Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms

Bandcamp really is fantastic and will always have a special place for me. Just let me buy the stuff, choose my format, (even ogg!). Even let me sample it a good amount of times, and no obnoxious nonsense on their website. I hope they're doing really well.

That said, for a larger number of really major artists, I heard about something called HDTracks. I haven't tried them yet, but it seems that they sell FLAC in 24 bit audio.

Agreed. No flac = no buy

>I strongly disagree. Spotify has dramatically increased the variety of music that I listen to and introduced me to lost of tiny artists with great music.

This has been my experience as well.

found a lot of greeat stuff on spotify. it has never sent me some topN track as an ad... :s never. jut dont search for these things if u dont want it to suggest it to u ;)

I can second this. Spotify has really helped me discover artists and bands I enjoy.

Years ago, I would have spent a non-zero amount of time linking through friends on Last.FM / Audioscrobbler. While this can be enjoyable, having it done by an algorithm is perfectly fine for me and I'm willing to pay for it.

> I strongly disagree. Spotify has dramatically increased the variety of music that I listen to and introduced me to lost of tiny artists with great music.

I've used a number of music recommendation applications over the last decade.

With Spotify, I've noticed that it will become "stuck" in what I describe as similar artist troughs and valleys. In other words, the Spotify recommendation engine will pigeonhole your recommendations into certain subgenres, niches, or related artists more so than say Pandora or Last.fm would.

> Spotify has dramatically increased the variety of music that I listen to and introduced me to lost of tiny artists with great music.

I can't speak to Spotify, but many years ago I picked up some agent software that does a rough analysis of the music I enjoy, then crawls the web looking for music that resembles it. I use that for recommendations.

The software is a bit crude in its analysis, but I think that's a feature, not a bug, because it ensures that in the mix of music that I certainly will like are random tunes that I would never have thought to listen to, and often those turn out to be gems.

Most of the music the crawler finds is from indie artists that aren't well-known at all. When I find a new one that I enjoy, I make it a point to seek them out and buy their music directly from them.

Anyway, this has been my solution for about 15 years now, and it works great for me!

I can confirm this. Pre-Spotify it was either listen to top 100 music or use up a lot of time downloading VS tracks. Now most my of music doesn't even chart.

I neither have the space, budget, or time to trade my music in the cloud for physical media. My online collection is much larger than either my Mp3 or physical media collection.

Spotify has good suggestions. All you need to pick is the genre and then you go to song/playlist radio and you are good. I have found many bands and it often recommends bands with foreign languages( which I don't want). Then there is also your discover weekly which usually gives me at least 1 or 2 good songs.

I only keep Spotify because of "Discover Weekly" playlist generated every Monday based on your taste. The algorithm is truly incredible. There are weeks I find myself saving half of the songs.

That's weird because for the first 6 weeks or so my "Discover Weekly" was all hits by bands I already knew. It did fairly quickly transition to deeper cuts and more obscure artists though.

I actually sent a suggestion/complaint to Google regarding their recommendations. If I start a radio station based on e.g. a 2009 indie pop song I'll mostly hear songs made around that year, usually like 2006~2013, with newer songs just absent. If I make a station based on a 2019 indie pop song, for the most part it's all the same bands as the 2009 playlist, it's just that the songs are more recent. I don't really like this because it forces me into a time capsule instead of just playing indie pop songs from any decade.

Discovery on Spotify isn't terrible, but I think Pandora is just really good at that since that was part of its original purpose with the music genome stuff. Plus it aims for more variety, avoiding playing a single artist too heavily.

In 1997, I'd wager more people listened to college radio than they do now, simply because there weren't as many alternatives.

Their bookstores would likely also have had a few rock/alternative/electronic music magazines to offer choices outside of Top 40.

If they were lucky, they might also have had an indie music store in town where you could browse through the stacks and make conversation with the proprietors who'd turn you on to new stuff.

As someone that was in college in 1997, I think that estimate is way low. I bought ~4 CDs per month and so did most of the people I knew. You're forgetting that we traded and sold back discs, and that music was more actively discovered. If you cared about finding music, you'd find local deals and make connections that could stretch a dollar, and most young folks budgeted much more than $10/month. You heard about bands from magazines, friends, a mention in an artist interview, etc, and it was not uncommon to buy more randomly. Hell, I've bought albums simply because the cover looked cool and it was in the right genre.

