FLAC is a meme for 90% of use cases out there. The difference in sound quality between a .flac and 320 .mp3 is imperceptible to the majority of people and needs thousands of dollars of listening equipment to become apparent. The file size is drastically different, though. Not to mention the fact that almost all music is recorded in .wav files nowadays, and the "lossless" versions are usually just synthetically upscaled for the audiophile crowd.
Not to say that I don't prefer to download FLAC when possible, but I also don't avoid non-lossless albums either.
Um, .wav is a lossless format. It's just raw PCM with no compression. An upscaled FLAC from a lossy source is not lossless, even though it's stored in a lossless compatible format (FLAC). A properly encoded and compressed MP3 file will sound very close to the lossless source, but when procuring those lossy files from third parties, you rely on whoever compressed them doing it properly. I prefer to store my music repository in a lossless format, and stream/sync in lossy.
With storage as cheap as it is nowadays, a 15 MB FLAC audio file vs. a 3 MB MP3 really doesn't matter anymore. Those 12 MB cost nothing to store.
And to be honest, in cases where storage does matter, a 320 kbps MP3 is just a waste of space. A VBR MP3 with average bitrate around 200 kbps makes way more sense and nobody can tell the difference between that and 320 kbps in a double blind test.
So just maintain FLAC or other lossless for sharing music and transcode down when needed.
But like, why? I'm going to be listening to the lossy version on my phone 90% of the time anyways, and my headphones are not good enough to truly appreciate lossless either. It doesn't matter that I have over 4tb of storage on my PC, I still don't wanna waste an extra 50GB for no tangible benefit, when I could use the same extra 50GB to more than double my lossy music collection if I wanted.
If you store lossy on your PC you will lose quality if you transcode to a lower bitrate. If you don't transcode, then you will be using more space on your phone.
That's why.
If you don't want to transcode and just want to download and play, then full lossy is easier. But you are going to be using more space on your phone.
This is my take as well. Storage is cheap. I have thousands of albums and about 40,000 tracks currently and it consumes about 400GB. It's really not that much storage, considering.
So you don't listen to music unless you're at home? Or do you choose a subset of your library to put on your phone? That would be terribly annoying for me.
In my case, a self hosted streaming server works wonders. Plex with Pleaxamp, Jellyfin, Navidrome, Airsonic, any of them will stream to your phone while out and about.
I live in the rural midwest with spotty cell service. All of those services support manual offline syncing to store music on your phone. I set Plexamp to stream lossy over cellular, and it doesn't take long to cache an entire playlist when I do have a signal.
It's easy bro just maintain a server with redundant disks and a reverse proxy so you can stream music over your unlimited cellular data connection that I'm totally sure you have access to in your region.
In my case I use FLAC because when Plex transcodes, FLAC > Opus sounds better than MP3 > Opus. Almost all my media was ripped by me direct from CD, with some coming from Bandcamp.
FLAC Not to mention the fact that almost all music is recorded in .wav files nowadays, and the "lossless" versions are usually just synthetically upscaled for the audiophile crowd.
Yeah, this isn’t how that works.
“Lossless” refers to a mathematical property of the type of compression. If the data can be decompressed to exactly the same bits that went into the compressor then it’s lossless.
You can’t “synthetically upscale” to lossless. You can make a fake lossless file (lossy data converted into a lossless file format) but that serves zero purpose and is more of an issue with shady pirate uploaders.
Lossless means it sounds exactly like the CD copy, should it exist. That’s really all. And you want lossless for any situation where you’ll be converting again before playback. Like, for example, Bluetooth transmission.
Lossless means it sounds exactly like the CD copy, should it exist
You're bang on with everything but this, if you're getting FLACs from the source, you may be getting higher quality than CD which is 16-bit 44.1khz. I've got many 24-bit 96khz FLACs in my collection
Your last point about Bluetooth is such a great one though. Recompression of already compressed audio is a much worse end result than compressing uncompressed audio one time (and before anyone says it, basically no one is listening to lossless Bluetooth audio)
Fair point with the higher bit depths and sampling rates, I just figured there was no point in overcomplicating it when it seemed there was already some form of misunderstanding.
Not to mention the fact that almost all music is recorded in .wav files nowadays, and the “lossless” versions are usually just synthetically upscaled for the audiophile crowd
WAV and FLAC are both lossless, the reason people use FLAC is because WAV doesn't (or didn't) have good support for tags and FLAC has lossless file compression while WAV usually is uncompressed. There isn't any sort of "upscaling" that is done.
Personally, I think a quality v0 or 320kb/s MP3 is perfectly fine for listening but I'm always going to prefer storing lossless audio so I can convert the files to whatever format I want/need. I've moved around between MP3, AAC, and Opus for different devices and if I didn't have the FLAC files I would either have to redownload files or do lossy to lossy transcodes
The difference in sound quality between a .flac and 320 .mp3 is imperceptible to the majority of people and needs thousands of dollars of listening equipment to become apparent.
I would disagree with this. It isn't really a matter of equipment cost. It may be a matter of not having ever heard a direct comparison between versions of the same track, though.
What I've noticed is that you really need e.g. wired headphones to be able to hear this difference. The compression artifacts of MP3 are quite distinct, but since Bluetooth tends to compress audio as well, this eliminates a lot of the difference between lossy and lossless sources.
I can hear the difference clearly with cheap (≈$50) wired headphones on my android phone (which is nothing special and a few years old). It is particularly noticeable with high frequency sounds, like hi-hats, which tend to sound muddy with a kind of digital sizzle.
Sometimes it's more about knowing you have the highest quality format than being able to hear the difference. An mp3 of a great sounding album with good dynamic range will always sound better than a FLAC of a shitty recording.
I think most people can train themselves to hear mp3 compression even on low quality gear by listening to comparisons of cymbal sounds. An experiment to prove this is to import a lossless track in to a DAW, export it to mp3, import the mp3 and invert the waveform, so playing back you will only hear the differences between the two tracks, ie only the sounds that the compression failed to accurately replicate, the compression artifacts. What you will be hearing with an mp3-320 is a sort of muddy static sound whenever the cymbals hit, blended with whatever other vocals or instruments overlapped with that frequency. This doesn't mean that when you only hear the mp3 it will automatically sound bad or noticeably worse, but it proves there is an audible difference in the character of certain sounds that can be heard even on bad gear.
