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There Is No CD Revival

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Re: There Is No CD Revival

#141

Post by masklinn »

andjd wrote: post #95
throwaway894345 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the one hand, you seem to (understandably) take great pride in the legal ownership of your CDs, but on the other hand, you're almost certainly breaking the law by ripping them. How do you feel about that? I have the same conflict with DVDs/BluRay. I want to play by the rules and pay for the media I enjoy, but it's absurd that it's illegal for me to rip the content that I've lawfully purchased for my own consumptio…

Obviously, laws differ in different countries, but in the US, making a backup copy for personal use is considered fair use, and is legal. With DVDs and Blu-Rays, the situation is less clear because there is a specific law against breaking DRM. However, to my knowledge, there has never been a lawsuit against a _user_ of software that lets you rip a DVD or BD, that law has only been used against companies that make or…

> Obviously, laws differ in different countries, but in the US, making a backup copy for personal use is considered fair use, and is legal.

Title 17 certainly does not say that. The closest it comes to talking about the subject is by saying that copies are only allowed if consented to by the copyright owner. Space shifting and other forms of personal copies are at best a gray area with little case law to work off of.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#142

Post by browningstreet »

greggman3 wrote: post #100
Jaruzel wrote: post #45

I still buy Music CDs. Why? Because once I have the disc in my hand, no-one can legally take it away from me. I can enjoy the contents legally until I'm dead, all for a single one-off payment with no-expiry. However, my households use of streaming media (mainly Spotify) has increased for 'casual' listening, so I think there is a balance, and I hope that buying physical media for music wont disappear completely any ti…

I had ~1100 CDs in 2000. Now I have close to 0. I don't even own a device I could play a CD in nor rip it. None of my 4 PCs (3 Macs, one Gaming Windows Box) have a CD (nor DVD nor Bluray) player. Instead I have about 9000 mp3 files. I find streaming services frustrating because their recommendation algorithm suck. I tried playing "Swing" and it gave me "Volare" by Dean Martin. (that's not Swing), I pick Prince Radio…

Same... literally. About 1200 CDs in 2000, I ripped them at some point and sold them when I became a digital nomad. I have no idea where those rips are; I think I may have just liked them all on Spotify and kept a folder of obscure albums I wasn't likely to find online. But I'm not sure where that folder is.

I bounce between Spotify and Youtube Music and Apple Music. I recently got into Apple Music library curation but then I got a Tesla which supports Spotify (and Tidal, but...). So I'm back on Spotify. But Apple Music has one really nifty thing -- highlighting major tracks on albums so that album exploration can be enhanced a bit.

But honestly, my appetite for keeping up with and curating albums is waning. I wish there was a nice "cd changer" like interface to one of these services -- load up 6 albums and randomize. Queueing isn't the same.

(I'll repeat a desire I've had a long time -- playlists of albums, not tracks, with album-shuffle. So simple, yet nobody supports it).

I have a few online streaming radio stations I love -- Radio Paradise in particular. Someday I can see chucking all the "streaming service album" management and just going other-peoples-radio.

Slacker (in the Tesla) is also good enough.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#143

Post by iamdbtoo »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #90
coldtea wrote: post #32

> I don’t think any of the writers or outlets publishing these headlines are out to mislead. But none of them seem to have consulted anyone actually trying to sell CDs, either Nobody even bothered to read the original source report, much less make sense of it, or even gave the article they wrote a minute's thought. They saw the story somewhere else (perhaps got it from a wire service too), and rewrote it just enough…

You're being a little harsh, but essentially correct. I worked at a newspaper for about five years, even wrote a weekly column for a couple. Lemme tell you, coming up with something interesting to say every week is really hard . "CD sales are up a tick? Oh, something to write about, which incidentally is my job, thank god." That's it.

This is something that frustrates me about large news/content sites. So much of it reads like it was written because someone needed to write something and not because this particular thing needed to be said.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#144

Post by masklinn »

andjd wrote: post #117
dusted wrote: post #2

Many times, buying the CD and ripping it to FLAC* is the only way to legally acquire* music for use with your computer. * It must be lossless and high quality. * It must work offline.

Have you done a blind test comparing a 256 or 320 kbps AAC file to a FLAC one? At that bitrate, the AAC file is lossy in the sense that you can't recreate a bit-for-bit perfect copy of the original, but most humans shouldn't hear any difference. A decent proxy to know that this is true is that at those bitrates, a FLAC file is often smaller than the AAC one. Yes, this makes you wonder why you'd want to use an lossy f…

> Have you done a blind test comparing a 256 or 320 kbps AAC file to a FLAC one?