My point is that music discovery, like all recommendation systems right now, is severely lacking in what made media discovery more meaningful in the 90s - that controlled chaos that led to surprises. Now everything collapses towards the mean of mediocrity. Sure you discover more 'bands' now, but they're belting out the same tracks with an extra half beat or a pitch shift, so I hardly call it 'discovery'. Long-tail used to be more fringe, but high-quality and related, unlike now, where it's the worst within the technical bounds of the algorithm. We're discovering more within our local minima, which is technically discovering more, but in the most frightfully boring way possible.

I would not have been exposed to at least half of the music I regularly listen to now if I had something like Spotify back then. I tried to use Spotify, Pandora, and Google Music, but after a month they each felt like I was listening to generic music station #342398 and I went back to purchasing albums. It's weird when a single album can be more diverse than a station with nearly limitless tracks to pull from.

And don't even get me started on how recommendation services have killed the idea of an 'album' - maybe the most rewarding facet of music production basically wiped out in less than a decade.

Yeah, I think after it sold to.. Jay Z or someone? It started going off the rails. Prior to that I loved that service though.

I registered my account at last.fm in 2006 but stopped in 2015-2016 when they took away many of the most attractive and cool features of the site with the redesign despite an incredible amount of feedback on the forums (that were also taken away in favor of a survey...). I still can't believe what they've done. Last.fm has been neglected to a degree that surprises me to this day. I spent so much time posting in the discussion groups (also removed!), reading interesting journals about music that others had written (another feature removed). I've since switched to Libre.fm. But it won't ever be the same. I think it's hugely disappointing to see what was such a transformative service tossed to the wayside at the hands of CBS.

I think all these algorithms reward novelty to keep you engaged, which means snipers making phony compilations beat the original.

"or" here really simplifies things. Nowadays almost every 70s-90s album on streaming services is a remaster with overloaded levels and clippings. One has to resort to torrent sites to find rips from original CDs or vinyls.

> Try some jazz like Coltrane or Miles Davis. It seems they never stoped issuing albums - remastered

This is only done to prevent copyright expiration and having the album become public domain.

You’ll see they only do it for “oldish” albums. It’s quite a scam.

> Coltrane for lovers, Miles for cooking.

And programming?

Missing my 160GB iPod Classic honestly. But nowadays oddly enough Google Play Music has most of the music I want and when they dont as OP does I upload them. One thing I do is buy the music and download it locally. Google Play Music gives me proper high quality MP3s compared to Apples m3a or whatever those were.

Licensing deals are stupid. Also I do see smaller artists on Google Play Music being lumped together with half a dozen other smaller artists. I cant believe how broken that is and sometimes the artists songs I am looking for doesnt show up cause they dont even show albums featuring that artist in their album listing.

I wouldn't trust flash drives for a whole library of hard-to-replace music, they fail all the time and they're hard to recover once they do. Better to use a NAS, external hard drive, or cloud storage you pay for like S3.

If privacy is not an issue, a dump feature solves this. Available for Google services and unofficial ones are there for many more. Clouds that don't provide such a feature are probably not worth using.

> This is why it's so important that we resist pressure to upload everything to the cloud. Buy a 64 or 128GiB flash drive and put your whole collection there. (plus one probably for backup). Copy it to all your local machine(s). Copy the important stuff to your mobile.

Collections are not static. I discover new music every once in a while. Syncing with cloud makes sense; it is just that you could be the owner of the hardware behind the cloud, to maintain privacy or you encrypt the data in the cloud (or both, and use one cloud as backup).

You could use rsync or something with a flash drive though. Android smartphones will happily eat microSD cards containing hundreds of GB of music.

Which means the iPod Classic 160 GB is finally obsolete. However I think you can hack those devices anyway, to put in a new 2.5" SATA SSD (if they eat SATA).

> Buy a 64 or 128GiB flash drive and put your whole collection there.

That's too small for my collection! (I use a 64 gig card for taking my music on the road alone). My music collection is stored on a 1Tb drive.

And there is no way to get them back? Completely deleted?

Please elaborate, was this Google Drive?

Aww. This will only get worse over time!

Were these on youtube? I wasn't aware that Google did the DMCA takedowns complaints for the rights holder - I thought the rights holder had to make a complaint, and that would necessitate them being somewhere the rights holder could view them.

You played AC/DC on multiple videos, and deleted all your originals and other copies after uploading it to YouTube?

