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Comment by wilsonnb3 | Hacker News Reader

Except you’re leaving out all the positives and only focusing on the negatives.

Sure, Google can revoke my access to a movie at any time but I can watch on any of my devices and I dont have to worry about finding it in stock at the local store.

I can carry literally thousands of books with me in a device smaller than a paperback.

I can’t stream lossless music from Spotify but I can stream high enough quality that most people can’t tell the difference. Not to mention you get access to pretty much every song you want for 10$ a month.

Electron apps and the web are replacing desktop apps but they are also making it easier than ever to make a cross platform app, meaning we will get apps that we otherwise wouldn’t. This is especially good for Linux, which would be much further behind macOS and windows without popular electron/web apps available like slack, Spotify, etc.

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Those aren't positives.

It does nobody any good to have 1000 books on a single device if the whole thing is subject to revocation, especially when you paid full retail price for the privilege of being allowed to read it. This is regression.

Previously you paid your $10 and received a paper book. You could read it, re-read it, lend it, sell it, or burn it for warmth. You owned it for as long as you kept it dehydrated. The $15 you now pay per book gets you one of these rights, temporarily.

Whether most people can tell the difference between 320k and lossless is irrelevant-- the retail price is the same for a technically inferior product. This is a regression. And again, for your money, you own nothing.

And for apps, the cross-platform compatibility comes at the expense of consumers, who have to continuously purchase and maintain newer computer equipment to do the same damn word processing, email and shopping tasks that used to be possible on a 486. And of course, since everything is a subscription, it's a double punishment for the consumer-- they have to maintain hardware to run software they don't own.

The entire premise of modern technology has become a new vector to extract the most money from the consumer while delivering the least amount of value, power or control.

It does nobody any good to have 1000 books on a single device if the whole thing is subject to revocation, especially when you paid full retail price for the privilege of being allowed to read it. This is regression.

What? You can still buy the paperback book, tons of my kindle books are $10 or less, and it very clearly benefits me, which is why I buy tons of Kindle books.

You don't own the book itself though, you own a license to the book. The doctrine of first sale does not apply, and they can revoke your license at any time.

They have revoked licenses in the past and deleted books from people's devices. I know you have a physical file that contains the book, but that file is secured with DRM.

> You don't own the book itself though,

To be blunt: Who really cares?

I care that I can read it. After I have I don't see further use for the ownership.

Others can claim they can revoke my access before the read event occurs but the chance of that is so low that I imagine it rounds to 0%.

I mean if I'm only going to read a book once I'm not going to spend $10 on it. The only books I buy are books I'd like to own so I can read them again in the future. If I'm paying $10 to read a book once that basically makes Amazon into a really shitty library that also sells knockoff goods and forces their employees to work in sweatshop like conditions.

I’m aware, but I don’t really care. I judge the risk to be really small, and the convenience to more than make up for it. And since I can still get the physical book if I choose, it’s hard to argue that this extra option with its pros and cons is a regression.

> Whether most people can tell the difference between 320k and lossless is irrelevant-- the retail price is the same for a technically inferior product. This is a regression.

My camera can save images as either raw files or maximum-quality jpeg's. I know for a fact that I will never need to edit these photos later on. Which format is superior?

Useless data is of no value to anyone, and data we cannot perceive is useless.

If you're worried about license revocation, you should focus on obtaining DRM-Free digital media instead of killing trees. And make backups, of course. DRM-Free is standard for downloadable music nowadays. DRM-Free eBooks are less common, but they do exist, e.g. https://www.kobo.com/us/en/p/drm-free

To agree with you and wilsonnb3 at the same time- I highly value OWNING the things I buy and am also willing to pay extra for the privilege of convenience.

When I buy movies I generally buy the Blu-Ray with digital download. If it’s a kid’s movie I usually just buy the digital download. I almost never pull out the Blu-Rays, but I know I’ve got them. They usually come with the DVD as well, for even more compatability in a pinch.

When I buy books I generally buy the Kindle version first. I generally only take time to read on planes, trains, and travel/vacation. I’m good for maybe one a month. If I really like the book, I’ll buy a hardbound copy for my library.

Music is the part where I have internal consistency issues. I love music. I love all kinds of music. Motown, classic rock, hard rock, EDM/Electronic in general, classical, folk, rap. I have music on ALL the time. Probably 6-8 hours a day on average. I own no music. I pay for Apple Music because it’s convenient to share a subscription with my wife. I last bought physical album in probably 2008-ish. I buy an album or two on Apple Music a year. Where I really spend my music money is concerts. I’ll pay hundreds of dollars without thinking twice to see my favorite artists up close and in person.

So yeah, I agree that all the convenient ways of purchasing media are nothing but a long term lease and I would not consider anything I’ve bought through those channels as something I own. But if I flip it around and consider that I’m paying some third party to host a copy of the content in a convenient way, I feel okay about it.

