Many people bring up the "discover new music" argument. It is probably subjective, but for me this has never been an issue. There are so many way to discover new music today, there are tons on youtube and people recommend in the comments, you see a mention of something and head over to Wikipedia, follow some links, and so on. I don't need an algorithm for it, an algorithm that most likely is more optimized for revenu…
> there are tons on youtube and people recommend in the comments I mean if Spotify UX is bad, YouTube is absolutely trash. I have to pay to be able to stream media if my phone is locked.
I almost always listen to YT on my desktop, connected to the stereo. And on Firefox with extensions to help with the rest.
> Most albums were padded with crap to fill it up so people didn't feel ripped off. This may be true, but you could always just buy the good albums. I owned a number of CDs/cassettes back in the day and I would listen to them and enjoy them front-to-back, over and over. Another aspect of it is that very often what's familiar sounds good, so by listening to the whole album, all of it (or more of it) would start to sou…
I 100% agree about the different experience of listening to good/great/amazing albums and the benefits of doing so. It's just that it is a pretty rare experience, particularly these days! A definite downside of our current music situation is that making an album like that is something that is really exceptional, since people rarely listen to music in that manner anymore. However, I wonder if the total number of "holi…
>I 100% agree about the different experience of listening to good/great/amazing albums and the benefits of doing so. It's just that it is a pretty rare experience, particularly these days!
Yes - I suspect many kids who are happy with Spotify haven't had the experience. (It's actually a similar trade-off with broadcast TV - I'm realizing now with kids the downsides to having on-demand every episode of every show ever made, versus having to wait until next week and having to be there at a particular time. Gives you time to digest, anticipate, and enjoy. And I always muted the ad breaks, which made them tolerable.)
Hah, I searched “cam” in the windows search bar the other day looking to open the camera app, but windows decided I was actually looking for “Calculator” or a handful of other things that didn’t have a single “M” in it listed ahead of the actual camera app.
Getting a bit off-topic here but YES, this drives me bonkers. Worse yet is that if I pause there for a moment, the search results continue to reorganize themselves, so that by the time I'm ready with a screenshot, the wrong answer has vanished. I can only catch it on video. How did search turn so terrible?
How did search turn so terrible?
Not enough people complained, and/or voted with their dollars and/or attention.
The few people who do complain are inevitably answered with the ever-present refrain of the Windows fan club ("You just don't like change!"), which effectively cuts off any avenues for argument in favor of the perfectly-good status quo. The only way forward from that point is down.
Physical storage space. ;) My laptop is smaller than any collection of CDs and can store an entire building of them in the space of 12 jewel cases. If you include my phone and a cellular connection for streaming, the entire world of music can be accessed in a device smaller than any portable CD player. And the speakers in my iPhone are better than most stereos from the same era. We truly live in the world where scien…
The speakers... A while back, my wife and I went for a week way out in the sticks. We live in Oregon, and our favorite place is out in the Ochoco high desert National Forest. And nothing works there. I mean nothing except for AM radio late at night.[1] After a few days, our hearing settles back to what is supposed to be normal. City life is loud and our hearing system compensates in various ways that reduce our abili…
Great story. Sounds like nights at Joshua Tree, where I am more familiar. Apple's laptop speakers are the best in the world. But even the best laptop speakers aren't "good hifi system good", especially in bass and stereo separation, but these qualities are not needed by lots of music. Even cheap modern portables with li-ion batteries and rare-earth magnets are startlingly good, a real feat of engineering, and perfectly acceptable to blast Pharrel at a pool party. But if I'm listening to Dark Side of the Moon, I want good headphones!
> And the speakers in my iPhone are better than most stereos from the same era. Did you live in this era? I don’t think you know what you are talking about.
Right, I think people have no idea that home hifi speakers and amps even in the 1960s could sound essentially as good as today when fed with a good source. However that does not mean that one of those systems found in estate sale will sound ok today. The materials degrade and sound nothing today like they did when sold. I remember my dad's mid-60s KLH speakers sounding good with a mid-70s Sansui solid state receiver…
>class D Yamaha receiver that I use as the DAC whether driven by HDMI or TOSlink from a USB audio periphera
I'm sorry to say I wimped out and, despite the low price and power efficiency, didn't try one of these, and opted for an older power hungry design. What did you get? I actually have an extra pair of the B&W speakers I got for my main system and was thinking of using them for the TV, but I don't want another clunky amp out there.
Why should the medium not matter? I actually feel that's the shallow take Quite often, historically, music comes as part of a complete experiential package. Gatherings around fire, singing and dancing in groups, celebrating life's milestones, getting dressed up for concerts, excitement at buying tickets, journeying in and out of the city to pick up new recordings. All of those things are valid aspects of musical cult…
Weren’t those things stripped from music when we invented recording?
>Spotify is extremely biased towards playlist listening and makes browsing and listening to a library of albums really painful. Does anyone else get a dystopian vibe from this statement? I feel like the old guy in the SF movie pulling his hair and exclaiming, "But what have we lost?!" We used to have vinyl, tapes, finally CDs, and even the ability to rip our library to a computer, which we could carry with us. It was…
The physicality of cassettes/records/CDs/mini-disks was fun, and listening to an entire album sometimes was really cool - but almost entirely not. Most albums were padded with crap to fill it up so people didn't feel ripped off. Remember, an album in 1985 cost $40 in 2022 dollars. Sure, there were occasional albums that the artist really thought about, including the slipcase, and the physicality of that I miss. But y…
>Revisiting that nostalgia in 2022 recently, and I've found the joy from an album isn't really what it used to be
Maybe you haven't found the right albums? You should listen to St. Vincent's first 3 albums - they are really good. More recently, Emma Ruth Rundle "On Dark Horses" is fantastic, or anything by Lisa Hannigan. Recording artists are more and more aware that people are not consuming albums in one sitting, but that's still how music is produced! Vinyl is one reason but another, I think, is that "album" is the most useful abstraction for the artist to think in when it comes to making a thing.
Do they do any development still? I haven’t seen a single useful feature come out from the team during past 3 years. Their single tap feature is absurdly bad. For some reason, shuffle is never truly random and keeps playing same old songs. I know people have been complaining about this for years. There is no easy way to merge duplicate playlists. There is tons of things to do but I don’t think they have any development team anymore. They rode on popularity, founders cashed out, bought private islands and now they probably only have small maintenance team to keep the lights on.
Plex (and plexamp) have really brought back the old iTunes interface I didn't know I was missing.
I can search and get a list, I can sort within that list by whatever I want, I can create a "smart playlist" for "100 tracks, with more than 5 plays that were last played more than 3 months ago". There's also a "shuffle albums" feature that I didn't realize I missed from iTunes. You can also add a tidal subscription within plex, but it's a little clunky so I just stick to my library.