Flickr lost all my photos when it was acquired by Yahoo, so I'm with you on this one... The cloud is useful... but don't trust it too much.

I wrote "deleted" but the truth is that I can see it on a small window, after navigating on my upload history to the very past, on some private Youtube account details page, and I can't download it anymore. I tried many many times. It's already have been years it is blocked from downloading it. I will try again soon if I can find a browser plugin that can help me with this.

As much as anyone that gives tech support to their parents I can assure you I get your very fine and subtle irony.

In systems development, the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is precious, it is your safeguard to mental and emotional health.

Actually, I'm rather shocked that there isn't an all-in-one solution like what I've cobbled together. It's not like there's any super secret magic involved; you'd just need a nice user interface on top of it all.

There are even music streaming servers that you can deploy on a VPS (or locally) pretty easily. Pop in a little rsync script to move your converted lossy files to the streamer and you're set. It's just that nobody's built something that integrates everything yet, thus my Frankenstein setup.

My setup is far simplified from the parent's--I simply have all my music backed up onto an external HDD that is attached to my HTPC (roughly 2TB of MP3s and FLACs). The "Music" folder is shared over the network via the Windows share option, and all of my Linux machines are able to trivially mount the directory as well using a SMB/CIFS share.

There's so little effort required that I'd barely consider it a DIY solution, considering that most of the OS's can see it and access the drive without leaving the file explorer.

I also discovered it happily continues to work when my ISP had an outage, since all of the IPs were local and still accessible provided that the router was up.

> I know it was not your intention but your comment reminds me of the infamous HN comment on why dropbox is useless and would never be successful.[1] :))

Except the context of the argument is different. OP is doing this for convenience and privacy reasons along with the availability and no-cost argument. While it's a slight point to make it is an important one these days. With the Dropbox argument the old HN comment was making the point without the context of privacy, security or even availability of which we all have to consider today. We know service providers have removed or deleted purchases by users. Some providers remove content and make it paid for during adventageous times of the year (e.g. holidays) and, well, privacy doesn't need much expansion here. We also know vendors can lock you into hardware ecosystems through file formats. Finally if we all stop DIYing our media/files/etc the options will turn into expert level oniy. So the continuation of this being a thing keeps the open side of the conversation right side up. Lest we all end up boiled frogs.

Dropbox has been operating at a loss since its creation and is currently not making a profit, so the jury is still out on whether it is actually successful (or just a VC-subsidized service that got advertised a lot).

The last sentence of that comment is:

> I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

I googled for 'dropbox financials', and soon ran across a TC article about its IPO last year [1] which says:

> The company’s prospectus warns it has “a history of net losses”; anticipates increasing expenses and slowing revenue growth; and notes that it “may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability.”

I'm still not sure that snarky 10-year-old comment was far off.

[1]: https://qz.com/1214822/dropbox-is-filing-for-a-500-million-i...

I'd like to know too. I also don't consider this off-topic considering we're contrasting streaming music with CDs, and one of the "value adds" of streaming is discoverability.

Same way I have for the past 30 years. I listen from time to time to stations that play the kind of music I like. Sometimes I check out various places that have top 100 charts. If I find something I like, I go get it and add it to my collection. Rerun the script and resync my devices.

RSS feed of music review blogs. Works well enough.

Bandcamp tags and notifications as well as following people with similar taste. Some reddit subs are also quite helpful

Slowly and gradually. The music I love, I love. I don't like playing chase.

So sometimes they played a show/concert with an artist I already like. Sometimes it just comes up in the YouTube feed. Sometimes somebody points me to something and it takes.

I think many of us curate a physical or digital collection and also subscribe to a streaming service.

I use Google Play Music and when I find something I like, I buy the CD.

A couple of ways I do it:

* Use the Shazam app on my phone to identify music I hear in public places

* Go on Rateyourmusic.com, look up an album I like and find what "lists" RYM users have put that album on, or what message board posts have cited that album. It's a much more "human-centric" approach compared to websites where algorithms generate the recs.

I've been trying an experiment lately.

I took a few local venues that I like, and put the top song from each of their headliners for the next month into a spotify playlist, then just listened on shuffle while I was doing something else. Occasionally a song jumps out, and like that! I've discovered a new artist I like, and I can go to their upcoming show to boot!

Add ampache [3] to that list. What it lacks in UI, it makes up for in features.

