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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

#371

Post by TacticalTable »

JCharante wrote: post #101
tadzik_ wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even if you listen to CDs on your computer the media player is still collecting your data and behaviour I'm not sure what OS or media player you use(d), but implying that it's somehow inherent to playing music on your computer in general is an overstatement, to put it mildly. As a counterpoint to your argument: I tried Spotify and went back to offline music. I don't use CDs of course, it's all ripped to MP3 and sit…

I started using Youtube Music last year. Recently I flew overseas, and for this reason I had downloaded some music (300+ songs) with their download for offline play feature. During my layover I connected to some airport wifi, and almost instantly I lost access to offline play of most of my songs because of licensing issues with the country that I was in. I've since learned to always use a VPN that terminates in the U…

I think this is more of a Youtube issue than a music issue.

I can't imagine Youtube Music is going to exist for long, given that 90% of the GPM subscribers I've talked to would rather swap to spotify than use YTM.

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

#372

Post by JohnFen »

kstenerud wrote: post #225
omega3 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly of-topic but how do you discover new music to listen to?

Same way I have for the past 30 years. I listen from time to time to stations that play the kind of music I like. Sometimes I check out various places that have top 100 charts. If I find something I like, I go get it and add it to my collection. Rerun the script and resync my devices.

> I listen from time to time to stations that play the kind of music I like.

You're lucky! In my area, there are no such stations. All of the stations are essentially top 40 (in each of the major genres -- top 40 country, top 40 pop, etc.), talk, and sports.

There's nothing in any of those for me.

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

#373

Post by JohnFen »

neuralk wrote: post #235
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…

This feels like a business opportunity. Or, at least, an open source repo + a tutorial article that would attract donations.

There are numerous sites giving tutorials about how to set up such systems using OSS.

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

#374

Post by JohnFen »

titzer wrote: post #94
sschueller wrote: post #24

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.

> Buy a 64 or 128GiB flash drive and put your whole collection there.

That's too small for my collection! (I use a 64 gig card for taking my music on the road alone). My music collection is stored on a 1Tb drive.

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

#375

Post by AwesomeFaic »

task_queue wrote: post #360
mywittyname wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I've used a number of music recommendation applications over the last decade. With Spotify, I've noticed that it will become "stuck" in what I describe as similar artist troughs and valleys. In other words, the Spotify recommendation engine will pigeonhole your re…

Wholeheartedly agree. While my musical tastes are a bit all over the place, I can say that for the past month or so almost all my generated suggestion playlists consist of music I've not only listened to recently, but many I already liked and saved to my songs.

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

#376

Post by briandear »

athroway wrote: post #248
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #196

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…

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).

It’s successful to me as a user. Beats the heck out of that whole “set up an FTP server” recommendation. And how much is their loss due to growth focused investment?

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

#377

Post by JohnFen »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #236
fibers wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i mean...you can load a good chunk of your library on an 400gb sd card and play it on your phone. it seems more battery efficient than constantly streaming music from an online account even when the cache expires consistently

People who spend thousands of dollars on music tend to be people who buy expensive phones that don't allow SD cards. But 128GB phones have enough storage for most music collections

> People who spend thousands of dollars on music tend to be people who buy expensive phones that don't allow SD cards.

The lack of an SD card slot is a dealbreaker in a phone for me, regardless of price.

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

#378

Post by kyle-rb »

jartelt wrote: post #308
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…

Agree that the Spotify discovery is bad. I find myself going back to Pandora, which is sad considering I have Spotify premium.

Discovery on Spotify isn't terrible, but I think Pandora is just really good at that since that was part of its original purpose with the music genome stuff. Plus it aims for more variety, avoiding playing a single artist too heavily.

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

#379

Post by kingosticks »

mirrorlake wrote: post #264
criddell wrote: post #250

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…

I had a similar experience last winter when I popped a CD into my desktop. Probably the first time I had heard music with a bitrate higher than Spotify’s 320kbps in a few years. Within a day I was off buying my favorite albums on FLAC and making a CD wishlist. Made me remember why I bought nice speakers in the first place. And I’ve thought this for a while: With gigabit internet connections spreading, video streaming…

Tidal offer a "CD quality" 1411kbps option. I tried their trial but I honestly couldn't tell the difference vs Spotify when I got the other half to test me. And at twice the price I couldn't justify it. Perhaps that says more about my ears and my audio setup but that's just my findings.

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

#380

Post by Abitingal »

hazeii wrote: post #365
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 (s…

What do I miss when converting to a lossy format? There are plenty of articles stating that the human ear cannot hear difference between lossless and 192 kbps. The second part I can agree with though.
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