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Comment by ttoinou | Hacker News Reader

"asceticism" with a lot of stuff to buy though

I always wondered if we could replicate the physicality of vinyl / CDs, games ROM etc. through memory cards (like SD Cards) in an enclosure with a label on it with a player made on purpose for them. This way we get physical media, easy to create yourself, not too expensive, in a digital way

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The thing with physical media that is often missed is - it never interrupts you for an OS update, you never lose content due to lapsed subscription, artists/labels can't revoke songs, theres no controller app that can be broken by updates, you don't have to worry about your speakers aging out of firmware updates.

You just put the media in and press play.

Sure having infinite streaming libraries is cool yes, but people listen to the same stuff or slowly expand listening habits. $10-30/mo for life ends up being a lot more money than just buying what you actually enjoy and listening to radio/stream like stuff to sample new.

The streamers are slop slingers now. Ironically I have found that YouTube's recommendation engine is 100x better for me than Spotify/Apple/Tidal ever were, and I don't even pay for Youtube, lol. Or sites like Discogs for more engaged music discovery.

> you never lose content due to lapsed subscription

You do however lose content to phyiscal damage or just misplacement.

I love CDs, but I've also lost some of my favourite CDs to damage or loss.

Yes, the quality of recommendations is generally terrible, but the equivalent in the physical media age, walking into a CD store and hearing something you love, just sadly isn't coming back.

Spotify etc are still unreasonably cheap for what they deliver, it costs the same as a couple of albums a month.

Most people outside their teenage years, unless music is their passion, are not actively engaging with the streaming services enough to consume 2 albums of new content monthly.

The old iTunes pay per song / album model with 30+ second previews is arguably a better model than where we’ve landed.

I beg to differ. Most people I know use streaming for automated relevant recommendations. I’m listening to Tidal’s daily discovery playlist on most days and most of it is meh, but I make a note of a new piece every other day or so.

I'm not sure who is the outlier but I'm like the GP says. Was into music and stereo systems as a teen and into my 20s. Now, I just listen to whatever is on the radio in the car. Even streaming is too much hassle most of the time. I will go to YouTube music occasionally when I get the urge to listen to a specific song, but that's pretty rare.

But another problem with online streams is that they are increasingly not the original music. More and more are remastered, autotuned, rebalanced to sound good on a phone speaker or earbuds. This can probably be done largely with AI now. A vinyl album or even a CD or local mp3 file is what it is when it was recorded, and will stay that way as long as it lasts.

To be fair, the stereo versions of The Beatles recordings badly needed remastering. Lots of things were hard-panned. They treated the original stereo mix as some novelty, and put all their focus and effort into the mono mix.

This is why the happy medium is owning your own data.

You can have the CDs or not, but owning your copy of the MP3 file, which you keep on a hard drive, or on a thumb drive, or on a portable SSD (in any of these cases, with a backup somewhere!), or wherever, means that

1) you can play it any time you want, for no extra money

2) your access to it can never be revoked

3) you can keep copying it onto new physical media any time you're worried about the old one wearing out

> I always wondered if we could replicate the physicality of vinyl / CDs, games ROM etc. through memory cards

I kinda like the idea that the music is stored as a raw analog signal pressed or magnetically stirred onto physical media. There's no file format, no codec , no DRM and no CPU involved. It's more of a protest against the digital assault that turned a ritualistic listening experience into a effortless, passive background task.

There's also a big nostalgia factor where a lot of people like me grew up with vinyl, cassettes and CD's when they came out. High school years were rife with tape trading, DiY mixes and kids who made their own music. In HS I knew kids handing out tapes with their fresh new rap or garage grunge band. You won't get that magic back with an SD card in a cardboard facade (or spotify for that matter.)

https://kazeta.org is doing something along those lines for games.

We do have stuff like that, here's an example for kids:

https://tonies.com

They seem quite well made, if not exactly cheap. I believe there's also a way to store your own mp3's, but I don't know how open the interface really is. Ofc you can also make sth like this from scratch.

My daughter wakes us up every morning smacking her tonie box (that's how you skip songs).

The figurines don't actually contain the music, they just have an NFC chip in them. The Tonie Box is connected to wifi and downloads the content.

The child doesn't really know any better though, it still gives them the physical experience without a screen.

Ah ok, sounds like a smarter way to do it. How hackable would you say is it, eg to register your own NFC chips? It seems like a nice platform.

Pretty easy. Same as for yoto

This reminds me of the modern fisher price record players.

The old ones were traditional music boxes, and each record had the musical notes.

The new ones have the score built in to the player, and each record just provides an ID for which track to play. So you can only play music that is built in to the device.

I never had the music-box style Fisher Price record player, I had the one that was an actual phonograph.

TIL!

https://www.reddit.com/r/vinyl/s/1wTKcVvkCV

For those looking at these, I highly recommend Yoto over Tonies.

We recently purchased a Hörbert for our kids, which is everything you (I) want and nothing you don't - music is loaded via a SD card, there are 9 "playlists", it's mostly wood, and there's no need for WiFi or additional purchases.

The only catch is that they don't ship to the US (we just bought one in Europe and brought it back).

https://www.hoerbert.com/

The Yota player for kids is basically this

Really really really missing the point! Firstly I'd object to your statement that you have to buy a lot of stuff to get into it. Record players aren't expensive, and vinyl is also cheap (and don't look on ebay, go to your local thrift stores / charity shops -- or even better, your parents' house). Secondly the physicality isn't somehow the friction of associating music with a physical object, but the actual experience and sound of a record playing. You won't get this unless you do it, often, with wonderful music, so it's hard to describe.

You're right, that it is a lot of stuff. I'm looking now at 6 shelves filled with records. That definitely doesn't work for people in small apartments.

Im only criticising the use of the term asceticism here… of course I know the experience and sound is different

Asceticism is a term, like "large" or "small", that only has meaning relative to some standard. Relative to "hear whatever I want from the entire history of recorded music right now using a single cheap device", the act of playing a physical format on a complex assortment of devices you integrated is relatively ascetic. Hence the softening of the term with "middle path".

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