Hearing the difference now isn't the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression, while MP3 is 'lossy'. What this means is that for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA - it's about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocidensity. You don't want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media.
I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrange…well don’t get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren’t stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you’ll be glad you did.
I really hope this is satire. If not, you're way off the mark. Lossy files do not intrinsically suffer any kind of bit rot. Bits are bits, and your storage interface doesn't have any clue what those bits mean. I have MP3s from the late 90s that have been stored on the cheapest CD-Rs you can imagine, that still play perfect.
That's 100% placebo. I'm a professional recording and mixing engineer and have done ABX tests in rooms with speakers that cost as much as a new car and struggled. Not to mention the tens of thousands of dollars in acoustic treatment in those rooms. 320kbps is guaranteed to be indistinguishable from lossless on $100 speakers in what's likely a horrible sounding room.
Thx, this was an easy way to test this out! Pretty much confirmed what I already thought I knew. The nice booming base in Dark Horse threw me off :-) but I managed to get 5/6 correct. Listened with UMC404HD powering my ATH-M50x, which makes its literally HUNDREDS of dollars of equipment. When I power those headphones off my phone via apple DAC, I don't think it would be audible. How did you do on this test?
All's I know is I've been slowly replacing my 320 mp3 catalog with flac and certain albums are night and day difference. Usually ones with a lot going on. Try comparing wintersun - time in mp3 vs flac. The instrument separation is way better
There could be a metric fuckton of reasons why the file on your computer and the file you downloaded from a store sound different, but the codec most definitely is not one of them, assuming they are good first gen lossy encodes.
This dude is scared that he'll find that he can't tell the different between high and low bitrate and completely invalidate his reason for storing FLACs.
Orpheus for torrents, Usenet gets like 90% of the stuff out there though. And don't forget to sort your favorites bands but buying their albums when they provide them as FLAC.
Nah, I won't pay for music, unless it's a signed record, because the bands get pretty much no money from the sale, so it's more of a fuck you to the labels. But I will travel to go to concerts and buy merch to support them.
I guess I should get around to figuring out how to use usenet, though.
This was more true when the labels were running everything. Now you can get a lot of the material more-or-less directly from the artists on various platforms. Instead of artists getting 5% of the $$$, they can get 70%+.
Just saying that not everything you listen to is necessarily by a band signed to a label. A lot of newer talents have gotten wise to the scam the labels have been running (for the same reasons you articulated - who would knowingly sign up for that?) and are putting things out themselves instead.
Ah, that makes sense, but I only listen to the same artists I have been for 20 years (or artists that I've discovered that have been active for that long), so not much has changed with the labels for me specifically.
Usenet is way better than torrenting. I had heard about it for years and finally checked it out a month ago. I bought a few lifetime memberships to trackers (but just nzbgeek might be enough) and subscribed to news hosting. The reliability and speeds are so much better. Plus the traffic is encrypted and it's much less common than torrenting so also safer
I made a XSPF format list of lossy versions, imported into qobuz and deezer using soundiiz, and downloaded from there using qobuz-dl and deemix, fwiw. Got about 1.2 TB this way
Soulseek is a great P2P file sharing service with terabytes (petabytes?) of .flac music spread across tens of thousands of users. You may run into the random asshole who won't share unless you check off ten items from their "wishlist" but generally it's all open for grabs.
I use FLAC for albums I love and mp3s for everything else (including copies of the flacs in mp3). It's a nice balance.
Fucking love my collection of music. I use Spotify as well, but nothing can compete with literally owning a music collection of my own I can listen to without the Internet
I did and failed. I don't want to waste that many hours of my life trying again. So they lose out on an amazing seeder and I lose out on good access to music.
Despite vinyl’s technical inferiority, it was those same limitations that meant vinyl actually sounded better than CD throughout a specific period. Vinyl cannot be too loud or the needle will jump off the track, making the vinyl unplayable. This prevented vinyl from dealing with the loudness wars, and brick wall dynamic range compression. So especially for the early 2000s, the masters used for the vinyl mix were often significantly better.
And, a clean record played on clean and properly set up equipment can sound really pristine, especially if copied to a digital format early in its life. You wouldn’t even be able to tell it’s vinyl.
+1 to all you said. I collect vinyl for a number of reasons and none of them are because it is technically superior (it isn’t) however, many (most?) people have never heard just how good vinyl can actually sound when it’s in good condition and played on a good setup. I personally cannot tell the difference between even a 33 and CD, let alone a 45, and I have a decently high end setup.
My ears like to trick me and tell me I can hear a difference between a 33 and 45 but I’m pretty sure this is a lie.
Not to mention, psychoacoustics don’t really give a damn about fidelity, so if your goal is “I want it to sound good to me” moreso than “I want it to reproduce sounds accurately” then there’s arguments for vinyl, tube amplifiers, vintage speakers, etc.
Hell I have a friend who specifically uses one of the earliest CD players because it had a 14 bit DAC and no oversampling vs 16 bit DAC, and for those few albums he really likes the digital distortion that comes with it because that’s how he first heard it.
Compared to CD? If you have to compare it to a lossy compressed format to make it look good in comparison, then maybe it's not that good overall. You may have noticed it's no longer the early 2000s and CDs are not ubiquitous, nor even very common at all anymore.
Lossy compressed format? Where? Are you talking about CD? The format famous for using uncompressed PCM audio perfectly specified to cover 100% of a human’s hearing range?
Because if that’s what you mean, you’ve got some studying to go do.
Are you using an off the shelf NAS or a DIY? I'm looking for around that much space but the consumer/prosumer grade stuff I've seen doesn't really do what I want (full disk encryption, Linux, ability to customize and host a few applications).
I originally figured I'd just cram 5x12TB drives in a case, RAID5, with my Linux flavor of choice... Then I learned how bad RAID5 is with big disks.
I don't need mirroring or high throughput (home NAS - other device backups and local streaming) but would preferably like a little redundancy... As a treat.
