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Nuclear: Desktop music player focused on streaming from free sources

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Re: Nuclear: Desktop music player focused on streaming from free sources

#251

Post by pxoe »

charcircuit wrote: post #100
pxoe wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's completely understandable not just for the usual streaming services (like youtube, etc.) and the grievances there (payouts per play, whichever way it goes, be it that artists getting stiffed or people refusing to come up with even a fraction of a cent), but for something like bandcamp as well, which is kind of 'almost but not quite a streaming service' and more accurately described in a literal way like 'it lets…

This bypasses the ads of YouTube Music which means that artists are not being compensated for their work.

Yes, which is what I also mention (as more usual streaming services, what someone would immediately think of and which is more geared towards that conventional kind of streaming - which bandcamp is kind of just not), it's just that culturally one is further down the line of being shitty to artists, and something like bandcamp has much lower fees on payments. However yeah, this thing is shitty to artists in about the same way, just relatively even shittier to artists on platforms that are better.

Re: Nuclear: Desktop music player focused on streaming from free sources

#252

Post by pxoe »

bigyabai wrote: post #203
Severian wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 100% agree with this take: adding Bandcamp to this "media" app is a really shitty thing to do. I personally know a few musicians who use Bandcamp to either exclusively make a living (along with touring), or to supplement their income. Some are overjoyed when they get a few sales a week on a release. This POS software denies that opportunity. Either way, 99% of the artists are small independent musicians, and this j…

Artists can disable full-length previews if this is a concern. Otherwise, I don't think Bandcamp's 320kbps MP3s are any more attractive than a YouTube rip.

Previews/free streaming on bandcamp is 128 kbps mp3 only. If you buy music there, you get the whole spread, lossy and lossless, mp3 320/v0, aac, ogg, flac, even wav. (Only thing notably missing at this point is opus, which would be fantastic to have, like for example, opus at 64k (space saving/space efficient) and 256k (quality), although vorbis or aac at whatever quality they have it set to is pretty good as a space efficient option)

Re: Nuclear: Desktop music player focused on streaming from free sources

#253

Post by mitchitized »

komali2 wrote: post #221
AlecSchueler wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a musician: that's totally fine, we can argue the philosophy of it all day and what the law should or shouldn't be. But right now it is what it is and people are basing their careers off that status quo. There should be some respect for that, no?

> There should be some respect for that, no? Not really. Like when my friend scolded me the other day for not finishing the dessert I ordered - "trash is burned here, you're contributing to excess methane production." May I be flogged for my excess methane production. I will present myself with no resistance, so long as the floggings are delivered in a linear scale mapping to amount of methane produced. As soon as al…

> People listening to music for free is less than a drop of water in the ocean of causative reasons musicians get fucked.

Astonishingly ignorant hot take. Music is what MUSICIANS DO. Some of them are also performers, many are not. What they create is the same as what a painter does, or even a chef or architect. However it is not a physical good so people with tiny brains think that means "iT's FreEEe!!1!" when each musical instrument used costs money, the recording cost money, the distribution cost money, the filing/registration costs money, and then there's all the years of time and effort spent learning how to do all of this.

The fact of the matter is that right now music is treated very similarly to software. There is ownership and copyright, and being able to make a digital copy for minimal cost/effort does not magically remove that ownership.

If you don't like it then you should change the laws. It's like being mad at cops because of the speed limit, when the likely culprits are your local city council.

Re: Nuclear: Desktop music player focused on streaming from free sources

#254

Post by NoGravitas »

account42 wrote: post #249
pelagicAustral wrote: post #10

I don't think anybody can be religiously opposed to Electron any more. It's pervasive.

Sin always is pervasive.

We live in a fallen world. I find myself using Signal Desktop, and have to say 10 Hail Emacs for every message I send.

Re: Nuclear: Desktop music player focused on streaming from free sources

#255

Post by pxoe »

1gn15 wrote: post #189
SirFatty wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's real, and been around for quite a while. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18921296

Interesting to see how much more pro-copyright (and less hacker-like) HackerNews has gotten since then. It's sad.

There's being "pro-copyright" and then there's just the topic of paying artists, and then choosing not to pay them.

Which sometimes is bizarrely and belligerently defended like some moral stance (barely even in relation to copyright/piracy), and sometimes bubbles up like tools that not just avoid paying artists, but make it harder to pay artists, even when those artists have something set up that's a far cry from ad driven platforms. Like, it's not just 'removing third party ads', it's removing any surface and any mention that may have artist selling their music. Is that even about copyright? The music is available to listen either way so it's hardly even infringing that way, it's just that something like this app chooses an active stance (how else would one describe actively removing everything about paying aspect) that's against paying artists, at all and in any form.

