331–340 of 452 posts
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.
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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…
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.
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> 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…
>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. This has been my experience as well.
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.
Warning: the site is really basic right now
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 :(
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'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…
> 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…
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.
Along this line: reissues of LPs that include every alternate take.
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.
Whenever I passed through, I would swap discs. If I had some free time, I sat in front of it and read while swapping discs.
It took a few months, but it was entirely doable.
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.
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.
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> I can not find the songs only alternate versions from other people who made a cover version of the song. Try some jazz like Coltrane or Miles Davis. It seems they never stoped issuing albums - remastered, Coltrane for lovers, Miles for cooking. It is next to impossible to find original album or remastered original. Yesterday on Youtube Music oldest Coltrane album was from 2015.
> Coltrane for lovers, Miles for cooking. And programming?