I'm using a Synology, and I love it. I have most of my self hosted servers running on it in docker containers, and I can use the Surveillance Station to locally store and view my camera setup.
I'll probably buy actual server hardware at some point, but I need to do my network build out first.
What do you think of the Asustor flashtor NAS drives which have 6-12 m2 slots...I think you can run any OS on it if their own software doesn't check all the boxes for you
Listen up, all you young whippersnappers and your FLAC collections, we downloaded our lossy but 'high enough quality' 128kbps mp3s from those IRC DCC Fserves back in the 90s using our dialup internet and we didnt complain!
Unless of course someone picked up the house phone and caused our internet to disconnect.
A 1TB SD card costs the same as a single vinyl LP right now.
It's not even a concern.
However, I have a box of CDs that I ripped to 96kbps Vorbis in the early 2000s, and I think this time I'll go straight to FLAC. Plex will transcode to the flavour-of-the-month codec on the fly when listening with limited bandwidth.
I have my flacs on a 2tb nvme drive in a little usb-c enclosure, kinda like a big USB stick. It's about half full...
Also have a couple hundred records so I'm pretty agnostic on format I guess.
Still use foobar2000 too to manage and play lol
I actually tried doing that when I first decided to start archiving my own CDs. I ripped with abcde to flac but kept both copies. The idea was to keep .wav as a sort of "master" original and then copy the flacs to my phone and laptop for listening. That way if something happened I could always go back to my "masters" without having to rip the CD again.
Honestly the wav files aren't that much bigger than flac and I feel like storage wouldn't be much of an issue today, but I started this project several years ago when an 8TB hard drive was still $600+ and I quickly ran out of space.
I guess the idea was that if something happened to flac like new devices stopped supporting it for whatever reason, or if a better lossless format came along, it would be much easier to go back to the wavs and convert them to a different format.
I salute your commitment to the audio jack. I no longer have that luxury, but it is what it is, and I love my phone despite that glaring flaw. Wish it had an FM receiver too, but oh well.
If nothing else it’s an entirely private and secure way to consume music.
Amen to that. I've got my weird guilty pleasures that I go to occasionally and there's no reason anyone else needs to know why I listen to a couple of specific dubstep songs as often as I do. If that theoretical information ever got leaked, would it even matter? Probably not, but I'm able to enjoy the music more if I can listen in my own world with no strings attached.
This is one of the biggest things I've enjoyed since I ditched spotify and started building up my own library again. It feels way more personal somehow.
Had a first Gen ipod permanently in my car from 2011 to just last year. Only took it out because head unit died and I put the factory one back in. iPod still works
The head unit in my car is so old it still has a dedicated 30 pin iPod cable that you're meant to run out to your glovebox. I don't do that, though. It has an SD card slot (full size) and also a USB port. And it still has a physical volume knob, too. I just chunk a flash drive into it.
I'm very new to Linux so I'll have to look up what that's all about. Got Mint on dual-boot, but I keep slipping back into Win10 because it's easier sticking with what you know, you know?
No algorithmic suggestions and therefore, no curated daily taste playlists, no sorting your library by genre (at least not as granular and specific as Spotify unless you put in as much work as they do at tagging your music), finding new music manually takes at least 10x more effort and you're limited to the taste you already know you have. If you switch phones you're SOL unless you want to deal with the insanely slow transfer speeds of androids MTP or whatever apples slow ass transfer protocol is. Not to mention your library is limited by how much space you have. My 10,000+ song playlists on Spotify aren't gonna easily fit on anyone's device, and definitely not at the highest quality that Spotify can stream at. Your only hope of getting even a comparable experience is to be tech savvy and patient enough to set up a home streaming server, manually tag all your music, and find an audio app with an interface/features that you like that also supports streaming. Oh and then your home computer needs to be on all the time, and your Internet has to be great, and you must not care about your energy bill that much, and ... I'm just gonna stop. Locally stored music is just not anywhere near as good. It's lame and tedious and nearly pointless. At most, I'd say keep a couple albums you like with high quality FLACs but that's it. You're waisting your time not getting Spotify premium or Apple Plus or whatever the heck
Oh and this is coming from 20+ years of pirating media. Limewire used to be the best, but now it's firmly Spotify etc.
Your only hope of getting even a comparable experience is to be tech savvy and patient enough to set up a home streaming server, manually tag all your music, and find an audio app with an interface/features that you like that also supports streaming. Oh and then your home computer needs to be on all the time, and your Internet has to be great, and you must not care about your energy bill that much, and … I’m just gonna stop.
It's a bit spam-like, but I'm going to write something about this separately despite having replied about a different item previously.
I'm technical so it has to be taken with a grain of salt but umm:
Home streaming software is not really that difficult to setup and run.
Search beats tagging for me, which is embedded as part of point #1.
There are an abundance of options for streaming music, it's (almost of course) easier and with more available choice than running your own Plex server which millions of people do. Hell, if you like plex you can just use its music app.
Of course you have to have a computer on in order to stream to yourself. I have a NUC (to counterpoint your "large energy bill" point) I use for the purpose of Plex and music streaming. But at least the music you like will stay there even as artists fight with various streaming services or try to start their own to get market share via exclusivity. It's all still there, because in a very real way you actually have the music.
Your Internet does not have to be great to stream music. Some of us older fucks remember RealAudio. We literally streamed audio via dial-up modem. Aside from that, many streaming software packages including the one I use have an ability to locally cache what you're listening to. I can listen to anything I've recently listened to on an airplane without preparing because it has an offline mode.
To each their own, but Spotify isn't for me for a large number of reasons.
No algorithmic suggestions and therefore, no curated daily taste playlists, no sorting your library by genre (at least not as granular and specific as Spotify unless you put in as much work as they do at tagging your music), finding new music manually takes at least 10x more effort and you’re limited to the taste you already know you have
I haven't used Spotify much, but I found Google Music and Pandora to be very shallow with regards to discovery. There's not really much to them other than "people who liked X tend to like Y" or "here's something that sounds similar to an artist you like". It's discovery sure, but it's discovery on autopilot. It'll keep you treading water in the same shallow area of the ocean forever unless you make a concerted effort outside of its algorithms to listen to something new.
