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Comment by kristiandupont | Hacker News Reader

I confess, I am part of this trend. And I just got into it, so I get no "before it was cool"-claim to fame. Not sure where that leaves me on the hipster-scale.

Buying CD's used to be a weekly ritual for me and I missed it for years. Putting on a new album on a Saturday afternoon with a beer or glass of wine while I start cooking is a very enjoyable moment for me. Now, obviously this was for the most part because I would have access to new music. That experience has not come back as I can put on anything on my laptop. However, there is a nice sense to putting on an album and being "forced" to play it from one end to the other. With streaming, I have a tolerance of 10-20 seconds of jarring music before I lose my patience and skip the track. Which is good but also means that I miss out on some of the tracks that take more effort and are in the "acquired taste" category. And in my experience, those tend to stay pleasant whereas the hits suddenly reach a threshold after which I can't stand listening to them any more.

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Growing up, I would revel in all of my father's records. During the summer I'd clean up the floor of his closet where he stored them all. I'd gaze in wonder at the bands that he never deemed worthy enough to buy the CD for.

Much like you, I remember listening to Blood on the Tracks on Saturday mornings playing GameBoy or reading The Hobbit. We'd have Asleep at the Wheel playing during a card-game, or overlaying bad sports commentary.

Fast Forward to High School. I was hired as a retail salesperson at a Mom-And-Pop hot-topic like store at the local mall. Given my somewhat decent taste in music, the shopkeeper let me determine music choice.

So now, as I've had Groove/Zune/Spotify subscriptions going on (basically continuously) for nearly 12 years, I still try to buy at least 15 or so LPs a year. That used to be CDs, but now that I'm an adult with some space, I carved out a section for Vinyl records. They weren't purchased for the different 'warmth', no, they were purchased because I love music and vinyl is one of the purest expressions of that love. It's cumbersome and pretty stupid, but it places the art with prominence and connects your body and actions to the music moreso than any other medium (purely since you have to flip sides every fifteen minutes or so). I like to think back to my saturday's playing GameBoy, and now I gulp down coffee while reading Gaddis or Foreign Affairs as Bob Wills blasts throughthe speakers

I'm not sure if this would work for you, but I like Spotify's Discover Weekly. Every Monday you get a playlist of 30 songs that you've never heard before. I listen to it from beginning to end without skipping and I often find songs that I end up liking a lot

Release Radar published on Fridays is good too for new releases. It's always a nice perk during my week to see what's in these two playlists.

I wonder if my account has a bug with Discover Weekly because ~50% of the songs I get come back over and over (sometimes as remixes or covers too...)

> I listen to it from beginning to end without skipping

This was the important part for me at least. There are a lot of songs that I think I'm not into. Once I forced myself to listen to all of them all the way through I found a lot of good stuff.

Note that they are definitely not songs you've never heard before once you've been listening to it weekly for a year or two. After a while, it started suggesting some of the more popular songs by artists that are near the top of my most played artists.

Discover weekly is Spotify's key to that sweet payola, and it really shows. You can't remove songs from the weekly recommendation, and somehow it repeatedly gives you well-marketed artists completely outside your listening preferences.

Another anecdotal data point: This has not been my experience at all. Its recommendations have gotten more obscure as I've liked/plussed those kind of things. It's more likely that you're encountering the limits of Spotify's library and/or algorithms rather than some nefarious payola plot. (I agree that being able to remove songs - or at least thumbs up/down similar to artist/album radio modes - would be nice)

Absolutely. I actually started listening to discover weekly playlists without giving it any feedback and it started based on my previous trends and gradually drifted into the more main stream stuff.

Once I realized I just needed to give its recommendation engine more fuel to work with and started liking/adding things I actually wanted to listen to, it went right back to giving me cool stuff with loads of obscure artists I'd never heard before but liked a lot. (It really only took me about two weeks to right the ship).

Spotify's recommendation algos are excellent.

Maybe it depends on the genres you listen to, but I haven't found this to be true at all. My discover weekly playlist is frequently full of bands I've never heard of with monthly listen numbers in the 2,000-50,000 range - I don't think those bands have marketing budgets.

Either my playlist is the outlier or yours is, because this is completely opposite of what I experience in that playlist. Mine is pretty much all +20/30/40 years old "niche" music.

Edit: And it almost always is something I really love. That playlist is the killer feature on Spotify for me at the moment.