I've been tempted to setup a jellyfin instance for more seamless in-browser video playback, though.

Edit: funkwhale is also quite interesting, especially for the federation and music discovery aspect [4]

[3]: http://ampache.org/

[4]: https://funkwhale.audio/

MPD is nice in that it has many clients. MPDroid (available on F-Droid) is quite decent.

How much money do you realistically see this generating? With how much effort for marketing and polishing? I would be impressed if OP could calculate even 1 dollar per hour and come out with a profit.

This is a niche of a niche of a niche.

There are numerous sites giving tutorials about how to set up such systems using OSS.

There are already several projects that do this. Sub/Mad/Airsonic all allow hosting your own music and transcoding with ffmpeg.

No need to do it all at once, just when you’re playing the CD. But I guess your CD player is not attached to the computer?

I set up a machine in the living room, and ran a script that would rip a disc as soon as it was inserted, then eject it.

Whenever I passed through, I would swap discs. If I had some free time, I sat in front of it and read while swapping discs.

It took a few months, but it was entirely doable.

I ripped my 1000+ cds in about 1 month. I specifically designed my scripts so that ripping was a separate task from "meta data" inputting. I'd bring a stack of 50ish discs to work and start ripping. The cd tray would open when it was done and I'd put in the next one and close the tray. That's the only interaction, and I could just deal with switching them all day. Then at night when I got home I'd do a meta-data pass, collecting the info from cddb/etc and finalizing everything.

I'm not going to say it's not work, but holy cow it's worth it in the end.

If you're running linux, just riping the CDs is fairly hands-off once it's configured:

abcde can be configured to save a flac with an embedded cue-sheet. You can make it totally non-interactive, and a simple "eject -t; abcde; eject" will load the tray, rip the CD and eject the tray.

Then just load a CD in every time the tray ejects. I ripped a bit under 300 CDs in a week with the only extra time spent on it being setting everything up.

We’re now invulnerable to rootkits?

Speaking as someone who actively boycotted Sony products for a decade because of this fiasco, I also think it's time to put this to rest.

Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose.

Or a properly configured windows. Not even windows 95 would autorun a CD if you didn't tell it to.

IIRC there was some consumer association action in France back in the day against such hackish DRM practices mandating the labelling of such CDs with a notice that the thing you were just about to buy may not play at all as well as requiring them to drop the CDDA Phillips iconography, all because someone bought a CD and couldn’t play it in his car or whatever. After that one it seems like the DRM scheme was basically dropped around here.

To nitpick your nitpick: there were many attempts to implement DRM even on pure music CDs, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_Control

My personal experience with this was with some import CDs (from Japan) that, from what I recall, messed with the error correction part of the data so that it skipped horrendously in my PC (so it was impossible to rip in cdex) but played fine in (most) standalone audio players.

> the format doesn't allow for data - it's all sound

Redbook CD-DA has one subcode byte and eight error correction bytes per frame.

wasn't it a thing, that you could bypass this by holding shift (to disable autoplay) when inserting the disc?

>A standard Red Book audio CD cannot install malware to your system. //

I don't think I'd ever be so confident as to say that given some of the incredible hacks I've seen ;o)

Everyone should have a reasonable expectation of privacy. That certain groups more frequently find this expectation violated does not mean that it is not a reasonable expectation.

Try the Goodwill auction site. They show up there occasionally, though often mislabeled as iPods.

The AGPTEK Rocker is okay, runs Rockbox and is reasonably small and affordable.

I have high respect for you. As for myself, I'll play the student card and bow out, haha :)

Done!

I thought that Amazon and iTunes both have DRM free songs (for purchase / streaming does have DRM)

It's smorgasboard. Some are MP3s I probably downloaded more than 20 years ago, others are ripped from CDs, others are bought from Amazon or other sources. The caveat with Amazon, Google play, etc is that they must be some DRM-free format. I'm not an audiophile, and medium-to-high quality MP3s are fine by me. I've actually got a record player, so most of the Vinyl stays in vinyl format.

As far as getting music to and from my setup, I'm usually pretty old fashioned. I have an external hard drive that I use for backup, and a thumb drive or two. Further, I have Owncloud set up on a Raspberry Pi, which is nice for moving a few files, but wouldn't be suitable for moving files of any real volume. Obviously, anyone could build a more mature and robust network drive if they liked, but this setup is more than suitable for my needs.