It's not even about 'what does downloading music entail', it's just 'fuck paying artists'. Music has been beaten towards kind of just giving up and making things free to stream and just kind of hoping to get their money elsewhere (concerts, merch, music sales), and yet still some people want artists to shrink with their "paying for art bullshit" even further as to preferably have artists not even mentioning that and themselves not seeing any of that at all.

Re: Nuclear: Desktop music player focused on streaming from free sources

#256

Post by ToucanLoucan »

komali2 wrote: post #222
llbbdd wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have demonstrably not - they have generally failed until introducing capitalism-eseque cooperation. "They fail when they're mismanaged, privatized, or stripped of the social fabric that sustains them" - yes, these are obvious natural consequences of scale.

Not really. It didn't happen in syndicalized Spain. It didn't happen for millennia in ancient cities. Scale being necessary seems to be unique to capitalism and state capitalism (Marxist industrialization requirements). Maybe it was necessary before, I don't know but it's moot. We certainly have achieved post scarcity now and there should be no issues leveraging the tools our ancestors have given us to ensure it's di…

Yeah but that would make all the people who are rich because they own things very sad, so instead we're just gonna starve shitloads of people to death next to piles of food daily and call it rational.

Re: Nuclear: Desktop music player focused on streaming from free sources

#257

Post by flkenosad »

edoceo wrote: post #175
ada1981 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why TOS violations in general are unethical?

Typically they start with something like: by using this $SERVICE you AGREE to blah-blah-blah ($X) If you agree to $X but then don't do it: you're a liar. The terms might be shit. But if you agree to shit terms you should be bound by shit terms. In the olden days: "I gave my word as a gentleman and a scholar" or "a deals a deal, even with a dirty dealer"[0]. Going back on a deal is not ethical; end of. [0] I think it…

> If you agree to $X but then don't do it: you're a liar.

No, you're unreliable.

Re: Nuclear: Desktop music player focused on streaming from free sources

#258

Post by rpdillon »

mitchitized wrote: post #253
komali2 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There should be some respect for that, no? Not really. Like when my friend scolded me the other day for not finishing the dessert I ordered - "trash is burned here, you're contributing to excess methane production." May I be flogged for my excess methane production. I will present myself with no resistance, so long as the floggings are delivered in a linear scale mapping to amount of methane produced. As soon as al…

> People listening to music for free is less than a drop of water in the ocean of causative reasons musicians get fucked. Astonishingly ignorant hot take. Music is what MUSICIANS DO. Some of them are also performers, many are not. What they create is the same as what a painter does, or even a chef or architect. However it is not a physical good so people with tiny brains think that means "iT's FreEEe!!1!" when each m…

I think you're misunderstanding the point GP was trying to make. Artists and musicians in particular seem to think that copyright is their friend. Because, in theory, it's a mechanism by which a revenue stream could appear when you produce artwork. But copyright is not the musician's friend at all. It's a mechanism by which record labels consolidate power as the middlemen and route revenue to their executives with very little money ever going to artists. and with every technological shift, the labels find a way to give less and less to the consumer and give less and less to the artists. So now it's extremely unusual for somebody that's a fan of some music to actually purchase that music, and artists are getting paid less and less when people do listen to their music.

My personal belief is that systems that allow people to get paid when they're not working are not sustainable, and therefore intellectual property has a fundamental flaw. The end game for musicians is to perform live and use their recordings as advertisements for that. That makes them very similar to jobs I've held my whole life where the second I stop showing up for work is the second I stop getting paid.

Re: Nuclear: Desktop music player focused on streaming from free sources

#259

Post by prmoustache »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #215
toomuchtodo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musicians are not the consumers, users are the consumers. Some musicians will always be unhappy, this is unavoidable due to complex issues around IP rights, compensation for art, and the length of time it takes to make changes to these systems (not to mention simply how much existing content is out there new and current artists are competing against, attention economy and all that). n=1, I am optimizing for access to…

> Musicians are not the consumers, users are the consumers Yeah but if you want to sell cheese it's probably a good idea to maintain a good relationship with farmers.

> Searching for and playing music from YouTube (including integration with playlists and SponsorBlock), Jamendo, Audius and SoundCloud

From what I understand the _farmers_ themselves are distributing their _cheese_ freely on various website and this tool is just a glorified search engine to find them more easily. Not sure why the _farmers_ would complain?

Re: Nuclear: Desktop music player focused on streaming from free sources

#260

Post by nashashmi »

debazel wrote: post #229
nashashmi wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idealistically it should not be using so much memory and burning up the world’s silicon. Efficient computing is a backbone of why we trust computers. (I am horrified with the windows explorer in windows 11 nowadays for its slowness.)

How are you burning up silicon by using your memory? If anything you're wasting more silicon by making low-density RAM modules.

Less efficient software means more frequent hardware upgrades.
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