The Last Format | Hacker News Reader

The Last Format

reallifemag.com

40 points1bm13 comments

This premise is ridiculous.

Just visit https://youtubemp3.rip/ or any of the other thousand sites that do this.

Or, you can just record the music as you listen to it using Audacity for example, and save them as an MP3 or any other format.

Of course, these tasks require about a minute of minimal effort. In our fast paced modern world of music streaming, who has time to load up an audio program and hit Record? Or type in a Youtube URL and hit Convert? I'm sure the blog author cant be bothered with such things.

....I remember recording cassette tapes off of the radio! Sitting there as a child, waiting Hours for That Song.

How times have changed, and for the better!

I still have MP3 files in my collection that I recorded off the radio. I recorded them off the radio with a cassette tape while in junior high. In my latter years of High School, I digitized them by running an aux cable between the cassette player's headphone jack and a Windows 98 PC's microphone jack. I know which ones are recorded off the radio because they miss the first second or two of the song.

> Holding music, either in your hand or on a personal hard drive, is a relic of Obama-era music consumption.

How is this true in any sense?

While I am not a huge music listener, it is largely true for me.

Spotify launched in 2008. I signed up for an account in 2009. Since then I have bought physical/downloadable music only a handful of times.

I am an avid podcast listener which occupies a chunk of my phone hard drive most days.

That's not really the idea that I'm repulsed by. I'm repulsed by the bizarre notion that music format eras should mention a political leader for any reason. It's like saying records really started declining after Nixon (or whenever/whoever is most appropriate, I'm not sure of the timing). It isn't necessarily incorrect, it's just categorically wrong to bring that information into the same thought.

I first thought of the Japanese custom of naming time periods after Emperors.

Obama served 2009-2017, so your annectdote contradicts your point?

I never used much physical media (napster generation), but I still keep a local music collection on hard drive. I tried cloud options but it's simply a horrible experience when travelling, which is where I spend most of my time listening to music.

General problems that aren't going away soon are the latency between clicking next and the song starting is way too high, especially annoying when you shuffle through a few songs at once. And I've only got 2GB of data a month, so I need to cache locally anyway, killing most of the benefits. The absolute worst thing is that you're tied to the shitty players that cloud-music companies produce.

Some google music specific problems were using tonnes of data even when I'm just playing cached files and things like hitting the next button twice in a row will give random results depending on which web request comes back first. I'm sure it works fine on the google campus though.

For the foreseeable future I'll be sticking with poweramp and music on SD.

> Some google music specific problems were using tonnes of data even when I'm just playing cached files and things like hitting the next button twice in a row will give random results depending on which web request comes back first.

I haven't had these problems with downloaded music on the iOS version of Google Play Music.

I thought it had a pretty good player app, but I'm now trying Apple Music for discovering new stuff. The Apple Music app, in my opinion, has worse UX. Good thing I'm just on the free 3-month trial.

This is a problem common to ANY "personal interested data", it's the very same for videos, mails, messages, discussions, ...

The trend is lock even better people pushing them to offload their personal stuff and this trend unfortunately keep evolving really fast.

One of the last alarming thing I discover is from my bank (Europian, big well-known, not involved in any recent big scandal etc): they offer a digital sign service so I can do more operation via internet banking... Only the bank hold the key. They simply say you go to your personal page, type your OTP and a key pin we give to you in print and that's signed. WTF?! Unfortunately I think many IT-ignorant people will find this service nice...

I still buy vinyl by the boatload and they come with MP3 or uncompressed audio cards, usually, so I’ve actually got a large collection of good quality MP3’s. I understand I am the outlier here.

I had a huge digital audio collection of mp3's and various lossy and lossless formats, but last year I burned the ZFS raid with the collection by accident. After several month of grieving, i decided to rebuild my collection, but this time using physical media - CD's, vinyl records, cassette and reel-to-reel tapes.

It was a revelation. I found it so liberating to be able to listen to music "unplugged". I can get home from work, put on a record or cd and listen to music without having to open the laptop or mess with the phone.

It also changed the way I listen to music - no skipping tracks, listen to the whole album start to finish. I found that I missed out on a lot of music when I just skipped thru an album because I didn't like the first 2 bars.

I'd settle for decent nested playlists and/or tagging coupled with reasonable discovery. Hypem used to be okay for discovery but has been gamed to death.

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