This is primarily the fault of later era CDs when the index marks were abandoned and small movements were separated by track breaks. Originally, Redbook audio was supposed to always have a silent pregap between tracks and indexes were for intra-track navigation. You will find this on early classical CDs. Then the problem is finding a player that supports skipping index marks.

I think the bitrate stingyness comes from the fact that people tend to watch Netflix at home over wired internet and they listen to streaming music over a more expensive wireless connection, often on crappy headphones.

There are higher bitrate services out there. Deezer will stream FLAC and there are probably others.

Where are you buying FLAC files from? For now I'm still happy with physical CDs although I have ripped them to ALAC. I'm not sure what the difference is, but when I scroll through my library on iTunes there's never anything I want to listen to, but if I look through my physical discs I always find something I want to put on.

Tidal offer a "CD quality" 1411kbps option. I tried their trial but I honestly couldn't tell the difference vs Spotify when I got the other half to test me. And at twice the price I couldn't justify it. Perhaps that says more about my ears and my audio setup but that's just my findings.

I suspect most contemporary CDs are just uncompressed dumps of bitrate/band limited compressed audio.

I don't think I've ever seen a longbow in person. I love the art on them though.

The first CD that I ever bought back in 1991 came in a longbox, but I don't recall any of the CDs I got after that coming in them.

> CDs are so cheap these days, and Amazon has AutoRip for many albums

I usually buy MP3s from Amazon's Digital Store (I've never bought into the streaming stuff). What's funny is that occasionally, it's actually cheaper to buy the physical CD with AutoRip than it is to buy the same MP3 download-only format Amazon sells. I've had a couple instances where I bought the CD, got the digital downloads with it, and tossed the still-shrink wrapped physical CD on eBay.

Perhaps. I have heard they also master differently for vinyl since it can't provide the same dynamic, frequency, or stereo range as digital. Some listeners find the result more appealing.

Kind of.

Vinyl can't carry much bass, so it's cut with a special EQ curve - called the RIAA curve - that eliminates most of the bass and some of the mids.

Phono preamps have the opposite curve. In theory when the music comes of the preamp you get a flat response overall. In reality any added distortion warms up the bass a lot, the mids some, and the treble barely at all.

Because what's left of the bass is still cut close to the dynamic range limits of vinyl, it's always distorted. But because of the extreme EQ this rounds out the low end and gives the mids a boost.

The overall effect is a warm sound.

Vinyl isn't a true hifi medium. It's more like an Instagram filter for music. It can sound very nice, but it's a heavily processed sound, not a realistic one.

Digital has other issues. But for ultimate fidelity, personally I would always - no exceptions - prefer to listen to a lossless 24-bit digital recording of a master tape captured with studio-grade converters and streamed from hard disk than from vinyl, CD, or any compressed file format.

"I'd like to see people's iTunes collection in 30 years"

Might look different and be called different, but I bet there is some service offering most music in existence in 2050.

> I'd like to see people's iTunes collections in 30 years...

I bought my first album from iTunes 10 years ago and it is right there in my external HDD since iTunes does not have any sort of DRM anymore (it was removed years ago). Unless computers in 20 years do not allow people to have local data and force them to use The Cloud (at which point i'd probably stop using computers altogether outside of necessity), i do not see them disappear.

If fact i rebought several albums i had in CD format because i lost some of the CDs after moving and a bunch of M4A files in a folder are more convenient than a bunch of CDs in a box (although TBH i do get the nice feeling of having something to look at that is physical... but only for things i really like and for me that is usually games not music).

> The issue even with a DRM-free local iTunes library is: how are people going to keep that over 30 years?

The same place and way you keep all your other digitally purchased music. Just like the music I buy from bleep, Bandcamp or directly from artists.

What’s the problem here?

Backing them up on MDISC DVDs or Blu-Rays is doable. 6 CDs per DVD if you want to store them bit-by-bit. 12 CDs if you go for losless compression. Around 35 CDs per DVD if you do 256kbit/s MP3 or something like that.

MDISC are supposed to last for 100 years or so.

I'd rather maintain a file system of FLAC files, and skip anything like iTunes that can potentially mess with the library. Then it's just data that gets backed up with anything else worth keeping. Add an extra 1MB of space for the FLAC source code if you're really paranoid.