I usually don't want something "similar to...X" when finding new music. I usually want things that are completely different. I subscribed to Google Music for around a year and found maybe two new artists I liked to listen to. I switched back to a manual discovery process around five years ago and this year alone I've found probably a dozen.
I think this is a really important point. Music streaming services are incentivised to concentrate attention and create filter bubbles in much the same way as other tech. I've been discovering some new music through internet radio stations and it's reinvigorated my sense of adventure in music. There is so much good stuff out there which is ignored by streaming service algorithms. Nothing beats discovering a new song/artist/album out in the wild and falling in love with it.
All valid points, and I'm glad Spotify works for you. For me though, the tedium isn't nearly as bad as it seems to be for you. I'm fine with my methods since they've never truly failed me Even with my relatively disorganized collection, I can find what I'm looking for pretty quickly even without metadata (Lots of my oldest stuff is also from Limewire, and even Kazaa. Let's just not mention the bitrate of some of it lol).
I'm fine with gradually expanding my tastes too, so I don't need Spotify for finding new things. To be fair though, I have found some truly great stuff through the site that I feel I would have never heard, so it's not without its merits. Though if you're ever bored and you want to do some manual discovery, Every Noise at Once is a bizarrely cool place and might lead to some interesting finds. But YMMV. And if I don't feel like picking anything I'll just throw on whatever internet radio station suits my fancy.
I get you on the storage space as well. Luckily for me, a lot of what I listen to (don't make fun please) is chiptunes, and I found a kickass app for my phone that reads the same files that the real consoles read so I can enjoy them in truly perfect quality, plus I have actual weeks of music in this format for less than 300 megs.
I admit my tastes are highly eclectic - to say the least - but I'm perfectly content with that. It's great that you, along with the majority of other people, have an option that best suits your needs. May we both be able to access our music solutions as long as possible.
Plenty of things have been removed from Spotify or just bastardized over the years.
The app is so much less useful overall, so many controls are just gone. It's exhibit A for the dumbing down of modern apps. It went from being mature software designed to give users tools to control their experiences to a ranch designed solely to corral users into singular usage patterns.
Interesting. Not a Spotify user, but that’s pretty gross. Looks like the way things are going and I’m becoming more okay with that. There are more and more commodities I’m becoming more and more comfortable not paying for.
I really thought it would go in the other direction for me: Making more money leading to being ok spending more. But it turns out I just dislike being nickel and dimed.
Yall may hate on em, but Spotify has not only made my life easier in that I don't have to first pirate then sort all my music, but has also got me through some difficult times by recommending music that I would have never found otherwise. I've found groups that I love that have maybe 2000 monthly listens. Went to concerts in places I've never been for bands I never would have found. It's more than just listening to your own music. The Monday and Friday discover playlists have been more beneficial to me than most anything else on this planet.
I recently started ripping all my Spotify playlists using spotdl to put them on my Plex. Spotdl doesn't actually download from Spotify but uses it as a source for the metadata to tag the files but it gets the audio by matching to YouTube music and downloading from there. From there I import to lidarr for renaming / organization.
It's been more than 25 years of accumulating mp3, editing and cleaning my libraries, upgrading to flac, etc. Now going strong at around 600gb of music.
Plex.tv
It's a free multimedia server that you can install on your computer and start streaming your own video & music to yourself or your family and friends when you share your server.
I paid for the Lifetime license because it's worth it. I own a 36tb server at home and I shared my server to about 20 people.
Envy and jellyfish are other open-source solution that are also great to use.
Ive done the library management before. For the moment I'm still content with paying for spotify premium. I bet they will raise their prices in the future to make me rethink that, but for now i enjoy not having to manage a huge collection and my spotify recommendations arent terrible yet.
Explains why Pandora turned out so great. At least when I used it ten years ago, then they restricted internationals. I could VPN and such, but at this point I'm just not vested.
My journey to mp3s was weird. Phones were already becoming common in high school but I wanted a music player after using the in-game ipod in Metal Gear Solid 4. But iPod classics were expensive and weren't drag and drop. Being on flights and in areas with spotty reception really made me see the value of portable offline music. No ads, no buffering, and no drain on my phone battery.
Yup I still use a standalone player. I got a Sony Walkman NWZ-385 first which was 8GB. It has the best ui I've seen on a player and I still have it. But now I moved on to a Sandisc with a 256GB micro sd card. Before I had to pick and choose but now I can have hours long files just dropped in no prob. And I have it a copy of everything on my pc hard drive.
I still buy music CDs and rip them to mp3s. Then I sync my Music collection to the various devices. I even sync it to a USB stick that plugs into the car. I don't have Spotify; I have Strawberry.
Opus is the best. Anyone still using mp3s in 2023 is living in the past. Some users can still hear a difference between 256kbit/s mp3 audio and uncompressed audio while Opus reaches transparency at about 120kbit/s.
In the realm of compression transparency is when the compressed medium is indistinguishable from the source audio by a human
Is there any piece of software that can help a degenerate like me fix my MP3 collection to not be such a fucking messy nightmare? Paid or free doesn't matter to me.
My brother once shared an rdio playlist with me. I used the firefox dev tools to download all of the songs to my library. A few months later, rdio shut down. To this day, a piece of rdio lives on on my hard drive.
I collect flac wherever i can on my Computer and sync it to my phone with transcode to lossy. I agree tho, a good lossy encode cannot be distinguished from their lossless version. Even less when you dont have the immediate comparison.
Three reasons:
collectors appeal -> music on the internet comes and goes. Chances are that your file that you downloaded randomly becomes the only one available. having it in best available quality is the icing on the cake.
generational loss -> the ability to transfer your music to any future media you like without/with minimal loss. Also if you remix/cut/edit stuff it keeps quality high
killer samples -> given more agressive music, codecs might fail. There are some examples on hydrogenaudio.
Do yourself a favor and get a record player and some records, vinyl if you can. Then sit down and really listen. Don't do anything else while listening. It pays off, I promise.
Subscribed to Google Music when it was still a thing for about a year. Found it largely horrible for music discovery, which was surprising to me because prior to it I had discovered music mostly manually (browsing websites, etc.).
