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

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411–420 of 452 posts

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

#411

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…

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.

I wrote "deleted" but the truth is that I can see it on a small window, after navigating on my upload history to the very past, on some private Youtube account details page, and I can't download it anymore. I tried many many times. It's already have been years it is blocked from downloading it. I will try again soon if I can find a browser plugin that can help me with this.

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

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair Dealing is extremely conservative. Could you expand on what you mean, give an example of the research situation and scope? AIUI the CDP would probably allow you to do format conversion for private study if the matter wasn't available to buy in a format you needed for that study; they'd probably want to see some outputs to show it was study and not entertainment (remember in tort the consideration is balance of p…

> Could you expand on what you mean, give an example of the research situation and scope? Well, if someone wanted to research a music discovery algorithm, then they would need to a have a large collection of music to test their algorithm, for example. Or perhaps someone wants to research differences between music preferences based on ethnicity, using some automated data analysis technique. This would also require a l…

Yeah those sorts of things come in to research, but there are FOSS and other out of copyright sources. If you're doing it commercially you'd need a license.

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

#413
post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Yeah, that's pretty cool! I'll probably wait for the price to come down a bit, and to see what the real lifespan of the things are, before I start doing anything more than experimenting with them, though.

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

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It's a freeware script that I picked over a decade ago. I don't remember where I got it or what it's called, though. I'm not able to access the server it's on at the moment, but I'll comment here once I can.

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

#415
post #219

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…

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

I've been trying an experiment lately.

I took a few local venues that I like, and put the top song from each of their headliners for the next month into a spotify playlist, then just listened on shuffle while I was doing something else. Occasionally a song jumps out, and like that! I've discovered a new artist I like, and I can go to their upcoming show to boot!

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

#416
post #361
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.

In 1997, I'd wager more people listened to college radio than they do now, simply because there weren't as many alternatives.

Their bookstores would likely also have had a few rock/alternative/electronic music magazines to offer choices outside of Top 40.

If they were lucky, they might also have had an indie music store in town where you could browse through the stacks and make conversation with the proprietors who'd turn you on to new stuff.

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

#417
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 posted this down below, but I want to share my personal method of music discovery.

Pick a few physical music venues nearby that you like, and make a list of all the artists playing shows there for the next month or two. Then take a song by each artist and chuck it into a playlist (could be youtube or bandcamp or spotify, whatever). Listen, and when you hear something you like, maybe listen to their latest release! If it's good, you've just found an artist you like, and guess what? They're playing a show nearby soon.

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

#418
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that sucks. Ripping a CD is (still) not illegal in the US. Neither is sharing a CD with a friend.

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

No. Borrowing a CD and ripping it is definitely copyright infringement in the US. I don't know if there's case law as to whether or not ripping your own CDs is legal, but apparently even the RIAA says it "won’t usually raise concerns" [1]

1: https://www.riaa.com/resources-learning/about-piracy/

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

#420
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize that those algorithms used by Spotify and whatnot are basically doing the same thing, right? “What songs did people who like your songs also like...”

They're not doing the same thing. I have no insight into how Spotify's algo works. When I go on RYM, I am reading human-written message board posts about WHY they're recommending this album. That additional context is far more valuable to me than a generic "Users also liked..." message that Spotify shows me.

That's true.

I attended a somewhat notable music festival this year and I noticed that the bands on the line-up had all the other bands from the same festival in the "similar" section, despite not being similar at all - (I'm assuming) just because other people interested in the festival were checking them out.

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