I also haven't found that to be the case...maybe, I guess. I don't really know which artists are heavily marketed and most of what turns up for me is pretty old. Only exception that comes to mind was "blood in the cut" which I liked so

The problem with these online streaming services I face is that I try to use them mostly for one crucial purpose and that is recommendation - and they always fail to recommend anything that appeals to me. I want to find new songs, new artists that I would like. But these services never helped me with that.

I don't like rap, hip-hop, or metal. I mostly like rock, some pop etc but that too not too loud. I don't really know how much "not loud"; that's where I thought these recommendation engines would kick in. I have found couple of artists/songs that I just love on Bandcamp (awesome place). But Spotify, Apple Music (this one has been an utter disappointment for me), and many other streaming services that I've tried in my country just didn't cut it.

What have helped me over the years are films, blogs, tweets etc. Something random playing on a bus, or a film soundtrack, a TV show theme song. Like that song A Chi that I heard while watching The Best of Youth. It was in Italian and I didn't understand a word but I just instantly connected to it. I loved it. That German song from The Night Porter - from there I discovered Marlene Dietrich's Lili Marleen. Or Many a tears from October Sky, or that song from Twelve Monkeys. And there are some like Amélie (well, every tune is fabulous in this one) where I disconvered Guilty by Al Bowlly. A friend once, out of the blue, told me to check out Imagine Dragons and later I listenred to Demons like crazy; on repeat. Or a chance hearing of a tune in an Iranian film that was composed by an Iranian artist. It's the best song of melancholy I have ever heard and it doesn't have any lyrics.

I even found some nice ones on WCD before it was burnt down. I got there late; or rather started exploring late. Its recommendations were a lot better than the streaming serives, at least for me.

What I find surprising is that I benefit from recommendation services for books, films a lot, but for music I've never been able to find recommendation service that tries to find that nerve or even something close to it that is a person's musical taste and then recommends tunes around that. Maybe unlike books just the lyrics of a song aren't enough and it's very difficult to discern how a tune would sound good or boring to a listener. I've tried a lot and after some time I gave up. Maybe I was doing soemething wrong or I should try services that just to music recommendation, and not streaming maybe.

I also like their Release Radar playlist, you get new releases from the artists you follow.

But why buy vinyl instead of buying CDs?

I understand your point about listening to a whole album being preferable to singles, I feel the same way but I'd still much rather listen to a CD than an LP.

A few years ago my wife bought me a record player for our anniversary. Since then I've been collecting used classic rock records. For me the difference between CDs and Vinyl literally comes down to the listening experience. Vinyl has a very distinct sound, big colorful covers, and a feeling of nostalgia every time you touch the needle to the record.

Same for me. The physical act of handling the record is more satisfying -- maybe just because it's bigger? I felt the same way about 12" LPs vs. 7" singles. The click when you put the needle on the record, watching it spin, even the smell all contribute to the experience. CDs/streaming has none of that.

I think I can answer that: because vinyl now feels like timeless artifacts while CD's feel disposable and cheap.

We thought vinyl was going the way of the dinosaur when the CD came, but now that they are back it feels like they are here to stay. Both vinyl and cds were bought to get the music the first time around. CD had no trouble displacing vinyl for the quality of the sound.

But this time, when it's more about the cover art and the ritual of listening, than it is about the sound, I don't see how something could display the LP. I know a lot of vinyl buyers now that buy the albums but then listen to the streamed music. Just to hold the album but have the convenience of digital.

I would even say that CDs really are somewhat disposable and cheap, they wear down after ~10 years and you often get scratches which cause your tracks to do the endless looping skip-skip-skip. I don't know how many DJ's I've heard play a scratched/skipping track, whereas Vinyl only skips if your tonearm weight is out of whack, the stage is bouncing, you accidentally bump the turntable (drugs are bad, mmmkay), or something physically gets on your record while it's playing. You can even see where e.g. the quiet sections are on your record, a bonus when mixing if you don't/can't memorize your music.

I've been DJing various Techno genres with Vinyl for ~15 years and I've watched the scene shift towards CD and MP3 devices, yet turntables (Technics SL-1200 or thereabouts) are still almost always guaranteed to be at most dance venues (often with CD-DJs hooked up nearby). I also somehow prefer carrying my music around with me, it forces me to pick out ~50 pieces and then lug them behind me to the event, arriving all sweaty and out of breath because that shit's heavy. But it somehow gives me a sense of accomplishment even before I lay down the first record. And I know that my records will play, as long as the mixer isn't totally destroyed.

If you're somewhat gentle with both, the CDs are going to last a lot longer.

Well UV light and oxidation cause disc-rot[0], so even if you leave them in their cases, they will eventually go bad. Therefore the only choice is keep them in a temperature and light controlled underground environment. Self-burned media tends to rot even faster.

