Hacker News Reader

Comment by antihero | Hacker News Reader

Foobar2000 was such a golden age of music discovery (mostly through piracy forums) for me in my teens, used to spend hours upon hours customising it and posting the results on Hydrogen Audio while weird and wonderful music was downloading from yousendit, rapidshare, soulseek, and megaupload. Bands I now go see live and support through bandcamp now that I'm not poor!

So much more exciting and engaging than fucking Spotify radio.

Shame the macOS one is basically nothing like the Windows one. I'd recommend Cog for something similar for macOS.

https://cog.losno.co/

View on HN

Music Forums (and 4chan) were amazing for discovery because you had people with extremely hard opinions arguing vociferously against others over which album was best or why such-and-such was awful.

Music recommendations feels like somebody constantly prodding you with "oh don't like this? try this!"

Perhaps it was the combative nature that made them so much fun.

TBF, a lot of that hasn’t really died out in niche music communities even though it might appear to be. Still widely prevalent in the metal scene at least with people moving to Reddit and Facebook as they age and stop being able to maintain forum software

Home ageing affects someone’s ability to maintain a standalone forum? Do you mean lack of free time?

Probably yes. As I move forward in life, my free time is dwindling faster than I like. Work responsibilities and other fun stuff seeps in.

I'm not complaining most of the time, but sometimes I want to be able to spend a day working mindlessly on my computer to try new things and fool around.

Free time is one factor but other factors include declining health (people that have lived the touring lifestyle understand how harsh it can be physically) and dying. Add in children and the complications of having a 10 year old listen to Cannibal Corpse with you as a hypothetical situation.

One other factor not commonly mentioned is that many people ossify and have difficulty expending the mental energy to seek out new music. I personally don't do that anymore but I certainly did for a while when I was much more stressed out with work. Additionally, some genres themselves seem to get into a rut and tap out (let's not forget the "punk's not dead" attempts at denying reality, for instancee)

There's also rateyourmusic.com which has a forum that I always thought of as the online hub for those who enjoy having petty arguments about all things music

The ability to downvote on reddit changes this dynamic.

Reddit has, for good or bad, always attracted a "help all newbies" mentality too.

Wait a second, 4chan had a music section?

It still does - /mu/

edit - it's not as fun as I remember it used to be

That's always been an accurate description of 4chan.

There were even decent releases made on /mu/. Specifically, never having been on 4chan myself, I've heard of that scene by the way of Loli Ripe—whose music is basically j-core a-la DJ Sharpnel, but with more breakcore. I only wish that they would better normalize the volume between tracks.

IIRC there was also something vaporwave-related (predictably).

(Dammit, this all was really long ago.)

> IIRC there was also something vaporwave-related (predictably).

/mu/ collaboratively produces albums all the time. I was present for and might have contributed to this one: https://millennialdreamcorp.bandcamp.com/album/drake-josh-jo...

/mu/ used to be a lot more interesting, but yeah. Nowadays it's mostly an Anthony Fantano discussion board, but I remember talking up some really interesting artists on there a few years ago. People would trade Death Grips demos for Monkees stems, and a number of relatively large artists used to frequent the board too. My fondest memories were chatting up Iglooghost who'd visit every so often, posting links to demos that sounded like keygen music from another planet. Dude didn't even need a tripcode: everyone knew his stuff when it came around.

It saddens me that I grew up during this time but never availed myself of any of these resources. What a lift that would've been to my lifelong quest to discover my own sound.

Nah, back then I just used LimeWire to download fake Weird Al Yankovic songs.

Though, I did discover the Avalanches because a guildmate I met while playing an MMO sent me the MP3 in MSN Messenger.

I like https://everynoise.com to get started on discovery. It kinda replaced looking at tags on last.fm for me, it uses Spotify metadata.

This is amazing. Thanks for the link!

This was same for me + early last.fm and sites like c8 [1]. Now I just obtain music from Bandcamp. And on my phone it is either bandcamp.app or decoupled.app

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20080514213709/http://c8.com/

The good old days of listening test on Hydrogen Audio and Divx / Xvid video testing on Doom9.

But as we have so much storage space and bandwidth the interest of newer, better audio codec wind down. 20 years later we still dont have anything that gives CD / 128kbps MP3 quality at half the bitrate. Instead we all went with 256Kbps AAC, and may be soon lossless. I wish MPC ( Musepack ) has taken off though, I still think it sounds better than AAC.

The same may happen to video too. The rate of Mobile 5G bandwidth improvement is much faster than video codec adoption. We used to care about sub- 1Mbps bitrate, now it is largely gone in developed counties.

Still, I am surprised Foobar2K getting updates in 2022.

> Still, I am surprised Foobar2K getting updates in 2022.