Pressed CDs do quite well over time if you keep them in a dry and cool place. I do think finding optical drives will be the rub, they are already becoming niche products. With SSD prices as they are, it’s not hard to imagine a world without SATA connectors before too long. It’s really hard to imagine that there won’t be some Asian company selling optical drives with usb-x connectors or something but I expect people thought that about various floppy disks over the years too. And then there is the software to read and rip it, probably not super difficult but you never know.

There is an awful lot of music simply not streamed, if you live near a college town or in any city of say 80,000 people then there probably some local bands, chances are good they’ve recorded some stuff and outside of that run of CDs, the music is nowhere else. It’s not like we’re losing part of the Beatles catalog exactly but if you’ve bonded and heard that band a few times it might be meaningful.

>But for a local iTunes library you need IT admin skills to manage it...

If we're talking actual files, it's just basic file management skills, and maybe some simple knowledge of ripping (assuming we're not taking the EAC lossless route). Almost everyone in my office (which are mainly non-tech people) have the former.

>...how are people going to keep that over 30 years?

It's way more likely someone's going to burgle my remaining CDs than they are to destroy every instance of my virtual collection.

>The issue even with a DRM-free local iTunes library is: how are people going to keep that over 30 years?

Parts of my MP3 library are 20 years old. Why do you think keeping them spinning a few more decades will be any harder?

>But for a local iTunes library you need IT admin skills to manage it, to back it up, to transfer it from one machine to the next, perhaps to understand that you can access the music without iTunes, etc. The vast majority of the public don't know how to do that.

Honestly, I think that's why streaming is taking over. Apple's approach to solving the sync problem was to rethink the whole paradigm, and so we got Apple Music instead of smarter iPhone/iPod sync. Sure, they get service revenue in the bargain, but to me it seems like an easy play.

I ripped my CDs 20 years ago and kept that library, moving it between machines and backing up to the cloud. I don't see why I can't keep it alive for another 20 or 30 years. Over time this has become much easier as storage has become smaller and cheaper. I now have my entire music collection on a microSD card on my phone which as well as being handy is also another backup.

Only real problem is that I ripped them at 128Kbps. For some tracks I've gone back and re-done them at a higher bitrate.

I have purchased some albums in the past on itunes and discovered with disgust that they had DRM. They were only playable on itunes. I returned them (a not very user-friendly process).

I have googled it a bit and it seems that DRM is not used any more on iTunes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairPlay#iTunes_Store_DRM_chan...

It's amazing to me that people still think iTunes music has DRM.

It looks like itunes has changed its ways in that regard.

However m4a files are lossy and thus not desirable for me. If I purchase music I want it in flac/alac format because I can transcode it to say, m4a if I need to in the future, or any other format. You can't do that with m4a without a degradation in quality.

Why not use two apps?

You can import music in to spotify.

Spotify allows you to import tracks from your computer and add them to playlists as if it was on Spotify. Obviously you can only access them on the computer you added them from though.

Not sure about the mobile app, I assume it will skip the missing tracks in a playlist as normal but it might be possible that it picks them up if they're present on the device somewhere.

Spotify windows client can play local music just fine. At least could last time I've used it.

Do you have an issue with playing local files in Spotify itself? I do this for the ~30 or so songs I have on my computer (in Dropbox, actually) and it works just fine.

The Sonos app does that for you. Likely their implementation of Spotify is not as slick as the native Spotify app, but you can for instance search for songs and see results from Spotify mixed with results from your local collection.

>Is there an app that can play both Spotify and imported files and present them in a single UI?

Spotify can play and sync your own files. You add them in a list of folders it checks.

I think clementine (based on/inspired by Amarok 1.4) supports spotify - at least they say so on their website. However, I (used to) use it only for my local music and switching to spotify for, well, spotify.

https://www.clementine-player.org/ Hm, but the last version is from 2016.

Mopidy can do this, that's what I use: https://www.mopidy.com/

...but it's a background service with a web UI, so how easy you'll find it to set up depends on your technical expertise.

I just use separate apps. I generally use spotify but occasionally I'll just play my local songs via vlc or itunes.

It’s not really Spotify’s fault. They are at the mercy of the master provided to them. For the most part Spotify sound quality is very good. Tidal has issues with poor masters as well - some songs sound worse on Tidal than Spotify, and vice versa.

Apple Music has a whole bunch of Henry Cow. No King Crimson though.

Perhaps such artists are not recommended (pun intended).