And my point was mostly that if you're DJing with them, it's hard to keep them in pristine condition.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot

12" x 12" artwork/inserts/posters/etc. vs. a small CD box. Many of the records I own are beautifully printed and satisfying to hold. Can be super informative too, with inserts/booklets (of course CDs can also have this info, but often not as nice).

Analog is neat. To me, at least. There's a microscopic groove cut into some plastic in which a tiny chunk of diamond connected to a cantilever is pulled through, and the motion it has gets converted to a tiny electrical signal which gets amplified. To hear this at home on speakers or headphones is cool enough; to hear it in a venue with excellent sound is really something else for me. Something so powerful coming from something so minuscule.

Maybe it's 40, 50, 60 years old, too. It's something that has a history, a past. I can listen to a record made in Brazil in 1968, that somehow found its way to Europe in my hands, or I can buy some sterile, boring CD copy of it. I can listen to my parents' very own records that they had in the 70s, that I also listened to growing up. I can even listen to classical records from before they were born. I can listen to a record from a country that doesn't exist anymore.

Not everything got released on CD (or streaming).

Plenty of reasons one might prefer vinyl over a CD.

I don't care at all for the act of playing vinyl, but I really love the artwork. I occasionally buy records just for the art. I wish they sold the art separately because it's kind of ludicrous to spend all that money for something that is kind of incidental to the actual product.

Some bands I like sell posters, but I've only seen them at concerts. I can't find any examples on their websites.

Nine Inch Nails did something kind of like that for their latest EP. They sold the art plus a flac download. It wasn’t large 12” art but it was bigger than a cd and… “interactive” (which really just meant “messy”). I would be totally down with more artists doing that.

If you're into DJing older soul/disco/house/techno you can't get a lot of stuff on ITunes/Spotify. A lot of people end up ripping YouTube uploads for rare cuts.

It's a distribution issue. You can't even get some of these songs as torrents ha. You have to find the physical record or find a high bitrate download.

> But why buy vinyl instead of buying CDs?

I download most of the music I consume from torrent communities in FLAC. For those times I am inclined to buy the physical artifact, it is far better to buy the vinyl version as it has full-sized artwork and is more suitable as decoration in my home (google "Hang Up Your Old Vinyl Records!").

Like an enormous number of vinyl purchasers, I don't even own a turntable. I'd never play the vinyl, instead I play FLACs off a Raspberry Pi media center. I imagine most young people buying vinyl these days just listen off YouTube.

The problems I have with CD's that I don't with Vinyl:

- CD's scratch and then skip easily

- CD's come in horrible plastic covers that break if you look at them wrong.

- Skipping to a certain part of a song is much more difficult with CD's.

- The benefits vinyl provides (large artwork and liner notes/ lyrics, posters etc.) don't all apply to CD's and at that point there's not much/any benefit CD's have over digital.

> - Skipping to a certain part of a song is much more difficult with CD's.

Are you serious?

Completely. Well, ok, not really :) I debated including it because it's not something I do very often. I do think it's true though. On a CD you hold the skip button and have to guess where you are (pretty sure none of my CD players showed a timecode when skipping but it's been a while). With vinyl you can see a physical representation of the length of the track and estimate much better (i.e. the solo is half way through so I put the needle in between these two lines and I should be close).

NB: I'm thinking about actual CD players here, not your CD through iTunes or something where you can click to skip on a progress bar.

The first CD player I used, which my parents bought in about 1988, showed the current time when you held down the "Fast Forward" button. I don't think I've ever owned one that didn't do this.

Nowadays, a good professional CD player (or DJ equipment) will have something like an infinite-turn knob, which you can use to seek.

Hmmm maybe I'm just remembering wrong then. It's been a long time since I had a dedicated CD player.

>maybe I'm just remembering wrong then.

Nope; many CD players, like the first one I got in 1986, had only a two-digit led display for the track number -- there was no time display at all.

EDIT: It was a Fisher Studio Standard that looked like this, so I guess it did show an "index number" while scanning through a track.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/J08NITOv2FA/hqdefault.jpg

> CD's scratch and then skip easily

I imagine they are not!

> Skipping to a certain part of a song is much more difficult with CD's.

Why would you even play the CD? Just rip it once to your media center in a lossless format, and then put it back on the shelf and never touch it again unless you suffer a hard drive failure with no backup. On a media center, it is easy to skip to whatever part of the song you want. Plus, if you don't open the CD's jewel case again after that initial rip, then you won't have to worry about the jewel case breaking through mishandling.

