Hacker News Reader

Comment by kodon | Hacker News Reader

I turned an old laptop into a plex server. If you have a personal music library, you should do this.

Right? Why are so many people willing to be used by agents of corporate media in their hunt for more loot? Own your media, own your future!

My reasoning is this:

I don't want to pirate music, and I don't want to pay for every song I'll ever listen to.

Pay-per-play makes the most sense to most users. We can't predict which songs we'll listen to once or 1,000 times.

Mine is this: I have tracks that aren't available on any streaming service. I've also been buying music on CD since 1993, and online for 10+ years and have over 120k tracks which will never "become unavailable". My playlists will never disappear. I'll never pay another cent for them this music for the rest of my life. The money you pay to rent music each month, I use to buy another 2 albums and a bunch of tracks, so my collection constantly grows in the direction I want it to.

Goodwill is a great source of CDs, too. Entire albums are $0.99. I get 20 CDs every couple of weeks, then rip them all as FLACs (with cdparanoia).

I re-purposed a Kodak Photo Kiosk thing to automate the ripping. http://www.davisr.me/projects/cd-ripping/

Wow, that's dedicated. Cool project

Bandcamp makes much more sense to me. Listen to music online as often as you want for free (without easy custom playlists that I know of, although they make some playlists and it is easy to play a bunch of music from particular publishers) and purchase if you want to add it to your collection (flac format) or support artists.

I used to have a huge selection of MP3s with obscure and non-obscure music of my tastes that I've painfully curated over the years and I listened using an MPD server.

I'm glad I decided to keep the collection behind when I changed computers because Spotify is so much more convenient. I don't have to worry about downloading music or having the right device connected to the right server, and I've found more obscure tracks that I liked in 3 years of Spotify recommendations than in a decade of randomly going through the Internet.

google music being shut down and youtube music being a terrible replacement was enough to push me to set up my own plex - loving it so far. I run it off a raspi.

Or, if you want free software, airsonic-advanced (specialized for audio) and/or Jellyfin (FLOSS fork of Emby)

Plex is fantastic except the direction they seem to be going with how they monetize is questionable. Streaming from private servers is definitely The Way though, in any case

Plexamp is a reasonable app for playing music with this too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com