Totally understand your pain :| They've recently added some very hard to find prog albums there, like Planet X, Andy West, Liquid Tension Experiment, Mahavishnu Orchestra, etc, but that obviously depends on what you like.

I dislike renting in general, especially something so important like access to music, but the only reason I do it in this case is indeed the availability of some hard to find rarities.

Successful ABX test only proves that no differences can be heard for some particular pieces of music, but not for all possible music material. There are edge cases (especially where noise is involved) that can never compress perfectly without overfitting the compression algorithm.

Their music is compressed down to 6db maybe, no wonder it sounds the same, the industry is to blame.

Sure, but without FLAC I wouldn't be able to have my music in Opus without re-encoding from a lossy format.

As I noted, my reason for flac/alac is for transcoding purposes. I mainly just transcode them to mp3 currently and play them in itunes anyways, but I have the freedom to transcode to any format in the future without a degradation in quality. You can't do that with lossy formats like mp3.

Double blind tests show that 320kbp/s mp3s are indistinguishable from flacs, barring very poor masters or some extreme edge cases. For a lot of music you could get away with 256kbp/s probably, but it doesn't cost you anything to just go with 320kbp/s.

Worth noting that the UK never had a proper revolution

Fair Dealing is extremely conservative. Could you expand on what you mean, give an example of the research situation and scope?

AIUI the CDP would probably allow you to do format conversion for private study if the matter wasn't available to buy in a format you needed for that study; they'd probably want to see some outputs to show it was study and not entertainment (remember in tort the consideration is balance of probabilities, they don't have to show you infringed just that it was most likely - without research outputs [eg study notes] then the likelihood is you copied for entertainment purposes.

In short, if you're thinking "I can pretend it was for study" then I think you'd find the court is not that naive.

YMMV, this is not legal advice.

So one could in theory create a distribution network of friends sharing and ripping CDs? We could call it... Wrapster.

Pretty sure you're using 'mp3s' in a general sense, but I'm going to nitpick because I love audio format geekery.

If you're going to rip your CDs, you should consider ripping to FLAC and Opus. The only reason to rip to mp3 is that basically every legacy device out there understands the mp3 format and knows how to play it. If you're playing back on a phone or PC or a more modern device, you should use a modern format. Both FLAC and Opus are totally open source.

FLAC is lossless and will reproduce your source CD bit for bit, but in a compressed format. Listening to music in a FLAC format is the same as listening to the original CD. Opus is a lossy format, so you lose some fidelity by necessity, but if you make that trade it's the best quality you're going to get. A double blind test had it outperform AAC and Vorbis, and significantly outperform mp3.

I rip my CDs to FLAC and store those files on my NAS. Then I convert the FLAC files to medium quality Opus files and those go on the SD card in my phone. I don't use old mp3 players, so I can do without mp3s.

My phone has this feature where it periodically checks if I'm still looking at it, to turn off the screen if I'm not. It doesn't take the opportunity to spy on my facial expression, but I reckon it won't be long.

I feel like Bandcamp is also more geared towards artists. When I discover new music on Bandcamp, I see the custom-designed artist pages and make a connection between the music and the artist while on Spotify and YouTube it feels more like going from song to song, but not focusing on artists separately (which is not necessarily a bad thing, but I personally prefer the former)

I started using Youtube Music last year. Recently I flew overseas, and for this reason I had downloaded some music (300+ songs) with their download for offline play feature. During my layover I connected to some airport wifi, and almost instantly I lost access to offline play of most of my songs because of licensing issues with the country that I was in. I've since learned to always use a VPN that terminates in the US before launching Youtube Music.

I run Spotify premium like I mentioned in the original post. This means that all songs I add to my libraries are automatically downloaded. Whenever my internet is down or my phone is away from WIFI I can continue listening to my music in the same way that you do, which is why I have no reason to use CDs for offline music

Deezer tells you (if you look): the song appears grayed out in the playlist.

I like that because a playlist is also a knowledge repository; and if the song ever comes back it will hopefully be reinstated.

Though they don't explicitly notify you, they keep the song on your playlist, they just gray it out. That way you can know when it's been removed, but unfortunately it's still inconvenient.

> Everybody knew record companies were just adding filling to get to a certain album lengths.

Sometimes. Maybe even often. Never always. To me the highest achievement a recording artist can make is an entire album that is a good coherent work of art best enjoyed as a whole. Some artist actually deliver this.