Why shouldn't it? It's still perfectly fine with a lot of extensibility. It's one of the rare desktop apps that I'll not easily give up for a web-based alternative. Having an offline music collection is just different. I don't know how to explain it. I know it's stupid but it feels like, when I actually purchase albums, they sound better than streaming. It's the value my subconscious assigns for the things I pay for directly perhaps. Still silly but, perhaps.

Opus at 64k~=Mp3 128k. There's still interest in better audio codecs in the commercial world, it's just more focused on streaming audio and voice chat these days.

The last listening test put Opus at ~90Kbps = 128kbps Mp3.

https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,117489.0.html

No? Opus 1.3 96k is slightly worse than mp3 192k CBR. Previous listening tests just always compared 96k opus+AAC to mp3 128k because mp3 is just that bad (and mp3 would still lose).

I think that is a personal listening test. Especially from Kamedo2 whom is quite bias towards Opus LOL.

The last group listening test was in 2014. Which was touched on in this thread [1]. And in general I believe and agree with IgorC. Opus has gotten better, but the last test results still remains largely the same.

On the subject of looking this up my HA account is over 20 years old. Oh My.

[1] https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=118446.0

Can you ABX 256Kbps AAC and the equivalent MPC?

I remember ripping a few things in Musepack a very long time ago.

Now I use ALAC for lossless (it supports 24-bit 192khz now!) and AAC for lossy, because they are standardised, use the MP4 container, and seem to be the most widely supported.

oink and what.cd. Ahh, the memories.

RIP

what.cd was one of the greatest resources available on the Internet, in my opinion. Still sad it's gone. :-(

Yet another rewrite project that went nowhere, if I remember correctly. Or was that waffles.fm? I'm probably confusing the two.

edit: ok I did confuse them, see reply

You're thinking waffles.fm -- what.cd was seized by authorities. waffles didn't even come close to the glory of what.cd

Would you happen to know if the story is written out anywhere?

I haven't used it myself, but I've heard REDACTED comes close to what.cd , you might have to interview again though.

Redacted hasn't quite rebuilt What.CD's full library, but it's getting remarkably close. Streaming services have taken some of the vigor out of the torrent scene, but I think it's safe to say What's all-music-archive dream is alive.

It might be a little late now, but in the early days, they seemed more than happy to have former What.CD users (provided they were in good standing) on board. There was an interview, but it wasn't a big deal.

https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-shuts-down-following-report...

https://torrentfreak.com/music-group-confirms-what-cd-raid-c...

41m € of alleged losses. And for that want, the library of Alexandria was burned down.

Met a lot of my best friends through there. Still hurts is gone.

What.cd was a massive loss for the entire internet.

Some of What's Vanity house stars are now real stars with tours around the world, like "The Flashbulb"

You too found The Flashbulb via what.cd? Soundtrack to a Vacant Life is an incredible album.

Yes I sure did. That album may have been a vanity house "staff pick" too, I don't recall. Pink and What felt like magical places... Terra Firma, what a massive tune. https://youtu.be/HwbVnFR-XP4

I also found Flashbulb via what.cd vanity. Good stuff

I mean this without hyperbole. Loseing what.cd was one of the saddest moments of my life. Losing it was on a tier below the burning of the library of alexandria, but only a single tier.

This article came out soon after it was gone: https://qz.com/840661/what-cd-is-gone-a-eulogy-for-the-great...

It put things into perspective for many.

Definitely a go-to but I used as well, up until it went dark within last couple years, the nmp3s off-shoot from SAF all those years ago.

The replacement is just as good, if not better.

Rare too see a mention of Oinks Pink Palace. Such an amazing site and community. What and Waffles were never the same thing.

I agree. Oink was VERY good and also very friendly. They also had a silly rule that "all avatars MUST be cute"

I think it was even "all avatars MUST be cute animals".

Yeah spot on, cute rule, I have carried that over into other community forums I used to run :)

Oink was such a great site, I remember feverishly following tutorials to rip my CDS in FLAC format with specific encoders just to boost my s/l ratio.

too bad nothing like oink exists anymore, I remember being an early uploader of some interpol albums. Also people just had great music tastes, you could go to any genre and sort and find heavy hitters you didnt know, who were amazing.

>too bad nothing like oink exists anymore

red, ops, slsk

Try redacted or Orpheus

what.cd was one the most incredible archive of music ever created, happily spent £10/mo on a seedbox to support it and had a bunch of scripts to auto-seed things to get some sort of ridiculous ratio.

The powers that be truly did destroy something great, if there's a tracker that's anything like it I'd happily rent a seedbox again.

Even now most music streaming services will only give you a single crummy option of the album version to listen to, usually some stupid remaster, AM sometimes gives lets you listen to the original but it's far from perfect.

Agreed. Such a step back in power user features these days; being able to say "create a playlist of all songs in genre X with 4+ stars" or "Play 5 star songs I haven't listened to in at least 12 months" was amazing.

