321–330 of 452 posts
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.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slightly of-topic but how do you discover new music to listen to?
A couple of ways I do it: * 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.
So, is the Loudness War finally over? Or are CDs still clipped to hell?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Kind of. 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 c…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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] [0] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/apparently-valve-are-...
A slight hitch: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/10/08/epic-games-buyin... and https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/964284402741149698...
But yeah Epic Games is terrible.
GOG/Humble have done wonders for Linux as alternative stores.
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 m…
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. I always buy physical.
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…
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: T…
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'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 (rad…
> in the 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.
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.
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 l…
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.