Music producers have been doing that since the invention of the LP.

Along this line: reissues of LPs that include every alternate take.

For typical single-based pop/top-40 that could be true.

But for the long tail of most album-oriented music (including the fairly obscure stuff I listen to), its the producer and musician(s) working together to create a coherent artistic work.

Obviously that doesn't always result in an album of consistently great songs, but in my experience as as an occasional musician, recording engineer, and producer, there's always more material than will fit on the album. Part of the creative process is to build that into a form that best expresses the concept of the work as a whole. That usually involves selection & curation, not adding extra filling. My opinion, of course.

Bandcamp is truely the best music platform and one of the best websites there is today. It's fair to artists and its UX is in the rarest of states: done. I hope to god they never change a thing.

Officially, not really. The 'scene' is a tad too big for that, although some circles publish on bandcamp sometimes (mainly those who can't attend the physical convention).

In the west, there used to be forums (like doujinstyle) dedicated to sharing new releases after every event, which turned into large discord servers in the past year. Otherwise, a lot of the releases can be found on Asia-oriented private trackers as well.

These are often the only way to get a chance of actually listening to the album, since there's generally a limited number of physical albums available for sale at the event, and reprints during the next edition of the convention are uncommon.

How do you go about finding the chillwave community on Bandcamp?

The polycarbonate substrate could degrade due to temperature, humidity, exposure to sunlight, and other environmental variables. These are concerns for institutions with large CD-based archives (e.g., Library of Congress). [1]

In practice, though, it's far more likely that the the disc will get corrupted from small scratches.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/08/18/34...

> I'm curious why a CD would not work anymore after listening to it a lot? Is the laser powerful enough to damage it or is it the heat from the device itself which is degrading the material in the long term?

If you handled everything with white gloves and carefully moved the CD around it would probably last forever under a realistic scenario (you left it in a closet, didn't move it around much, etc.).

I have a bunch of original CDs from my first music collection that still work after ~20 years based on spot checking some of them 5+ years ago. Even with hundreds of playbacks.

But, I do have a handful of CDs that I remember having issues. They skip in certain spots due to artifacts on the CD. The real world happens. I don't remember what happened exactly in each case, but I'm guessing they got scratched. Like maybe I didn't put it fully into the black binder that held 200 CDs and I hit a bump in my car which caused the binder to jump around and an edge of the CD got clipped by the zipper, who knows.

Also burnt CDs seem to have a much worse shelf life. They are much more susceptible to being damaged. I don't know exactly why at a technical level but for sure I've had more burnt CDs fail over time. That becomes an issue when you want to back things up.

With mp3s, I can just put thousands of songs on my computer and everything works all the time. I never had an mp3 not play or skip unless the file itself was corrupt initially. They are also a heck of a lot more portable. You can put your collection on your phone, throw in some earbuds and now you can go on a run, or a 6 hour plane trip. You ever try running with a discman[0]? I have. It doesn't really work too well haha.

[0]: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41305EZ51FL...

I've had issues playing CDs on older players. I think newer models have better error correction.

Perhaps it is another issue, but the fact that I've had it across multiple devices, I'd be surprised if it isn't Spotify's shoddy "algorithm" (if you even wanna call it that). I posted this a while ago on reddit on /r/Spotify[0] that shows two examples of the same song being chosen close to each other (one of which actually was listed one after the other). This is either terrible algorithm or an algorithm that benefits Spotify, not the consumer. The issues have been raised on Spotify's official platform, but they've just ignored it. There are literally thousands of replies[1].

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/spotify/comments/966nx7/uhh_dear_sp... [1] https://community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/Implement...

I will try that. However, I don't think this is the case as this happens on WiFi as well. Additionally, on 4G with 5 bars it still happens. Everything else works fine and is instantaneous.

So I've had it on offline mode since you've mentioned it. It works much better. No sluggish start ups or sluggish song changes. This is really strange as I've got 1Gbps connection at home and it still does this when it on the WiFi. More reasons to get rid of it.

I feel the same, but fondly remember the old last.fm recommendations. Those were pretty good (I hope that's not just nostalgia speaking). Plus browsing scrobbles [=playback history] of people with similar tastes was a good way to find more great music; or explore new genres.

Eh. With proper care and a well-configured turntable, records can last a long time. And you can always buy a new one.