I wound up going back to running my own streaming software from my own MP3 catalog and haven't really looked back since.
Locally we have 24/7 classical, 24/7 Jazz/Blues, 24/7 bizarre college, 24/7 FUCKYEAHROCK, 24/7 FUCKYEAHOLDERROCK, 24/7 Talk radio, 24/7 HipHop/R&B both old and new school, shortwave, and whats your 20.
And I don't need internet for any of that. that said I do use mp3 (hallelujah and Amen break for that) and youtube for finding this and that.
But all of those stations have shows that I tune in for specific content.
Radio was meh at best here. Classical/NPR, 1 old country station, 3 new country, 3 classic rock, 1 rock alt, 2 Christian, 1 oldies and 1 interesting one that has been a game changer.
That one is The Summit in Akron Ohio. Locally owned and plays mostly indie rock but also damn near everything. Polka, bluegrass, blues, you name it. I've discovered enough music from them that I bookmarked their playlist page on my phone for quick access. Also no ads (they are funded by the public via memberships and donations) and no morning talk shows!
You can find them on Radio Garden if you want to check it out
been doing it since 2011 never ever stopped. why would i stop? i never even got the point of spotify, oh cool only the official releases if the contract is currently valid, fun, i love paying so i need internet access anytime i want to listen as well.
in the last few months i've been buying vinyl actually which is even more antiquated and quaint and even more fun, really detailed immersive listening, feeling like you own a piece of the band
I love buying vinyl too! I have a small collection spanning a few genres, but it's mostly videogame soundtracks, hah. I currently have a crappy Sony turntable that's apparently infamous for scratching records, so I'm holding out on spinning til I get a good one. I'm thinking one of the Audio Technical models that people recommend often.
I recently moved the old archive to a new drive and started adding to it again. The enshittification of all the things is real, seems like if it's something I'd like to re-watch or listen to the only sane way I'll be able to do so is by making sure I have a copy some company can't yoyo around.
I noticed Jellyfin can do music as well, but not really used it much. Need to get myself a mini PC as a server at some point. Seems a bit wasteful leaving a full desktop running just for that.
I used to flex on the gigabytes my collection required. Now it seems like bragging about the length of your buggy whip. Kinda wish I'd stuck to it though... Now I'm just the curator of a big pre-millennium library.
Even though I got files of many differing audio types, the feeling is still mutual. No dealing with ads or paywalled/removed features on Auxio on my phone or Strawberry Music Player on my desktop.
The amount of song has only been going up since I got my first smartphone in highschool and it feels good having them stored on my phone/desktop for local playback.
Used to be heavy in the business, still have ~32,000 songs left of my collection it used to be a few thousand more.
Got into it back when I had no regular internet access, where you'd have to grow your music on your own and seasons make all the difference in going outside to find a wifi hotspot and then download a list of albums that you prepared for beforehand by doing hours of research in your free time at 1 MB/s, during good hours, sitting in the freezing cold watching LibreTorrent or Freezer 24/7 on your old phone because it didn't have enough RAM to actually store an app and let it work in the background. And at the same time hoping the years-old battery would hold enough power left to last the 2 hours it took you to go home. For multiple years in succession, downloading at least 20 albums at each opportunity.
Yeah, I did some work for my collection. It's why I also can't delete it, had I deleted it within a month it would be different, but after multiple years it would feel too much of a waste. It's a monument of the same time frame in which an incredulously important person to me partook in. The first few months of this year were my second deepest spot ever, and thus I got incredibly bored of everything and, because of that, couldn't get into an artist at a time anymore, if at all. I came to the conclusion that ignoring the problem is the only thing I could realistically do, so my mood never improved or decreased, it was just a plateau that's depressing to look back at. Beginning of September I found the band Waterparks for myself and recently started expressing myself more how I want it (:3). The switch-up really fueled me to question if I could actually had a chance at being passively moderately happy, after almost two decades of having felt pretty much nothing. Music represents me, I couldn't.
It's super easy for me to maintain a library of offline music because I just listen to the same synthwave tunes and 90s dad rock over and over. Saves me $120+ a year. If I want a new song or album, I use a YT downloader extension.
I still play physical CDs every day. Still buying them, although that is getting to be more difficult, sadly.
I have a nice Rotel CD player at home and a CD player in my vehicle. I got a great CD/DVD duplicator for $50 used so all those CDs in my truck are easily disposable copies of my originals that stay at home.
I should rip them all but that is a lot of work. I did rip many of them to 192 khz mp3s a while ago so that has been enough so far.
Streaming is nice but the fuckery will continue and they can miss me with that shit.
This made me remember that my five CD disk cartridge in my Volvo no longer works ... it's great to have access to physical content but mechanical things break down too.
Yes things do break down. They still sell CD players. Scamazon has many portable ones including Sony. I bought my main home CD player art worst buy ( magnolia).
I recently bought a portable CD player that outputs a FM signal. So I can play my CDs on the radio now. Which can replace a car CD player. Studebaker brand.
But IDK about new car audio with a CD player. A quick look at Crutchfield shows they do still sell CD players and DVD players.
I only use Spotify for a couple of exclusive podcasts I like and maybe some comedy. I certainly wouldn't pay for a subscription since I don't listen to much music and I hate the user interface especially through Android Auto.
The only time I really listen to music is late at night in front of the PC and I have a music collection for that. It's amazing how cheap you can pick up old CDs these days second hand in car boot sales and similar. It's just cheaper to buy CDs and rip them rather than fork out 11 euros every month.
It's harder to find (legal) downloadable music anymore too. 7Digital has been pretty alright for me, but I just stopped bothering with Spotify and Pandora and such. Youtube used to be great for discovery until they started mega cracking down on adblock again.
How often people are just getting rug-pulled left and right by streaming services is ridiculous.
I'm too cheap to get an unlimited data account and I don't want to use up my mobile data. I have a separate ipod touch for my music, so it frees up space on my actual phone, so if one gets broken/lost/stolen, I'm not completely out of everything. Plus, I like the idea of actually "owning" my stuff, as much as you can own digital files. After my Dad passed, I picked up all his mp3s he had saved and merged them into my library, so I also like the idea of potentially passing on this collected library to my kids (if they care enough or the world hasn't transitioned completely to streaming music when I die).