Ha ha, those who would sacrifice ownership for convenience deserve neither.

That about sum it up?

>It does nobody any good to have 1000 books on a single device if the whole thing is subject to revocation

If what you really care about is reading and the knowledge you get from it, as opposed to the opportunity to take some totally unrelated stand, then yes, it really does do you some serious good to have thousands of books in your pocket!

It does me good to have those 1000 books. When I finish one on the train I get to pick a new one from the device when I don’t have network.

Why not reflect on the one you just finished? Stop. Think.

It worries me that you believe there's a natural conflation between the genuinely valuable services products like Kindle offer, and the specific business model of purchasing ephemeral licenses to media content. Kindle, Google Play, iTunes, whatever; they're amazing services that provide a lot of value. But that value could still be conveyed if the products they offered didn't have additional restrictions beyond those restrictions already present on physical media.

I'm not going full RMS here and saying DRM is evil. I'm just saying that: I should be able to loan digital content to other people. I shouldn't be afraid that Apple will, one day, just say "I know you really enjoyed spending $200 on all that media, but its all gone. See ya." Maybe that means they need to offer downloads of the content, or maybe it means we need legislation which says we can sue the hell out of them when they try it. I have no preference. But consumers need more protection.

Also its worth clarifying: I don't hold subscription services to the same standards. That's a different business model.

Not “most people” - pros on high end equipment cannot pass an ABX on 256kbps MP3. Spotify’s “extreme” quality setting is 320kbps.

This isn’t some “normies”/“audiophiles” thing. 256kbps mp3 is acoustically transparent to human beings in ideal listening situations.

The bad rap mp3 got was from 128kbps that was more common pre-broadband.

Also, using lossy compressed sources (even 256-320kbps) in derivative works (eg dj mixes, samples, et c) that will be later lossy recompressed (podcast, satellite radio, spotify, et c) is a good way to make your production sound crappy, which is why lossless is important. Any audiophile who tells you they need lossless for final listening simply hasn’t tested it. It is religion, not engineering.

Spotify also uses Vorbis, not MP3. Sound quality should be better for a given bitrate since vorbis is a more modern codec.

(They possibly use MP3 in their webplayer according to some sources)

I disagree. I can often tell the difference between CD audio and 320 or v0 mp3s. I can also notice compression on files with a lower bitrate than 320 or v0.

You can really notice the difference on the high end and the width of the soundstage.

However above 16 44.1 I can't hear a difference.

256kbps MP3 is transparent in most cases, but there are some sounds that MP3 is bad at encoding (notably the sound of maracas and similar rattle type sounds), and you can train yourself to get better at identifying MP3 artifacts. People have reported successful ABX of maracas sound at 256kbps, e.g.:

https://www.head-fi.org/threads/when-is-mp3-transparent-an-a...

Excellent post! The author notes that 320kbps mp3 was transparent in his testing. 320kbps Vorbis (Spotify “Extreme” setting) is even better.

Everyone gives this pitch, but I alwast spot the teltale digitl diatortion immediately. It affects the transients. We are training ourselves to hear worse.

>Not to mention you get access to pretty much every song you want for 10$ a month.

If you listen to mainstream shit where the artist does not have enough control of their work to opt out of the scam that is the pay scale for streaming music.

I have had to resort to ripping vinyl and CDs from my collection to get digital versions of tracks that Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Music do not have. If I had to do it all over again, I'd keep the vinyl and CDs in the box and just grab the music from somewhere like REDacted instead.

I ripped all my CDs at one point, realized it was a pain in the ass, deleted all of them, and then redownloaded them from Oink.cd/What.cd.

I stopped buying albums for a while, because I have a Google play music subscription, but a couple albums I really liked were deleted from the service recently. I had "added them to my library", understanding that I didn't own them, but I never expected them to get pulled from the service.

I'm getting pretty sick of Google Play shenanigans altogether. I'm probably going back to ripping my own music because the streaming services suck, and oink/what are shut down.

Not sure if it will last, but Google Play Music does allow you to upload your music to the service. It does not matter if those songs get removed from Google’s licensing or if they never existed on Google in the first place: they are streamed independently.

I already give everything but a bloody DNA sample to Google. I'm not giving them neatly tagged music files of music that I like that is not on their service that they can then combine with the music I listen to from their service so they can advertise to me over a music bed that they think is to my liking.

The "positives" you've listed were basically the case for the standard 00's setup. You just had to undertake some deliberate action to adopt it as your setup, rather than going along with that period's sharecropper option.

How would you maintain access to your entire library across multiple devices in the 00’s?

I had an iPod with a big hard drive that synced when I plugged it in (Linux). I either ran a streaming server off my home machine or mounted my filesystem via sshfs.

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