It seems that the "stream any song instantly" usecase is winning out, but I really pine for some metadata / playlist overlay that I could use to regain this sort of control of my music streaming.

Navidrome added a feature similar to what you're describing (they call it smart playlists https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome/releases/tag/v0.47.0). Beets also has something similar (https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/plugins/smartplaylist...).

I replaced my usage of spotify with these two and its been great. I also enjoy having fine grained control over my listening, and streaming services were sorely lacking.

> Such a step back in power user features these days; being able to say "create a playlist of all songs in genre X with 4+ stars" or "Play 5 star songs I haven't listened to in at least 12 months" was amazing.

Possibly ironically, both of those examples work on current versions of the Music app on macOS, and will work with both local and cloud files in your library. There are many valid reasons to dump on The Application Formerly Known As iTunes, but it remains more capable at library management than I think it's usually given credit for.

(N.B.: the same cannot be said for its iOS counterpart, which can sync smart playlists but not create them, and seems to have dropped support for star ratings completely.)

That was and still is the main way I use music players. On any (new) platform I always look for the one that provides such possibilities.

I was a Winamp guy on Windows, now I'm using Swinsian on Mac and both GoneMad and PlayerPro on Android.

I forgot about Hydrogen Audio! Remember when Musepack (is that what it was called?) was the greatest audio format ever? Oh man, those were the days. Then I got old and bought a Spotify subscription. Haha

I'm trying to get back to those times, I use Apple Music for most stuff, but I've got a SSD and cheap VPS that I use navidrome on. Nobody can pull the plug on me. AM and Spotify et all is great but the feeling you get when you can't access them for some reason and realise you have become near totally dependent on corporation and laws for something that is core to your soul is a huge realisation.

They can pry my music from my cold dead hands.

For people who have multiple computers or are “on the move” a lot I can recommend https://asti.ga

Basically type throw your music on a cloud or a combination of ones, Astiga scans these clouds and presents all the music it finds as one library which you can browse and play from the browser.

Maintainer and operator of Astiga here - thanks for mentioning the service!

THANK YOU for this recommendation. I've been trying numerous iTunes/"Music" alternatives but none have stuck, or their price point doesn't make sense for the offering. This looks perfect!

What about Clementine [https://www.clementine-player.org/]? I used to love Amarok, so been using Clementine on Linux for the last few months.

Can't forget the Clementine fork https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/

Ooh another good find. Like I mentioned above Clementine doesn't open at all for me, so maybe this is worth a shot.

Ah, wasn't even aware of a fork (but makes sense!).

I was excited by Clementine but it doesn't even open for me on this version of OS X unfortunately.

I remember setting up AudioGalaxy on my home machine and using their UI so that I could download stuff "from work" and have it available when I got home. It was great for my use!

> Cog for something similar for macOS.

https://swinsian.com/ is another choice. Not a free or oss one though.

Ah soulseek! Those were the days. I'm sure I have a hard drive somewhere with like 100Gb of music from there.

>Foobar2000 was such a golden age of music discovery... So much more exciting and engaging than fucking Spotify radio.

But what you describe takes work and Spotify radio and similar features from their competitors don't.

As someone who also built up a big library during the golden ages of music piracy, the primary benefit of the Spotify-like services is not their libraries. It is that they remove the need to do the work in both music selection and discovery. They provide a middle ground between just random music selection and entirely intentional selection. Sometimes I just want a specific musical vibe without having to design a playlist or choose a specific singular artist. In addition these services are smart enough to understand that vibe and mix new music in that fits that vibe which I therefore might also enjoy.

Is there anything that can adequately replicate this type of radio style listening while using one's own library that doesn't require them to spend hours and hours both proactively seeking out new music and meticulously updating their library's metadata using something like Musicbrainz (or whatever the modern equivalent now is)?

At some point Subsonic/Airsonic had an integration with Last.fm to make smart playlists with music from your library

I would suggest that there's an inherent trade-off at work here. It was more exciting largely because of the time and work involved.

But Spotify isn't stopping you from dedicating that time and doing that work if you still have that desire.

> they remove the need to do the work in both music selection and discovery

And this right here is the problem. It makes you lazy, it makes music discovery a passive process. It kills your soul. By requiring active effort to engage with a scene and music itself, you regain a certain beauty and excitement to music because it becomes an interactive process and something you are part of. Once you have "earned" a new album and or band by discovering it on your own whims, you are more motivated to share it and discuss it with people as opposed to just appreciating it as an individual.

Sure, there's a time and a place where you do just want to kick on a vibe and do something else (especially at work) and for that AM Stations or Spotify Radio is adequate, however, it is a gilded cage.

>It makes you lazy... It kills your soul... Once you have "earned" a new album and or band

You have to understand that this reads like gatekeeping nonsense to a lot of people.

On the Mac front I use and love Swinsian (https://swinsian.com). It's like iTunes as it was in 2001.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com