Most of it, admittedly almost all of it I've only played once, buuuuuut....I'm not just gonna throw away good data! It's like several years worth of music, and it's nice when someone's like: Eyyyyy, pop this track on YouTube on the TV!
And I'm all: Fuck that! Pop it on the big speakers, got that guy's whole discog in lossless!
I wonder if I still have my Creative Nomad Jukebox somewhere... came out in 2000. Was the size and shape of a portable CD player so it fit in the same kind of cases. Took normal AA batteries. Had a 6 GB capacity, which was insane in 2000. I had a huge number of MP3s on it. Many radio dramas. I wish I still had them elsewhere.
Almost 300GB of MP3s, and I keep everything organised. All 320kbps, all tags correct, artwork done, etc... I started this years ago and simply kept on doing it. I have a separate hard drive for music, and another to back it all up. I even use a Fiio X1 MP3 player that I purchased around 2013. MP3 players were getting hard to buy as it was back then. If this breaks, not sure what I am doing? It's all quite retro and old school, I guess?
I mean, I use them my prime 4 dj system because i'm not always gonna be sure about internet availability at the next venue. I don't want to DJ for other humans while using my phone as a 5g accespoint.
Bandcamp, Supraph Online, Ototoy, Uta 573, Steam and GOG's OSTs and Apple's iTunes store have been my to-go options. No DRM, no worries. Just avoid Apple's music subscription, as it is DRM'd.
After I got rid of Spotify Premium subscription, I tried this app called InnerTune. It's basically the same as Spotify, with synced lyrics, music searching and download (not mp3 though)
But things got messy when I was flying long haul using a LCC, where at first I can play a song from a downloaded playlist but cannot manually play next/previous/another songs from the same/different playlists and not long after the app crashed
I guess mp3 is still the best choice, I currently use older version of Spotify desktop (old UI and no ads) and spotdl. 128 kbps mp3s are good enough for me
Unless you have just an absolutely massive library what is the advantage of this over just file sync?
I prefer file sync as I'm often listening on portable devices and it's nice to not rely on a connection and working server as two points of failure.
I used to. But in the later years I found it very difficult to carry this much weight. In addition to that, I've realized the transient nature of my music tastes and my over-reliance on music. Also my priorities have changed a lot. Music is far from essential for survival, and when the times get rough (when you move a lot, and all you can take with you is your laptop), it's much easier to access an online library than your own physical one. I've decided to keep the mp3s (m4as, wavs, flacs, etc.) of the songs that aren't on Spotify and remove everything else.
Yeah them removing music I listen to cause of licensing bullshit was why I quit Spotify a couple of years ago and went back to buying and pirating music again just like before. Plus I get better audio quality, have like 1 tb of mostly 24-bit Flacs on my NAS with Plex. I do also not have to keep paying more and more for the same content cause they find out they cant keep infinite growth so they squeeze the existing subs for more money instead. Fuck I hate subscriptions in general. The only thing I miss are the mixes and radio cause it made me discover so much new music.
Honestly, what I need is a recommendation-engine like Pandora that I can basically just set the computer to download any/all new music, and then I can listen to "Radio" by selecting a song, and metadata used to suggest whatever song comes next.
Go FLAC or go home.
FLAC is a meme for 90% of use cases out there. The difference in sound quality between a .flac and 320 .mp3 is imperceptible to the majority of people and needs thousands of dollars of listening equipment to become apparent. The file size is drastically different, though. Not to mention the fact that almost all music is recorded in .wav files nowadays, and the "lossless" versions are usually just synthetically upscaled for the audiophile crowd.
Not to say that I don't prefer to download FLAC when possible, but I also don't avoid non-lossless albums either.
Um, .wav is a lossless format. It's just raw PCM with no compression. An upscaled FLAC from a lossy source is not lossless, even though it's stored in a lossless compatible format (FLAC). A properly encoded and compressed MP3 file will sound very close to the lossless source, but when procuring those lossy files from third parties, you rely on whoever compressed them doing it properly. I prefer to store my music repository in a lossless format, and stream/sync in lossy.
Yeah, but that argument was compelling in 2005.
With storage as cheap as it is nowadays, a 15 MB FLAC audio file vs. a 3 MB MP3 really doesn't matter anymore. Those 12 MB cost nothing to store.
And to be honest, in cases where storage does matter, a 320 kbps MP3 is just a waste of space. A VBR MP3 with average bitrate around 200 kbps makes way more sense and nobody can tell the difference between that and 320 kbps in a double blind test.
So just maintain FLAC or other lossless for sharing music and transcode down when needed.
file size absolutely matters when you have thousands of songs lol, my music is a significant chunk of my phone's SD card capacity
That's why you should transcode to 200 or even 160 kbps for your phone.
But the master archive should be in flac if possible.
A 2 TB disk is less than $100 nowadays.
Now that’s dedication.
But like, why? I'm going to be listening to the lossy version on my phone 90% of the time anyways, and my headphones are not good enough to truly appreciate lossless either. It doesn't matter that I have over 4tb of storage on my PC, I still don't wanna waste an extra 50GB for no tangible benefit, when I could use the same extra 50GB to more than double my lossy music collection if I wanted.
If you store lossy on your PC you will lose quality if you transcode to a lower bitrate. If you don't transcode, then you will be using more space on your phone.
That's why.
If you don't want to transcode and just want to download and play, then full lossy is easier. But you are going to be using more space on your phone.
In which case we circle back around to "storage is cheap". Music is the only substantial space hog on my phone.
You should upgrade from your Razor to a phone made in the last decade, they have a lot more space now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpQQohcHk9Q
This is my take as well. Storage is cheap. I have thousands of albums and about 40,000 tracks currently and it consumes about 400GB. It's really not that much storage, considering.
40... 40,000...? My god I thought I had a lot of music downloaded, but I haven't even broken into the thousands yet
So you don't listen to music unless you're at home? Or do you choose a subset of your library to put on your phone? That would be terribly annoying for me.
In my case, a self hosted streaming server works wonders. Plex with Pleaxamp, Jellyfin, Navidrome, Airsonic, any of them will stream to your phone while out and about.
