downloading. I can only assume this bizzare inefficency is related to someone's bonuses related to disc sale metrics or accounting and logistics which encourage reducing unsold stock over the effectively infinite downloads.
The biggest problem I have with the way I listen to music these days is that I'm basing tricked into thinking my "library" is a collection of my music.
I get that a $10/m subscription isn't selling me each song I listen to, but it is letting me collect them, and that collection is a lie.
At any moment it may change, songs can be deleted at will by Apple, or Spotify. This service is great in that it exposes a much wider quantity of artists to me, but it's a price for a radio service, not a music collection.
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.
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.
- 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A few years ago I bought an 'old' ('00 Integra) that had the stock head unit. It would only play CD ROM. It was a total pain to find actual CDs and not DVDs. I dug up mine and my girlfriend's old zip-up CD books full of ripped/torrented mix-cds from when we were teenagers, and it was an actual blast. It felt so good to rediscover some albums I hadn't thought of in the last 10-15 years. The Integra is getting a little long in the tooth, and I'm going to be sad that my time machine to 2005-2007 is going away.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
I buy a couple of 4K Bluray movies every month. I want to get the best possible quality and also support film makers, but damn, other than the image quality getting movies from torrents is still the best user experience. It's not even a money problem for me.
Not only pirated movies are available weeks before you can buy them in Amazon, but you don't get any anti piracy ads, or trailers that you can't skip.
The available catalog in torrents is immense too. I waited like 6 months before I could buy the Dark Knight trilogy in 4K because it wasn't available anywhere. The Nolan 4K collection is also very difficult to get without spending an arm and a leg in my country.
You also don't get all the regional BS. I can't even get the digital online versions of the Bluray discs I buy because I don't live in the US. I've considered buying digital (iTunes, Prime, etc) but the regional catalog we get is poor. Google Play Movies for example doesn't even have 4K and, hear this, not only most movies are dubbed, if you want the original audio and the dubbed audio for the kids you have to buy 2 movies. Yeah. And then, since you don't really own the digital movie you bought, it can disappear from your library or you can lose the 4K version like what recently happened with iTunes.
I love movies, I want to spend money on movies, but damn the studios and distributors need to find a better way of selling their content.
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.
I got a Taf Toys "My First MP3 Player" a few years back. Parents could load a USB stick with MP3s on any PC (including Linux), then plug the stick into a secure compartment on the device (requiring a screwdriver for access, like the battery compartment). Children then had buttons for play, stop, next, previous, volume up, volume down. Only minor issues/features were that the maximum volume was pretty low (presumably to make it safe for babies), and it would switch itself off if no buttons were pressed for a short while (again presumably so it would be safe to leave unattended). Was going to post a link, but it seems it is no longer available.
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'm not married to CDs, specifically. I buy them, but them rip them into digital files and save the CDs as backups.
However, I don't use music streaming services either -- they are unacceptable to me for the reasons the article states, and more. Instead, I keep a library of digitized music, and either stream it from my own streaming server or put a subset of them onto an SD card and play them from there.
That satisfies my need for quality control, to be free of tracking and ads, and to have confidence that the music will never just disappear on me. Not to mention avoiding an unnecessary ongoing expense.
Why not play a DRM-free audio file (Opus, while having lossless FLAC backed up) instead of an obsolete CD?
I don't use renting services for music, but I don't buy CDs either (unless it's the only way to buy it). I buy audio files. The benefit of CDs though is also getting the lossless version, when digital one sold is lossy only. Other than that - I don't see the point.
Don't all streaming services have a way to add albums to collection and listen to those instead of a randomly generated stream? I use Apple Music and have both albums that I can stream and music I have uploaded there myself.
There are no ads, I believe none of my privacy is violated and there are definitely "no algorithms" assuming the author talks about curation.
I use streaming services like Spotify and even YouTube purely for discovering new music, on my terms. Music I want to listen to is music I own, as in I have it locally, managed by me. Ads, privacy, audio quality and many other issues plague streaming services.
I went the CD road too and use a squeezebox. Very fine.
Except that ripping audio cd is tedious. Does anyone know about a music player that, once it sees a new CD, plays it and rips it at the same time (so I just play my CD and, next time, magic !, my CD is ripped)
Not to go against the grain but I love Spotify, the Discover Weekly is killer for finding new music. I also have a large collection of vinyl at home for when I really want to enjoy an album.
