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Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms

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Re: Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A RAID NAS! Anything less won't cut it.

Still incredibly vulnerable to physical disasters e.g. a fire

Re: Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seems like overkill for OP's 64 gigs of music. Just buy two or three flash drives as backups. They're dirt cheap and bog simple.

Or you could burn them to bluray if you have a device.

Re: Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms

#184
post #103
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Coltrane for lovers, Miles for cooking. And programming?

Personally, Goa works for me. Try Astral Projection, Hallucinogen. https://ektoplazm.com/ is a great place to start sampling this type of music for free.

“I am actually flying into a star!”

Re: Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms

#186
post #13
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

Why not use two apps?

Shuffle play

Re: Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms

#187
post #104
post #71

"Why play music from your hard drive? No Ads, No Privacy Terrors, No Algorithms"

Yeah, I feel like people have forgotten mp3s somehow. - Storage cost is trivial even with multiple backups - Can be better quality than streaming - Available offline, forever, at no extra cost Sure, in some jurisdictions it's not legal to rip CDs you own but it's easy enough to defend morally if you're doing it for private use.

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.

Re: Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms

#188
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.

Re: Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms

#189
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.

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