That will work great if you live your entire life in cities.
I spend a lot of time in places with no cell service.
I live in the rural midwest with spotty cell service. All of those services support manual offline syncing to store music on your phone. I set Plexamp to stream lossy over cellular, and it doesn't take long to cache an entire playlist when I do have a signal.
Yes, I listen to music and podcasts everywhere. I use airsonic-advanced, currently.
Plex or other local system streaming service, you know, using the tech that's existed for over a decade now?
No need to store jack shit on my device unless I know I'm going to a low reception area m
It's easy bro just maintain a server with redundant disks and a reverse proxy so you can stream music over your unlimited cellular data connection that I'm totally sure you have access to in your region.
Bro I'm poor. I make the compromises I have to make.
It starts adding up when your collection is in many thousands of albums.
I get what you are saying though
In my case I use FLAC because when Plex transcodes, FLAC > Opus sounds better than MP3 > Opus. Almost all my media was ripped by me direct from CD, with some coming from Bandcamp.
See the problem there is that Plex is transcoding instead of just supporting popular audio formats directly.
Plex does support FLAC. It's transcoding to reduce data usage. You always have the option of playing the original, I'm doing it right now.
Yeah, this isn’t how that works.
“Lossless” refers to a mathematical property of the type of compression. If the data can be decompressed to exactly the same bits that went into the compressor then it’s lossless.
You can’t “synthetically upscale” to lossless. You can make a fake lossless file (lossy data converted into a lossless file format) but that serves zero purpose and is more of an issue with shady pirate uploaders.
Lossless means it sounds exactly like the CD copy, should it exist. That’s really all. And you want lossless for any situation where you’ll be converting again before playback. Like, for example, Bluetooth transmission.
You're bang on with everything but this, if you're getting FLACs from the source, you may be getting higher quality than CD which is 16-bit 44.1khz. I've got many 24-bit 96khz FLACs in my collection
Your last point about Bluetooth is such a great one though. Recompression of already compressed audio is a much worse end result than compressing uncompressed audio one time (and before anyone says it, basically no one is listening to lossless Bluetooth audio)
Fair point with the higher bit depths and sampling rates, I just figured there was no point in overcomplicating it when it seemed there was already some form of misunderstanding.
WAV and FLAC are both lossless, the reason people use FLAC is because WAV doesn't (or didn't) have good support for tags and FLAC has lossless file compression while WAV usually is uncompressed. There isn't any sort of "upscaling" that is done.
Personally, I think a quality v0 or 320kb/s MP3 is perfectly fine for listening but I'm always going to prefer storing lossless audio so I can convert the files to whatever format I want/need. I've moved around between MP3, AAC, and Opus for different devices and if I didn't have the FLAC files I would either have to redownload files or do lossy to lossy transcodes
I would disagree with this. It isn't really a matter of equipment cost. It may be a matter of not having ever heard a direct comparison between versions of the same track, though.
What I've noticed is that you really need e.g. wired headphones to be able to hear this difference. The compression artifacts of MP3 are quite distinct, but since Bluetooth tends to compress audio as well, this eliminates a lot of the difference between lossy and lossless sources.
I can hear the difference clearly with cheap (≈$50) wired headphones on my android phone (which is nothing special and a few years old). It is particularly noticeable with high frequency sounds, like hi-hats, which tend to sound muddy with a kind of digital sizzle.
Jokes on you, I have thousands of dollars in listening equipment
As in, a phone?
THOUSANDS!
I totally agree, I was just perpetuating the meme
The .wav part of your comment makes no sense, that is a lossless format, and it is used everywhere because it is dead simple to impliment
Sometimes it's more about knowing you have the highest quality format than being able to hear the difference. An mp3 of a great sounding album with good dynamic range will always sound better than a FLAC of a shitty recording.
I think most people can train themselves to hear mp3 compression even on low quality gear by listening to comparisons of cymbal sounds. An experiment to prove this is to import a lossless track in to a DAW, export it to mp3, import the mp3 and invert the waveform, so playing back you will only hear the differences between the two tracks, ie only the sounds that the compression failed to accurately replicate, the compression artifacts. What you will be hearing with an mp3-320 is a sort of muddy static sound whenever the cymbals hit, blended with whatever other vocals or instruments overlapped with that frequency. This doesn't mean that when you only hear the mp3 it will automatically sound bad or noticeably worse, but it proves there is an audible difference in the character of certain sounds that can be heard even on bad gear.
Hearing the difference now isn't the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression, while MP3 is 'lossy'. What this means is that for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA - it's about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocidensity. You don't want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media.
I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrange…well don’t get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren’t stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you’ll be glad you did.
Just to be certain: are you really suggesting that mp3 files, if left unmodified, will degrade in sound quality over time?
I think it's pasta
Oh thank god haha. I've never been so relieved to have been baited.
It's veru tastu pasta.
I really hope this is satire. If not, you're way off the mark. Lossy files do not intrinsically suffer any kind of bit rot. Bits are bits, and your storage interface doesn't have any clue what those bits mean. I have MP3s from the late 90s that have been stored on the cheapest CD-Rs you can imagine, that still play perfect.
I'm a programmer, I know this. It's a cooypasta you dork.
Just about all music is rendered to uncompressed .wav
Anything else is just some inferior transcoding /s
But also not /s because it's accurate, just dumb.
Nah this is bullshit. Even on my $100 edifer speakers you can easily tell the difference.
Type of music matters though. For metal flac is totally worth it. With ambient music you aren't going to hear a difference obviously.
That's 100% placebo. I'm a professional recording and mixing engineer and have done ABX tests in rooms with speakers that cost as much as a new car and struggled. Not to mention the tens of thousands of dollars in acoustic treatment in those rooms. 320kbps is guaranteed to be indistinguishable from lossless on $100 speakers in what's likely a horrible sounding room.
Really so you can ace this test no problemo?
Thx, this was an easy way to test this out! Pretty much confirmed what I already thought I knew. The nice booming base in Dark Horse threw me off :-) but I managed to get 5/6 correct. Listened with UMC404HD powering my ATH-M50x, which makes its literally HUNDREDS of dollars of equipment. When I power those headphones off my phone via apple DAC, I don't think it would be audible. How did you do on this test?
