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.
Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms
41–50 of 452 posts
Re: Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms
#42I 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…
For all flac lovers: http://abx.digitalfeed.net/ I do understand the sentiment though.
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.
Re: Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms
#43I 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.
Re: Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms
#44Another 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.
Re: Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms
#45You can achieve most of the convenience with a downloaded collection of mp3 / flac / alac why use CDS?
I guess the CDs are the symbol here more than anything else.
I do a similar thing: I buy CDs, smell the paint, rip them into mp3, put them on a shelf and never touch them again. Everything nicely managed by MPD.
Re: Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms
#46I 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..
> 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.
Re: Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms
#47I 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 t…
Use shuffle and offline frequently and have never experienced any of the above.
Perhaps it's some other issue?
Re: Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms
#48I 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…
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 p…
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.
Re: Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
wasn't it a thing, that you could bypass this by holding shift (to disable autoplay) when inserting the disc?
or use linux :)
Re: Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
2009. That’s when the DRM was removed. 10 years ago.
A good lesson for anyone considering user unfriendly features.
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... ).