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The lost joy of music piracy

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Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#221

Post by bugufu8f83 »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #199
bugufu8f83 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, vinyl is still relatively niche in absolute terms. Second of all, the popularity of vinyl, such as it is, has absolutely nothing to do with availability. It's largely driven by a kind of retro nostalgia (as the technology itself is, of course, inferior from a technical sense of faithful reproduction) plus a desire for personal physical ownership of something.

> It's largely driven by a kind of retro nostalgia Incorrect. The reasons why vinyl specifically is still relevant (as opposed to any other "retro" audio format) are technical. Vinyl avoids compression issues by design. (Compression both in the computer science sense and in the audio engineering sense.)

This is complete bullshit, sorry. Digital is more capable of faithfully reproducing sound than vinyl is. Vinyl does not have technical advantages when it comes to faithful sound reproduction. I mean, it literally degrades over time, for chrissake!

I don't know what kind of "compression issues" you're talking about but I strongly suspect you'd be well served by learning about the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#222

Post by parasti »

Spotify is fundamentally broken in a certain, unfixable way, IMO.

I use it and have a subscription, but I dread opening their app and looking at the starting screen that shows the same artists I listened to twenty years ago in pointless blurbs like "presave this (you can't listen to it)", "jump back in (you literally already listened to it)", "your favorite artists (not according to you but according to us)". There is no joy of discovery of new music that you haven't heard. There is no connection to other humans through music. Audioscrobbler/Last.fm is miles ahead of this. Youtube is miles ahead of this.

Here's how I discover music these days: I swipe Youtube shorts until its algorithm decides to show me an artist, then I look that artist up on Spotify. Thats how bad Spotify is - it's an audio server with search and a hundred layers of irrelevant features bolted on top.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#223

Post by twelvechairs »

ValdikSS wrote: post #104
omgmajk wrote: post #28

Music piracy is alive and well if you know where to look. Some places has been mentioned in this thread already. Of course there is no replacing the magic of early 2000-2010's p2p sites like OiNK, What and Waffles - but well curated sites still exist.

Public p2p sharing is pretty much dead in the West. Only Russian Rutracker is still going strong, but everything other is either stagnating or defunct. I have a p2p sharing websites bookmarks which I collected about 5 years ago, 60% of them are dead now. Private (invite-only) West sharing websites are still alive though, but are supported mostly by beefy enthusiasts who seed everything via a seedbox elsewhere, not in…

Soulseek is still going strong last time i checked

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#224

Post by juvvel »

ndesaulniers wrote: post #74
maxaw wrote: post #30

What a cool article. I have good memories of being 13 and my cousin telling me about limewire. Between random pornography titles there was an artist called burial, which I downloaded cause I thought it sounded edgy. How lucky was I!

Final Fantasy FMVs set to edgy nu metal. Man, I _had_ a limewire shirt (somewhere); they interviewed at my college. Where is that important piece of history?

The opening of FFX basically is basically an FMV with edgy metal built in. :D

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#225

Post by xaitv »

pjc50 wrote: post #177
erikschoster wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was also common to have a collection of CDs you owned and wanted to put on a device like this.

We forget that the labels also consider that piracy. For a while there were attempts to make CDs un-rippable. Streaming (which pays labels and artists much less) only exists because it's the compromise that solves the "service problem" side of piracy.

> We forget that the labels also consider that piracy. For a while there were attempts to make CDs un-rippable.

One of these attempts that I assume most people are familiar with but is an interesting read for those that aren't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#226

Post by speed_spread »

postalcoder wrote: post #119
CoolestBeans wrote: post #56

One thing I miss about the iPod era is that Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music. It doesn't take much look at how much music an iPod could store, how much music cost, and how much people had in disposable income to spend on music to realize that music had to come from other means. The iPod and P2P file sharing were incredibly synergistic in a way that makes me giggle. The iTunes store is just…

> Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music. On the flip side, Sony lost the consumer devices market for this very reason. Sony's single-minded pursuit of proprietary formats was a disaster class of corporate mismanagement. It disgusts me because I used to love their products so much. Sony's competitor to the iPod was a marvel of a device called the NW-HD1. It was beautiful, had a ton of space, and…

Yet a few years before that Sony had no qualms selling walkmans, blank tape cassettes and dual-tape portable sound systems, often with double speed copy function. We would gather for afternoons and make actual copy parties. Recording quality wasn't great but we didn't care.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#227

Post by motbus3 »

parasti wrote: post #222

Spotify is fundamentally broken in a certain, unfixable way, IMO. I use it and have a subscription, but I dread opening their app and looking at the starting screen that shows the same artists I listened to twenty years ago in pointless blurbs like "presave this (you can't listen to it)", "jump back in (you literally already listened to it)", "your favorite artists (not according to you but according to us)". There i…

I had spotify premium for ~10 years i think. I recently cancelled. I travel a lot, so now they started complaining i was not listening near my address.

then they started blocking family members because i was not around.

then they wanted to charge in a different coin because i was not home, but EVEN if i would their login doesnt work because it redirects me to a different country if i am abroad.

they are vibe coding too hard that they add all bs they think is a good idea. it was a good push for me to cancel that.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#228

Post by juvvel »

Oh, the joy was never fully lost to me. I still listen to bands so obscure that Spotify and Youtube Music don't have them, so I have no other choice. I'm slowly reverting back to my tech use of the late 2000s and early 2010s, with the added bonus of being able to access my own music collection from anywhere. I've seriously been considering getting an MP3 player again.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#230

Post by rkharsan64 »

parasti wrote: post #222

Spotify is fundamentally broken in a certain, unfixable way, IMO. I use it and have a subscription, but I dread opening their app and looking at the starting screen that shows the same artists I listened to twenty years ago in pointless blurbs like "presave this (you can't listen to it)", "jump back in (you literally already listened to it)", "your favorite artists (not according to you but according to us)". There i…

I haven't used it, but YouTube Music has a samples section which is supposed to show you "shorts" of new (to you) songs.
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