Also because Tool won't release their albums online =(
You know what else doesn't have ads, privacy terrors, and algorithms?
Vinyl.
But really, I think the pleasure of vinyl is the pleasure of being fully engaged in the act of listening. The privacy is the privacy of your own experience.
I still only buy CD's when buying music, then rip to FLAC for other uses. My Pioneer receiver can play them both, streaming services, and the horrible local radio, so all bases are covered.
Not to mention superior sound quality! I've been listening to classical music on Spotify and it sounds awful to my ears using headphones, even with so called HD audio enabled.
The only place I’ve heard music in years is YouTube on my phone, car radio, or live. There’s so much on YouTube that I frankly don’t care to look almost anywhere else at this point.
I've reverted back to using a standalone mp3 player. I got one of the newest Sony Walkmans and threw a large SD card in there. Something about it just feels right.
I used to be a serious CD holdout, but then a few things happened that changed things for me.
Storage
Look, I'm in my late 40s. I've been buying music on CD since I was about 17. I have LOTS. It's not really sustainable, so when iTunes went DRM-free, I started buying the odd thing there.
I live in a place with a proper record store, so I still buy things there, too, but mostly stuff I know I really want the best experience out of. Random music that I kinda know I'll tire of and probably never revisit, though? Definitely iTunes.
Fucking Sync.
I'm in the Apple ecosystem, because this works best for me and my family, but one thing they never really sorted before Apple Music was whole-family-uses-same-library. It was awkward and vexing, especially to the non-technical members of the household, and so (e.g.) my wife ended up just not really having music with her on her phone.
That's annoying. Plus, even for someone like me, it was annoying that if I bought a CD (or a vinyl record with a download code), getting that music on my phone was a hassle.
So when Apple Music happened, I eventually signed up, and holy cow I haven't really looked back.
What's great about it for my wife is that she never has to bother plugging her phone into a computer to get music at all. She can just add stuff on the fly, from Apple Music. Maybe it's stuff we own already, but that wasn't on the phone yet. Maybe it's new stuff she wants. Doesn't matter; still easy.
We still buy records and CDs from our local shop, too -- mostly the same algorithm, between "I want this forever" and "this is probably transient" -- but overall we're both listening to MORE music than we did before. I mean, think about it: I'm paying Apple basically the cost of a CD per month for our family account, but the world is literally our oyster. MANY times since I signed up I've found myself reading a review of some album somewhere, and wanted to hear it. Before, I'd have to make a note to go find it online somewhere, or find a Youtube clip, or whatever. Now I can just have it, almost immediately, on my preferred device and through good headphones. It's pretty great.
Now, I'm really only willing to do this because the vendor is Apple, and I trust them with my listening habit data. I wouldn't trust an ad-driven provider AT ALL, which is why I never signed up for Pandora or Spotify or whatever. But with Apple, all this is easy, and I'm not concerned about the privacy implications.
I still have a shitload of CDs and vinyl, though. It used to be that "hey, pick a record" was a fun party game, because so few folks have big record collections. Now CD has picked up some of that novelty, too, and people enjoy browsing through the CD stacks when we entertain. But that's all a special corner case. ;)
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.
Clickbait title... Article is just an interview with a nyt journalist who covers the music industry. Was interested in the discussion of cd vs streaming.
SoulSeek was awesome for discovering music. Unfortunately, the quality of the music shared was usually at lousy quality (96-128kbps), with the result that I usually ended up deleting the albums later and re-acquiring them at higher quality from somewhere else.
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)
That being said, indie music stores like Bandcamp are digital only, but offer one-click DRM-free MP3 downloads for purchased songs/albums. The UX is focused on buying music first and supporting individual artists, rather than commoditizing their sound into an algorithmic playlist where they're lumped in with everybody else.
I honestly find Spotify and Apple Music bad for music discovery if your tastes aren't really adjacent to Top 40 (is that even a thing today?) style pop music. Back in the day, Last.fm used your iTunes/Foobar play history to show you bands you'd like. The algorithm was based on user-submitted tags, and the recommendations weren't limited to bands that had deals with the platform. I discovered a ton of new music across very different genres there. Unfortunately it doesn't look like the site is very active these days.