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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

#391

Post by orblivion »

poelzi wrote: post #270
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…

Badcamp has physical media as well. It's up to the artist to produce and deliver them. Since I find mp3 unacceptable audio quality, especially on PA sound systems, I collect flac only. Many shops have a shitty policy on lossless, thanks bandcamp for being proper.

Bandcamp really is fantastic and will always have a special place for me. Just let me buy the stuff, choose my format, (even ogg!). Even let me sample it a good amount of times, and no obnoxious nonsense on their website. I hope they're doing really well.

That said, for a larger number of really major artists, I heard about something called HDTracks. I haven't tried them yet, but it seems that they sell FLAC in 24 bit audio.

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

#392

Post by NeedMoreTea »

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…

Last.fm was ruined by, I think, CBS.

Their recommendations were miles ahead of anything Spotify, Apple or Google have ever managed. So last.fm killed off the radio, the streaming, then started playing random Youtube vids for each track - very often a poor rendition, or a cover etc.

I gave up years ago, but still miss that recommendation engine that drove the radio stations - I discovered so many brilliant new-to-me artists through that. Scrobbling listens into a different platform or recommendation engine is the least useful part of what they did.

I'm actually surprised the site's still there!

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

#393

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

leemailll wrote: post #300
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #44

Another reason CDs are still worth considering: classical music and, to a lesser extent, jazz CDs often feature extensive and informative liner notes that have never been posted online anywhere. I myself typically rip all my purchases to FLAC immediately and then I listen through my media centre, so I often forget that I have the original physical release there on the shelf, but when I do go back and look at that CD…

I agree. I mostly listen to classical music, although I also rip them but most of the time I still use cds. It seems current music players on computers never thought about creating classical music pieces playlist. I had to manually add pieces to create them with correct order or just add albums which is the same as just playing a cd. In the end, I listen to music with CD players mostly, and still insist on buy a car…

This is primarily the fault of later era CDs when the index marks were abandoned and small movements were separated by track breaks. Originally, Redbook audio was supposed to always have a silent pregap between tracks and indexes were for intra-track navigation. You will find this on early classical CDs. Then the problem is finding a player that supports skipping index marks.

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

#394

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

asdff wrote: post #320
indigochill wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So one could in theory create a distribution network of friends sharing and ripping CDs? We could call it... Wrapster.

The grateful dead used to (probably still does) let people plop their tape recorders right next to the mixing tent at shows. As a result, pretty much every grateful dead show has been recorded by someone and passed around the community.

Most taper friendly concerts are on archive.org nowadays.

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

#395

Post by amerkhalid »

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 still buy CDs but mostly for artwork and nostalgic value. I remember going to friends' places and browsing their CD collections and trying various CDs.

It is rare these days to browse anyone's music collection on their cellphone. The most we do is just search for music we want to hear or want our friends to hear.

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

#396

Post by RandallBrown »

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…

Spotify made a Tastebreakers playlist at the end of the year to recommend music I might like but is outside the genres I typically listen to.

I thought it was decent.

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

#397

Post by sfotm »

guggle wrote: post #263
edpichler wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I lost my precious childhood videos after "saving" on the cloud. Google deleted it because of some seconds of the background music of AC/DC's on the radio.

Flickr lost all my photos when it was acquired by Yahoo, so I'm with you on this one... The cloud is useful... but don't trust it too much.

I've learned to replace "the cloud" with "someone else's computer". Always worth repeating to yourself when you're considering uploading sensitive documents or something you can't afford to lose.

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

#398

Post by andai »

JohnFen wrote: post #374
titzer wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you're going to like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19919163

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

#399

Post by aidenn0 »

skinnymuch wrote: post #301
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…

Spotify has never recommended a typical “top 40” mainstream artist to me. I looked at the top 100 Billboard list and while I recognize most of the artists, I don’t recognize any of the songs or albums since i don’t listen to those artists. The only exception is that I have listened to Offset’s songs recently. The algo isn’t the best, but it’s not awful or just giving you the most popular music around. For example the…

That's weird because for the first 6 weeks or so my "Discover Weekly" was all hits by bands I already knew. It did fairly quickly transition to deeper cuts and more obscure artists though.

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

#400

Post by anderspitman »

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…

You've solved the storage/archival half of the problem. What do you use on the UX side for playback? Do you just stream everything, or use some sort of an app for choosing which songs to pin to your mobile devices? Personally I use syncthing and keep a complete copy of all my mp3s (only ~5GB in my case) on my phone. I'm curious what others use though.
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