Well yeah but I thought the point of this conversation was comparing the physical media CD to vinyl instead of using a digital version on your computer. Vinyl can be ripped too and most new releases come with a free download.

Incidentally that’s how I deal with the few records I have. I rip them once to flax’s and then never touch them again. Then I can experience the noisy clicks and pops from the comfort of my phone. :-)

>- CD's scratch and then skip easily

Only if you mishandle and abuse them. Doing that to vinyl records is going to make them sound lousy too. Both of them are fairly delicate.

>- CD's come in horrible plastic covers that break if you look at them wrong.

Those jewel boxes are easily replaced, because most of them are standard (the exceptions are weird ones, like the double-CD ones). The plastic boxes keep the booklets and artwork in pristine condition. On vinyl records, there's no plastic, only paper/cardboard, so the more you handle it, the more worn-down and beat-up it gets. There's no way to keep it mint-looking without simply never opening or handling it. With CDs, as long as you're careful handling them, they'll stay mint-looking indefinitely (as long as they aren't those stupid "recyclable" ones that are mostly cardboard without the jewel boxes).

The only advantage LPs have is that there's physically more space for artwork/notes. But that's not a big problem; in the CDs, it's just shrunk down to 1/4 its LP size. Get some reading glasses if you have problems seeing that.

> But that's not a big problem; in the CDs, it's just shrunk down to 1/4 its LP size. Get some reading glasses if you have problems seeing that.

By the same reasoning, I suppose I should throw out my tablet and replace it with an iPhone and a magnifying glass.

That's a very strange comparison. How often do you look closely at the artwork for an album? If you're spending countless hours staring at a single album cover, you probably have some issues.

I don't know if you've bought an LP before, but many of them have what's called "liner notes," which are long textual notes about the album's contents. If you shrink these down to 1/4 of their size, they are almost impossible to read. (I have several jazz CDs which reproduce the original LP covers at a smaller size, and they're terrible to try to read.) Even if it weren't for liner notes, though, there's a difference between large album art and small. Many LPs have elaborate, detailed artwork that loses a lot by being shrunk down.

Regarding cases/CD damage - I agree that if you're careful those things won't happen but I'm not exactly clumsy and I've ruined many CD's. It just doesn't seem to happen to vinyl on the same scale for me (I've never scratched a record or broken the cover but can't count how many times I've done that with CD's).

How exactly have you ruined "many" CDs?

I have a few hundred CDs in my collection which I started collecting around 1990; the large majority of them were acquired during the 90s. I have precisely one CD where there's actually any damage that causes playability problems (at one point on one track), from one of my earliest ones. All throughout the 90s, I played these CDs over and over, countless times, both at home and in my car. I never stopped in the car until I finally got an MP3-CD player for my car and started making MP3 CDs (somewhere in the late 90s), and at home when I finally ripped them all to Oggs and just started playing them on my PC or my portable MP3 player, so there's at least 10 years there in my teens and 20s where I was constantly handling these things. Somehow I managed to never cause any major damage to them, even when I was changing discs while driving. What's your problem with handling CDs?

> CD's scratch and then skip easily

You can back up a CD's audio tracks digitally to PCM files, with no loss. You still have the music even if the CD is completely destroyed, and your backup survives.

Vinyl records are also sensitive. They can skip even with slight vibration, because the arm which holds the needle is delicately balanced to exert only a small force to keep the needle in the groove.

Vinyl records easily warp from heat. They still play, but the warps make it easier for skipping to occur.

Fun personal fact: my grandma hard a way to make records flat again. She sandwiched them between cotton cloths, and gave them an ironing!

> Skipping to a certain part of a song is much more difficult with CD's.

Skipping to a certain part of a song is very difficult with a vinyl record. The song consists of a strip of grooves that are only a couple of centimeters wide. The resolution for navigating is not very good. Even if you could pick a specific cycle of the groove, which you won't, your precision is still limited by the rotating latency. At 33 rpm (let's round off to 30 rpm), you have one revolution every two seconds. (Sure, you could stop the rotation, and fiddle with it for five minutes to get the exact spot in a four minute song.)

With a CD-ROM drive and PC/laptop, you can script up some software to seek to a position with sub-second precision.

A decent media player lets you mark off two points, A and B, with sub-second precision, and loop them.

A bookmarking feature is plausible; there is no reason why a CD playing application wouldn't let you make bookmarks associated with CD's. Pop in a CD, and see a list of bookmarks; pick one and there you are at your favorite part of a favorite song. (If this doesn't exist, propose it ... say for VLC, or hack it yourself.)

