I still do it. Spotify is good for making playlists but I don't use it for listening. I collect mp3s, bought on Bandcamp or downloaded from Soulseek, and listen on an old Sansa Clip mp3 player.
The lost joy of music piracy
431–440 of 637 posts
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#432Earlier 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.)
The music is digital before it gets pressed on vinyl. They're not recording directly from microphone to vinyl.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
I once did a blind test on myself. A FLAC audio file and a 128Kbit Ogg vorbis file of the same track that I could switch between as I pleased but without knowing which was playing. Yeah, I cannot tell the difference. I am absolutely sure others can, but not me. I also think credit goes to far better encoders today than what we had 25 years ago.
I did this with a japanese punk band and when I finally got on a private tracker, I redownloaded them and the quality difference was night and day. I have a huge backlog of mid-grade MP3s from TPB back in the day and I'll occasionally download a second flac version of the albums just to get the dynamic range.
A lot of old stuff was also encoded way worse than one might think from the alleged bitrate. A while ago I went through a ton of old files, and everything that sounded shitty (or, far more commonly, stuff I downloaded but didn’t care about) got yeeted.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was also common to have a collection of CDs you owned and wanted to put on a device like this.
Yeah, GP is rose-tinting piracy and Apple’s stance a bit… When I was a teenager we had _dial-up_. My first 2 iPods were strictly playing ripped CDs, which I, friends, or family had bought. Buying the iPod itself was probably cheaper than 2 months worth of internet traffic back then.
It took about 30 minutes to get 3.5 MB mp3 song over dial up. I would let downloads run overnight and could get a dozen songs by next day. I would do my bulk mp3 downloading in the morning before class at schools library to immediately transfer over USB to my 4 GB Archos Jukebox hard drive mp3 player. That was around 2001 - 2003 either before schools blocked p2p or I must have been using public file downloading sites.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#435Very fond memories of using Audiogalaxy, and also soulseek. Soulseek especially had a community where you found someone who was into the same kind of music as you (obscure breakcore! japanese garage punk!) and could browse their collections, and chat to them also! What a wonderful way to make music friends and get good recommendations.
Audiogalaxy was awesome. I loved how you could browse every file that had ever been online, rather than just what was online now, and queue them up for when they came online again. I’d just leave it running on our dial up connection when everyone went out of the house (no dedicated line so you’d clog up the phone, the good old days haha) and then come back to some exciting downloads I’d totally forgotten that I ever…
Audiogalaxy dev here. That was my favorite part of the design.
One of my other favorite parts was that prioritized matches based on how similar their domain name was to yours, so a lot of times you would end up grabbing files from someone in the same dorm or city (cable modem IPs had hostnames back then had the city in the name).
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#436Ah flashback of going to a large LAN party in the late 90s, having an open share on your PC, leaving for dinner and coming back to the disk filled with new and exciting tunes, including one[1] that I still listen to.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#437I still use torrents to find lossless CD rips of various 80s - 90s music. Makes it easy to get multiple different releases and pick best sounding version. Buying used CDs on ebay to rip would be a chore.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#438It's important to remember that to this day, streaming sites do not have a full archive of the music out there. There is still a need for music piracy Even albums mentioned in the Norwegian business magazine D2 can be impossible to find in legit channels. Your only option is to buy used CDs on Discogs for 50-100 USD, or know your way around the successors of these sites These CDs weren’t even on Oink or What (or did…
> Even albums mentioned in the Norwegian business magazine D2 can be impossible to find in legit channels.
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
"People got used to free shit and stopped paying as much." "Your claim is poorly supported." "Well it came from a book. Check it out if you're interested." "What? It's not free? Hell no I won't pay!"
(anecdotally) proving their point that pay walling something doesn't mean people will pay for it. Buying the book would have been hypocritical.
This whole thread does have me questioning my understanding of cited sources behind paywalls.
A contrived example I have in my head "My friend has more definitive proof in HIS book that , it only costs $1 trillion. Go read it yourself." For this particular thread its a bit disingenuous, but in a general case how does one go about understanding / disproving arguments made like this?
Re: The lost joy of music piracy
#440The thing I miss most, and the thing we’ll never get back was the cultural buy-in and network effects. My music discovery then was different friend groups incrementally amassing large collections of albums in whatever sub-culture that friend groups had doubled down on. My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships. I would then fall in love with bands and albums and tracks on these albums without any influence b…
> and the thing we’ll never get back was the cultural buy-in and network effects.
You must not be using Spotify the way I do.
I access my friends' playlists and they access mine. Spotify lets you do exactly what you're describing, only faster and easier.
For a lot of people, they use Spotify specifically because of the network effects, because that's where people can find their playlists. Because everyone's culturally bought-in to the idea that Spotify is where you share that.
> I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this
It literally was built for this. If you aren't using shared playlists, then you have only yourself to blame. Not Spotify.