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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

#361

Post by rconti »

rchaud wrote: post #261

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…

The average person with a $10/month budget in 1997 (let's ignore inflation for now) is buying maybe 8-10 CDs a year. They're absolutely not long-tail discovering new stuff. They're buying what they hear on the radio.

It's basically an indefensible position that we're not discovering more and paying for more 'long tail' type media in the digital streaming era.

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

#362

Post by shmerl »

Why not play a DRM-free audio file (Opus, while having lossless FLAC backed up) instead of an obsolete CD?

I don't use renting services for music, but I don't buy CDs either (unless it's the only way to buy it). I buy audio files. The benefit of CDs though is also getting the lossless version, when digital one sold is lossy only. Other than that - I don't see the point.

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

#363

Post by beat »

pier25 wrote: post #321
beat wrote: post #252

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.

Yeah but knowing that every time you listen to a record the needle removes a bit of its lifespan is not a great feeling.

Eh. With proper care and a well-configured turntable, records can last a long time. And you can always buy a new one.

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

#364

Post by shosko »

rchaud wrote: post #261

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…

DJs and Soundcloud help me discover new music more than iTunes or Spotify ever could. Human curation is better than algorithms. Bandcamp is consistently the best place to buy music, both high quality digital and vinyl.

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

#365

Post by hazeii »

kstenerud wrote: post #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 who…

Having CD's that go back to their launch (plus records/cassettes from before), I had to rip a couple of thousand CDs to FLAC so I'm totally with you on this one. Unfortunately a lot of people don't understand what's thrown away when converting to a lossy format, and the consequential horrible degradation that comes with converting from one lossy format to another. It's not like storage or bandwidth is an issue now (soon even the 2:1 or 3:1 lossless with FLAC won't be worth it). Just save the raw data and move on.

Of course it's more 'convenient' to trust cloud service X but (as recently discussed here) 'convenient' services can turn out to be pretty venal - not to mention short-lived (Microsoft Zune,various google services, random shuttered startups etc).

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

#366

Post by JohnFen »

I'm not married to CDs, specifically. I buy them, but them rip them into digital files and save the CDs as backups.

However, I don't use music streaming services either -- they are unacceptable to me for the reasons the article states, and more. Instead, I keep a library of digitized music, and either stream it from my own streaming server or put a subset of them onto an SD card and play them from there.

That satisfies my need for quality control, to be free of tracking and ads, and to have confidence that the music will never just disappear on me. Not to mention avoiding an unnecessary ongoing expense.

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

#367

Post by JohnFen »

mywittyname wrote: post #296
rchaud wrote: post #261

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…

> Spotify has dramatically increased the variety of music that I listen to and introduced me to lost of tiny artists with great music.

I can't speak to Spotify, but many years ago I picked up some agent software that does a rough analysis of the music I enjoy, then crawls the web looking for music that resembles it. I use that for recommendations.

The software is a bit crude in its analysis, but I think that's a feature, not a bug, because it ensures that in the mix of music that I certainly will like are random tunes that I would never have thought to listen to, and often those turn out to be gems.

Most of the music the crawler finds is from indie artists that aren't well-known at all. When I find a new one that I enjoy, I make it a point to seek them out and buy their music directly from them.

Anyway, this has been my solution for about 15 years now, and it works great for me!

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

#368

Post by millzlane »

rchaud wrote: post #261

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 couldn't agree more. I have found new artists that I probably wouldn't have listened to with both spotify and last fm. But with last.FM radio alone I have discovered more genres.

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

#369

Post by JohnFen »

rchaud wrote: post #268
athroway wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>the metrics of success have always been different in tech.

It hasn't always been that way at all, but it certainly is now. I think this is one of the huge red flags about the modern incarnation of the tech industry.

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

#370

Post by JohnFen »

kstenerud wrote: post #222
_bxg1 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard of Plex?

Plex doesn't convert files for storage on a portable device, nor does it replaygain. It also has a terrible music selector interface and doesn't firewall punch. Streaming is only part of the issue. I'm talking about the whole lifecycle, from backed up lossless to lossy-on-device in whatever format, or to a streaming service that integrates with your player devices, all from a single source of truth that you control 1…

> Plex doesn't convert files for storage on a portable device

I don't know about Plex, but Kodi does this.

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