>CD's scratch and then skip easily

They can also be regenerated for cheap as long as the scratches don't reach the data layer and only affect the plastic protection layer. Vinyl discs, on the other hand...

Not sure if this is still the case, but 10-15 years ago most vinyl albums were mastered separately from CDs. CDs were subject to the horrors of the loudness wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war . So, in many cases, the vinyl actually does sound better, but not (directly) because of any difference in technology, just a difference in how the medium was processed.

It's pretty variable, but this is still the case for some releases. The opposite is also true as well, particularly with electronic music releases from small labels, with a low quality masters becoming the source material for the pressing. Music on Vinyl [1] is held in high regard for the quality of their masters/presses.

[1] http://www.musiconvinyl.com/

yes and I also recall 10 years ago that many reissues that came out on vinyl and cd simultaneously the vinyl version sounded bad

There is a quality aspect regarding the "loudness war" : http://www.soundmattersblog.com/vinyl-vs-cd-in-the-loudness-...

Making Vinyl sometimes better than CDs

I don't buy a ton of vinyl, but when I do, it typically falls into one of a few categories:

Either it's something newer that I just really love and want the big cover art and physical "object" for collecting and appreciation. Often times I'll be at a show and buy the band's new album instead of a T-shirt as a way to support the band I like. Those often come with download codes so I can still get a high quality digital version for portability.

If it's something older I find at a Goodwill or a yard sale, I tend to buy it because it looks interesting enough to be worth the $0.50-$2.00 asking price. It's almost like buying some small novelty or other impulse purchase. It may be great. It may be awful. It may just be fun to have a bunch of old comedy records on my shelf. And if they are uninteresting, the cost is low so the risk is as well.

And occasionally I've purchased the vinyl versions of albums I copied from friends' tapes in high school or downloaded illegally years ago. As with buying the record instead of the Tshirt at a concert, it's a way to support the band I discovered for free but has since earned my payment.

One particular sight while living in Tokyo was the checkout line snaked around the store at places like Tower Records. Students and businesspeople alike, each with a CD or two, buying them after classes/work. New releases had entire sections with lots of promotional material. Honestly creates this warm nostalgic feeling, and I like the Japanese trend toward a "collection" aspect of maintaining a physical library of music/books/film/other media, but personally Spotify already feels too integrated into my life to give up, especially for music discovery.

I would never give up PDFs, arXiv, audiobooks, and ebooks, but I still heave a collection of physically printed papers and books.

I don't think that using a new technology for most things precludes having physical copies of the pieces of culture you find most important.

If you're looking for the best music discovery on the planet, or just some easy eclectic listening while you cook, then try KCRW. Public radio at its very finest. Based in Los Angeles, it's what I recommend to any music listener if they get tired of streaming their own music all day everyday. Let me also plug Gilles Peterson who has a show on BBC Radio 6 every Saturday morning, PST. I've been buying records for over two decades and I will tell you there is still an art in "finding" new great music, and in my experience, you have to still listen to the "radio" to find it.

Also:

http://www.nts.live/

http://redlightradio.net/

http://kexp.org/

You'd probably did KEXP, out of Seattle, as well.

Same boat - I just got into it in the last 18 months or thereabouts.

I got rid of my CD collection 10 years ago to get rid of clutter. I had a great collection curated on grooveshark, but since that was shut down I've mainly listened to streaming radio.

I've found buying vinyl second hand in antiques stores or used record shops to be an interesting way to discover music. Often the price is cheap enough to be able to take a chance on something that looks intriguing. I probably have 100 records now, with production dates from 1932->2016, with lots of interesting albums that probably aren't even digitized (or at least readily available.)

You don't find it inconvenient to have to turn the LP over during cooking?

I happen to agree with parent comment. Doing physical stuff to get it to play is part of who we are... if you used to collect CDs that is, I did too.

It's a different music discovery and listening experience than streaming. Go buy some obscure music on CD/LP and listen to it over and over for a day.

Must admit, I have resisted the LP movement until now. Might check it out =)

If I'm at home, more than likely there's a record spinning.

I don't mind flipping. If I'm busy momentarily, it'll just spin with the needle in the deadwax...not a big deal.

All the players I've used have auto return, is that less common these days?

I'm not sure, but it doesn't seem as common in new tables. Personally I find it to be a pain in the ass, and will only go for manual ones. I used to have an auto Technics changer turntable. Frustrating to use most of the time.

Some of those hurt the records, so some of the more expensive turntables seem to forgo them recently.

I see you don't play Sgt. Pepper often. That endless loop…

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