431–440 of 452 posts
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The first CD that I ever bought back in 1991 came in a longbox, but I don't recall any of the CDs I got after that coming in them.
The longbox was the original standardized packaging format for CDs, but since the longbox itself was disposable -- the actual CD was stored in a plastic "jewel case" inside, you were supposed to keep the plastic case and throw away the longbox -- there was an outcry against them as wasteful packaging. (See for instance this article, from 1990: https://ew.com/article/1990/04/20/whats-cd-longbox/ ) The recording indust…
As retailers installed dedicated CD shelving systems, the longbox format was abandoned.
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Does Spotify notify you in any way if any song that you have in your playlist is removed from their library? I have playlists on GPM and sometimes songs just disappear because they've been removed from the service. No notification or anything, I just realize the song's gone after I check for it. I'm considering switching and if this is implemented better I'd definitely go for it.
Deezer tells you (if you look): the song appears grayed out in the playlist. I like that because a playlist is also a knowledge repository; and if the song ever comes back it will hopefully be reinstated.
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Perhaps. I have heard they also master differently for vinyl since it can't provide the same dynamic, frequency, or stereo range as digital. Some listeners find the result more appealing.
Sometimes the vinyl master is in fact better, because it is less compressed, because a mastering engineer can assume that people listening to vinyl got a decent sound system, while mastering for "web" means people have phone speakers, laptop speakers, hifi systems, whatever.
Web distribution (iTunes/etc.) files come from running the CD master through an AAC/MP3/etc. converter which does data compression only. But a 256Kbps/16bit/44.1KHz AAC (like you'd get from iTunes) is a lot higher quality than vinyl.
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.
My point is that music discovery, like all recommendation systems right now, is severely lacking in what made media discovery more meaningful in the 90s - that controlled chaos that led to surprises. Now everything collapses towards the mean of mediocrity. Sure you discover more 'bands' now, but they're belting out the same tracks with an extra half beat or a pitch shift, so I hardly call it 'discovery'. Long-tail used to be more fringe, but high-quality and related, unlike now, where it's the worst within the technical bounds of the algorithm. We're discovering more within our local minima, which is technically discovering more, but in the most frightfully boring way possible.
I would not have been exposed to at least half of the music I regularly listen to now if I had something like Spotify back then. I tried to use Spotify, Pandora, and Google Music, but after a month they each felt like I was listening to generic music station #342398 and I went back to purchasing albums. It's weird when a single album can be more diverse than a station with nearly limitless tracks to pull from.
And don't even get me started on how recommendation services have killed the idea of an 'album' - maybe the most rewarding facet of music production basically wiped out in less than a decade.
I keep pointing this out, but Spotify's shuffle algorithm is absolute horrible. It plays the same 10 or so songs for hours on hours before it moves on to the next 10 or so songs. Their offline feature has become rubbish. Every morning I have a 10 minute walk to the train station and I usually open spotify right after I lock my door. Throughout this walk, spotify has played for about 1 minute in total, on a good day t…
Use shuffle and offline frequently and have never experienced any of the above. Perhaps it's some other issue?
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/spotify/comments/966nx7/uhh_dear_sp... [1] https://community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/Implement...
I keep pointing this out, but Spotify's shuffle algorithm is absolute horrible. It plays the same 10 or so songs for hours on hours before it moves on to the next 10 or so songs. Their offline feature has become rubbish. Every morning I have a 10 minute walk to the train station and I usually open spotify right after I lock my door. Throughout this walk, spotify has played for about 1 minute in total, on a good day t…
Try putting your phone in airplane mode, or possibly Spotify's own offline mode. I've found that Spotify works great when you have a good internet connection or when you have none at all. It doesn't do well when you have 1 bar of edge reception, or your phone is struggling with cell/wifi handover.
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 a…
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Sometimes the vinyl master is in fact better, because it is less compressed, because a mastering engineer can assume that people listening to vinyl got a decent sound system, while mastering for "web" means people have phone speakers, laptop speakers, hifi systems, whatever.
That's interesting, but I'm not sure what you mean by "compress". Do you mean data compression, or a compressing audio filter? Web distribution (iTunes/etc.) files come from running the CD master through an AAC/MP3/etc. converter which does data compression only. But a 256Kbps/16bit/44.1KHz AAC (like you'd get from iTunes) is a lot higher quality than vinyl.
Data compression doesn’t make much sense here, because you usually use uncompressed audiofiles anywhere unless it goes to the web.
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> 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 th…