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w10-1

Forget internet: just sync.

Add music on macOS, and on your phone. Then sync.

RESULT: one overwrites the other, regardless of any settings.

You no longer have the audio you formerly owned.

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In 2025 I have a dedicated pixel5 with no SIM card that is nothing but an mp3 player.

It has nothing installed but VLC.

Life is too short to deal with the ridiculous interoperability of (simple music files) and (any modern computing platform).

Where would one get these MP3 files? Not everything is on Bandcamp and torrenting everything feels like a part time job, but maybe I just have too much music I like.

I still remember spending days inside during summers as a kid, downloading, cataloging and tagging MP3 files while others were probably experiencing life haha.

But I do long for the days where I could just press 'play' and I would hear music, without waiting for Spotify's Electron crap to finish loading its 'optimistic UI', declining 10 cookie popups and agreeing to upload the soul of my unborn kids to Daniel Ek's private cloud.

A USB CD reader costs $20-30 and will probably also read and write DVDs.

Software using libparanoia and lame or ffmpeg is free. The very first time you use it, you might spend 30 minutes figuring things out. It generally takes 3-8 minutes to rip and encode a full CD these days.

The market for CDs and used CDs is quite open. $10-15 for an album is quite common. For those not aware, an album is usually 8-20 songs, so roughly the same $0.99 price as for individual tracks -- but without DRM, and with physical backup.

An awful lot of artists have their own shops; frequently, if you buy the CD from there, you also get a digital copy in WAV, FLAC or MP3 immediately.

I make my music library available as a read-only NFS export in my house network, and remotely via various bits of software to members of my family.

> Where would one get these MP3 files? Not everything is on Bandcamp

A lot of music is still available for sale, if not through Bandcamp then through stores like Qobuz[1]. Sometimes I have to look around for a bit to find a store that sells what I'm looking for, but I can usually find it on Bandcamp or there. Occasionally it's not for sale, in which case I don't feel bad about torrenting or downloading from YouTube, but that's rare.

[1]: https://www.qobuz.com/shop

The big digital music stores are DRM-free these days (iTunes and Amazon both are). There's also Qobuz if you want to avoid the tech giants (though most of your money ends up going to record labels, so does it really matter?).

There's a whole cottage industry of Android powered digital music players. They usually skimp on things like screen quality and compute power, but add things like microSD slots, physical transport controls, and high quality DAC & amp hardware. It's gotten very competitive in recent years.

I sometimes look at these and daydream about owning one, then I slap myself and just put music on my phone. My hearing is just not that great these days, I doubt I could hear the difference.

What is the function of parentheses here?

Think of them as variables - a stand in for any given file format or modern operating system.

The language itself gets that across without the parenthesis, literally what was said.

Some people like the clarity of dividing up sentences to avoid any possible misinterpretation.

The parentheses eliminate this alternative interpretation:

> Life is too short to deal with (the ridiculous interoperability of simple music files) and (any modern computing platform).

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