171–180 of 209 posts
I feel like developing an app for iOS is harder than developing one for Android. Everything from writing code to building and publishing is overcomplicated.
Unless you try to support wide range of devices. That's where android development is harder.
It's interesting that most/all of the available tools for playing digital music, a well-known and very popular activity... suck. Do we think that's enshittification or product managers misunderstanding the market? In a normal universe one might otherwise expect it to be saturated with options.
It's enshittification. Software for playing audio used to be great even with far fewer engineering resources going into them. That suggests the reason they are getting worse is deliberate and stems from a misalignment between what software users want and what the producers want. Most music software companies today are two businesses joined together: 1. A software company that makes apps to let people listen to music.…
And it's funny you point to the podcasts as an example for that, a lot of the podcasts and now audiobooks they push are some of the most expensive content they have.
It's interesting that most/all of the available tools for playing digital music, a well-known and very popular activity... suck. Do we think that's enshittification or product managers misunderstanding the market? In a normal universe one might otherwise expect it to be saturated with options.
The enshitification was completed when they convinced us to no longer want to own our own copies of music but to perpetually rent access to their content.
Not everyone had some massive record collection and hundreds of cassette tapes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
foobar2000, IrfanView, Total Commander. The 3 apps I still miss after 15+ years of not using Windows (went through 10 years of OSX, now on Linux for probably 5 years). There's just nothing like this trio on OSX or Linux.
I've used foobar2000 and irfanview when I was a windows user 20 years but I am struggling to figure out what these have that make them more desirable than comparable apps on linux. I have all my image browsing / viewing / light editing usage covered with gthumb on Linux and rythmbox does it for me in term of music listening as it can play both my local files as well as net radios. I think kde users are naturally more…
I also like Irfanview because:
A) It has every basic editing function you might need (crop, color adjust, blur/sharpen), great for ad-hoc one-off things. It has all these functions but loads just about instantly on my older laptop. For example, if I need to rotate a picture real quick, it's convenient to open it in Irfanview and just press L/R to orient it.
B) I like it for one-off converting pics from one format to another, and it's the only GUI program I've seen that lets you save as jpeg, but also specify the target size. So I can convert a 10MB PNG to a 256KB jpeg easily. I know this is trivial to do in Linux with the convert command but when, for example, working with pics from my phone, I'm already previewing it in Irfanview in the first place. Irfanview's save GUI actually exposes a lot of knobs for many image formats that I don't see on other programs.
C) If you want to extract images from a PDF, you can open the PDF in Irfanview and Irfanview will let you save out the individual images. At least for the PDFs I've tried it with.
D) The batch mode it has is decently implemented and is easier to use than Linux command line stuff for small jobs if Irfanview can take care of the need (less than 50 images), especially if the images are all over the place and not in one folder.
I'm so used to it I'll probably use it in Wine (if possible) if/when I actually make the jump to everyday desktop Linux, which Windows 11 may make me do finally.
I've been building a music collection in FLAC format for 25 years, and last year I bought an (Android) phone and a MicroSD card of 1TB that fits all of my music. It's been a long project for technology to catch up, but now that it's possible to have all of it in my pocket, I'm pretty happy with it. I'm sure I can't be the only one that doesn't want to be a renter, give up control and stream anything the industry want…
You are very good collection curator! Only ~25% of my collection is FLAC/APE/ALAC/WavePack and still I have more than 3TB. It is what stops me from listening music on the go — I cannot choose what to put in mobile device in advance :-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The enshitification was completed when they convinced us to no longer want to own our own copies of music but to perpetually rent access to their content.
People have spent many decades without actually caring to own their music content. Back then they used these things called "radios" to enjoy music content without owning the collection. Streaming services today are just another evolution of listening to the radio. Not everyone had some massive record collection and hundreds of cassette tapes.
Today, those "cool" stations have primarily been slurped up into iHateRadio / Comcast conglomerates, so commercial radio is useless. The internet is the only saving grace for kids today, but even streaming platforms don't do it for me. Sadly, youtube is about the best thing for its ubiquitous availability. Bandcamp/Soundcloud are cool, but still not the same discoverability as YT.
Even with my collection, it's still not instantly accessible as I'd like due to the manual labor of digitizing. I've tried on multiple occasions, but it's only a fraction of the collection. It's just too easy to find it with yt-dl
Dang, I thought he had built his own hardware. I'd still love to get a proper successor to the Sandisk Sansa Fuze, just with USB-C charging instead of its proprietary charging cable. There's plenty of "luxury" /audiophile MP3 players out there which cost in the hundreds of dollars, but that one was in the sweet spot of bang-for-your-buck music player that I could just use for listening to music on long plane rides et…
Essentially, you could carry a small battery attached to an extra sigle-task dedicated device, or a slightly larger battery in about the same-ish form factor that will let you use that energy to do anything you want with your other device you're probably already carrying.
If your phone is in whatever airplane mode, battery saver mode, etc. it's not going to use that much power just to play local music.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People have spent many decades without actually caring to own their music content. Back then they used these things called "radios" to enjoy music content without owning the collection. Streaming services today are just another evolution of listening to the radio. Not everyone had some massive record collection and hundreds of cassette tapes.
I never have liked commercial radio. There's too little music, and too many commercials. Then of course there's the whole payola issues, and the lack of variety in the tracks played on the radio. In major markets or college towns, there might be a few stations that just play good music based on what the program director or specific jockeys want to play. Luckily, I had one near me, and it offered me a catalog of music…
These platforms aren't necessarily drawing people who really wanted a big privately curated music collection to own forever, they're drawing the people who just want to listen to music and not have to spend much or anything at all for it. Which happens to be a ton of people.
I was hoping the article was going to be about a physical device as well as the software to manage and play songs. A few years ago I wanted to get my 10 year old son an mp3 player – he's really into listening to music but wasn't ready (still isn't) for a phone. I was shocked by the state of the mp3 player options. When Apple discontinued the iPod they created a huge vacuum that no one seems to have filled. I think th…
Fiio has a bunch of products in this category, eg. https://www.fiio.com/cp13 and https://www.fiio.com/jm21