That's irrelevant, FLAC is an archival format. If you rip a CD, it makes perfect sense to rip it to flac in order to have no data loss whatsoever, and be able to fork it off to whatever lossy format is de rigueur for your new device. If you rip to a lossy format, then each copies will accumulate approximations from the different codec's perceptual models, especially if you keep deleting the previous copy and only keep the new one.

I don't put FLAC files on my phone, it takes way too much space, and the phone doesn't support it anyway. The phone gets AAC conversions of the "master" FLAC files.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#145

Post by masklinn »

dmonitor wrote: post #124
andjd wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you done a blind test comparing a 256 or 320 kbps AAC file to a FLAC one? At that bitrate, the AAC file is lossy in the sense that you can't recreate a bit-for-bit perfect copy of the original, but most humans shouldn't hear any difference. A decent proxy to know that this is true is that at those bitrates, a FLAC file is often smaller than the AAC one. Yes, this makes you wonder why you'd want to use an lossy f…

That's also dependent on your headphones. I might have shitty earbuds today, but in the future when I might have 3D "puts the sound directly into your brain" phones, I might tell the difference

> That's also dependent on your headphones.

It's not.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#146

Post by ufmace »

Aside from CDs themselves, has anyone noticed a severe lack of CD players these days?

I might be off-base, but as far as I can tell, basically no laptop computer and rather few desktops come with any type of optical media drives these days. Haven't shopped for a car in a while, but I don't think I've seen one with a CD player either. Most music seems to be consumed on phones and tablets, where it's basically impossible to have a CD drive. I would expect you can still buy standalone home theater-style CD players, but I bet the sales of them are pretty low these days.

The only reason I have a optical media reader at all is that I homebuild my PC. I bought an optical drive for I think like $20 or something like a decade ago on my first build, and just kept the drive and case through multiple upgrades. If I did a new build from scratch tomorrow, I'm not sure I'd bother. My current drive, the door doesn't open half the time, and I haven't bothered to try and fix or replace it, since I basically never use it.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#147

Post by RajT88 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #127
RajT88 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The technical merits of vinyl are dubious. But it is undeniably the coolest way to listen to music. It takes effort, it is an event, a ritual executed with great care.

May as well get your coolness with cylinder recordings.

That is a thing you can do too:

https://tmbw.net/wiki/Wax_Cylinder_Recordings

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#148

Post by masklinn »

Melatonic wrote: post #132
andjd wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you done a blind test comparing a 256 or 320 kbps AAC file to a FLAC one? At that bitrate, the AAC file is lossy in the sense that you can't recreate a bit-for-bit perfect copy of the original, but most humans shouldn't hear any difference. A decent proxy to know that this is true is that at those bitrates, a FLAC file is often smaller than the AAC one. Yes, this makes you wonder why you'd want to use an lossy f…

The advantage of storing in FLAC though is that if you do want to encode to a more lossy format later you are not going to make the file worse than if you were to originally go from say .wav to mp3. Or if you wanted to manipulate the file later for use in a movie or something. Given that tons of players do FLAC these days and storage is relatively cheap I don't really see any advantage to using AAC.

> storage is relatively cheap

Server storage is relatively cheap, mobile storage is a different kettle of fish, and even with a lot of storage, if you have a large music collection it's much easier to blow way past with FLAC as it's at least an order of magnitude larger than even high-quality lossy tracks. I can't put my entire collection on my phone even after having converted it to a lossy format, putting the lossless masters is plain not an option.

And since conversion is easy to do, and to automate, really the only reason to put lossless tracks on a device other than the storage server where they live is sheer laziness.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#149

Post by throwaway894345 »

andjd wrote: post #89
throwaway894345 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I didn't realize CDs didn't have copy protection? Why would they not? From the RIAA's perspective, isn't that just a way to double charge customers like the MPAA does?

CDs are older than DVDs, and when they were released there would have been no digital way to copy them. It makes sense that the DRM wouldn't have occurred to the developers of the format.

CDs are just digital storage media. You could just layer DRM on top of it, but you'd have to get the whole ecosystem to move. And I have to think they probably would if the RIAA insisted.

Re: There Is No CD Revival

#150

Post by TrispusAttucks »

Purely anecdotal but I bought around 8 CDs this year. The first time buying any in many years.

I just want to listen to an album and not fuck with playlists on my phone.

I want to hear what message an artist has to actually say not just slap corporate approved pop hits on the way home.

I don't want my listening to be a point in some dataset to be later sold.

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