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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

#381

Post by chaostheory »

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…

I can confirm this. Pre-Spotify it was either listen to top 100 music or use up a lot of time downloading VS tracks. Now most my of music doesn't even chart.

I neither have the space, budget, or time to trade my music in the cloud for physical media. My online collection is much larger than either my Mp3 or physical media collection.

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

#382

Post by acuozzo »

dirkt wrote: post #26
SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #3

No privacy terrors? What short memories we have. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

To nitpick: Pure musics CD (CD-DA) can't contain any DRM or rootkits, because the format doesn't allow for data - it's all sound. Only combined CD-ROM/CD-R + CD-DA formats together with the unfortunate eagerness of Windows to auto-execute everything allows such rootkits. So if you feed a music CD to a real old CD player, or to (say) a properly configured Linux computer: No privacy terrors.

> the format doesn't allow for data - it's all sound

Redbook CD-DA has one subcode byte and eight error correction bytes per frame.

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

#383

Post by 2Ccltvcm »

Freak_NL wrote: post #82
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #64

Worth noting here that ripping a CD is a copyright infringement, yes even for individuals, here in UK. We had about 2 years when it wasn't. Yes, that means Apple iTunes and the like provide tools for copyright infringement -- far worse than the young adult that got extradited to USA for providing links on a website (which is allowed in UK law) -- and in theory could be sued for contributory infringement.

Worth noting that the UK (along with Malta) is an exception in Europe. In the other European countries ripping a CD you own for personal use is completely legal.

Worth noting that the UK never had a proper revolution

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

#384

Post by dave5104 »

classichasclass wrote: post #295
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…

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.

> CDs are so cheap these days, and Amazon has AutoRip for many albums

I usually buy MP3s from Amazon's Digital Store (I've never bought into the streaming stuff). What's funny is that occasionally, it's actually cheaper to buy the physical CD with AutoRip than it is to buy the same MP3 download-only format Amazon sells. I've had a couple instances where I bought the CD, got the digital downloads with it, and tossed the still-shrink wrapped physical CD on eBay.

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

#385

Post by rchaud »

JohnFen wrote: post #369
rchaud wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed, "always" is the wrong term. "Since the late '90s" would be more accurate.

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

#386

Post by myself248 »

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…

Yup, I've had to work around this. I'll pick a song I like, and do "song radio" to find more like it. But this makes a playlist which is basically 6 more similar artists, and no variety beyond that. But I want to branch out more, several steps beyond that. So I'll open a particular song from that playlist, go to "song radio" for that, and drag a bunch of songs I don't recognize back into the first playlist. Repeat this for a few more songs. Then once I've added a bunch more variety, do "playlist radio" again.

It's super obnoxious. I wish they had a slider for "be more adventurous" versus "hew close to the line". Do I remember Pandora having something like that?

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

#387

Post by bobajeff »

JohnFen wrote: post #367
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…

> 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 feat…

Sounds like you made a little Music Genome Project (by Pandora) like system. Lately I've been thinking about building something like that using machine learning and the hopes that it would scale better than Pandora's effort did.

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

#388

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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…

I suspect most contemporary CDs are just uncompressed dumps of bitrate/band limited compressed audio.

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

#389

Post by eppsilon »

JohnFen wrote: post #367
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…

> 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 feat…

What's the name of this crawler software?

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

#390

Post by eppsilon »

JohnFen wrote: post #367
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…

> 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 feat…

What's the name of this crawler software? Is it open-source?
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