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

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281–290 of 452 posts

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

#281
post #94

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 on…

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.

> 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).

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

#282
Why I play mp3/4 with cementine and various other open source players directly from my harddisk? Because no ads, no spying, no algorythms. I use to use last.fm but I turn it off now and just use it to find new music based on searches if I feel like it.

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

#283

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, ha…

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 :)

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

#284
post #256

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 who…

"I've got all my music ripped to FLAC" And that's why I won't do it, because there's no way I can rip all my cds, let alone my vinyls... it takes way too much time.

No need to do it all at once, just when you’re playing the CD. But I guess your CD player is not attached to the computer?

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

#285
post #233

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 who…

Have you looked at some selfhosted media platform like Jellyfin[1] or mpd[2] ? Those seems to be good privacy-wise. [1]: https://jellyfin.github.io/ [2]: https://www.musicpd.org/

MPD is nice in that it has many clients. MPDroid (available on F-Droid) is quite decent.

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

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

You'll be surprised, but AFAIK Windows Media Player can do all of that.

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

#287
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 way it works today is just as simple. The OS automatic asks permission to run the program.

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.

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

#288
post #71

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

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.
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