The lost joy of music piracy

Post by minikomi » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 5:17 AM UTC

slackerIII wrote: post #435

tomduncalf wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Post by qingcharles » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 7:09 PM UTC

beloch wrote: post #498

eisa01 wrote: post #51

It'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…

Some music is a lot like abandoned video games. It can sometimes be tricky to figure out who owns the rights and, even having done that, more difficult still to track them down and get their permission. Also, it's not a given that the answer will be, "Yes.". If you ask an obscure artist to fill out forms and jump through hoops for 6 cents in streaming royalties, they may tell you to piss off. There are likely many al…

Post by miladyincontrol » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 11:44 PM UTC

Post by chriscyber » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 4:57 AM UTC

smugglerFlynn wrote: post #243

devonsolomon wrote: post #112

The 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…

> I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this, and invariably find 90% of my listening happening on algo-generated playlists of songs that sound exactly like a song I like. I never learn the names of the songs or the names of the bands as the songs go by, and I fall in love with none of it… It just vaguely sounds like stuff I like. It sucks. I don't think algorithms are…

Post by efreak » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 9:32 AM UTC

tonyhart7 wrote: post #561

ocd wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very serious. It's not a simple matter to get any sort of exportable data from these cloud services, and they won't bother to notify you that media that was on your playlist or in your library has been removed. I gave Apple Music a try for about a year. and even that relatively small migration was hellish. I have an easy time managing a playlist through the many available audio player frontends writing to an .m3u…

no one gonna delete your playlist, stop making shit up