Maybe. I'll give it a shot later...
All's I know is I've been slowly replacing my 320 mp3 catalog with flac and certain albums are night and day difference. Usually ones with a lot going on. Try comparing wintersun - time in mp3 vs flac. The instrument separation is way better
There could be a metric fuckton of reasons why the file on your computer and the file you downloaded from a store sound different, but the codec most definitely is not one of them, assuming they are good first gen lossy encodes.
This dude is scared that he'll find that he can't tell the different between high and low bitrate and completely invalidate his reason for storing FLACs.
I fucking love my 100gb flac collection
Do you know a reliable tracker? I have lidarr set up to find lossless versions, but it's pretty terrible at it.
Im using Soulseek
Orpheus for torrents, Usenet gets like 90% of the stuff out there though. And don't forget to sort your favorites bands but buying their albums when they provide them as FLAC.
Nah, I won't pay for music, unless it's a signed record, because the bands get pretty much no money from the sale, so it's more of a fuck you to the labels. But I will travel to go to concerts and buy merch to support them.
I guess I should get around to figuring out how to use usenet, though.
I'm pretty sure they are getting money at their merch tables, but I could be wrong.
This was more true when the labels were running everything. Now you can get a lot of the material more-or-less directly from the artists on various platforms. Instead of artists getting 5% of the $$$, they can get 70%+.
Just saying that not everything you listen to is necessarily by a band signed to a label. A lot of newer talents have gotten wise to the scam the labels have been running (for the same reasons you articulated - who would knowingly sign up for that?) and are putting things out themselves instead.
Ah, that makes sense, but I only listen to the same artists I have been for 20 years (or artists that I've discovered that have been active for that long), so not much has changed with the labels for me specifically.
Usenet is way better than torrenting. I had heard about it for years and finally checked it out a month ago. I bought a few lifetime memberships to trackers (but just nzbgeek might be enough) and subscribed to news hosting. The reliability and speeds are so much better. Plus the traffic is encrypted and it's much less common than torrenting so also safer
Can you recomend me some trackers? I've been considering usenet for a few months now but never pulled the trigger
I'm using nzbgeek, nzbplanet, and miatrix
I made a XSPF format list of lossy versions, imported into qobuz and deezer using soundiiz, and downloaded from there using qobuz-dl and deemix, fwiw. Got about 1.2 TB this way
Look for the Redtopia torrent. About 6tb of flac albums and another half terabyte of .mp3s
Where does one begin to find flac? I am taking the first steps beyond "finding a movie to play for free"
hdtracks.com and Bandcamp are some sources.
Soulseek is a great P2P file sharing service with terabytes (petabytes?) of .flac music spread across tens of thousands of users. You may run into the random asshole who won't share unless you check off ten items from their "wishlist" but generally it's all open for grabs.
Tidal + Tidal-dl or Soulseek
I use FLAC for albums I love and mp3s for everything else (including copies of the flacs in mp3). It's a nice balance.
Fucking love my collection of music. I use Spotify as well, but nothing can compete with literally owning a music collection of my own I can listen to without the Internet
This is the way. Also, FLAC for high bit rate audiophile vinyl rips.
I literally got goosebumps reading that. Take my Iron Maiden collection for example:
I have mp3 versions of all albums. Different release versions of FLACs and then a vinyl FLAC collection as well.
It's nice exploring the difference in sound, but somehow, vinyl always makes me feel the best.
Man I miss what.cd.
I miss Oink's :(
That too :(
Interview for redacted.
I did and failed. I don't want to waste that many hours of my life trying again. So they lose out on an amazing seeder and I lose out on good access to music.
Gotta use that lossless format so you can pick up all the sound artefacts caused by an imperfect physical format.
Despite vinyl’s technical inferiority, it was those same limitations that meant vinyl actually sounded better than CD throughout a specific period. Vinyl cannot be too loud or the needle will jump off the track, making the vinyl unplayable. This prevented vinyl from dealing with the loudness wars, and brick wall dynamic range compression. So especially for the early 2000s, the masters used for the vinyl mix were often significantly better.
And, a clean record played on clean and properly set up equipment can sound really pristine, especially if copied to a digital format early in its life. You wouldn’t even be able to tell it’s vinyl.
+1 to all you said. I collect vinyl for a number of reasons and none of them are because it is technically superior (it isn’t) however, many (most?) people have never heard just how good vinyl can actually sound when it’s in good condition and played on a good setup. I personally cannot tell the difference between even a 33 and CD, let alone a 45, and I have a decently high end setup.
My ears like to trick me and tell me I can hear a difference between a 33 and 45 but I’m pretty sure this is a lie.
Not to mention, psychoacoustics don’t really give a damn about fidelity, so if your goal is “I want it to sound good to me” moreso than “I want it to reproduce sounds accurately” then there’s arguments for vinyl, tube amplifiers, vintage speakers, etc.
Hell I have a friend who specifically uses one of the earliest CD players because it had a 14 bit DAC and no oversampling vs 16 bit DAC, and for those few albums he really likes the digital distortion that comes with it because that’s how he first heard it.
Compared to CD? If you have to compare it to a lossy compressed format to make it look good in comparison, then maybe it's not that good overall. You may have noticed it's no longer the early 2000s and CDs are not ubiquitous, nor even very common at all anymore.
Lossy compressed format? Where? Are you talking about CD? The format famous for using uncompressed PCM audio perfectly specified to cover 100% of a human’s hearing range?
Because if that’s what you mean, you’ve got some studying to go do.
BUY ME BIGGER STORAGE BROTHER
looks at his 42TB NAS
That's a lot of hip-hop 😂
Are you using an off the shelf NAS or a DIY? I'm looking for around that much space but the consumer/prosumer grade stuff I've seen doesn't really do what I want (full disk encryption, Linux, ability to customize and host a few applications).
I originally figured I'd just cram 5x12TB drives in a case, RAID5, with my Linux flavor of choice... Then I learned how bad RAID5 is with big disks.
I don't need mirroring or high throughput (home NAS - other device backups and local streaming) but would preferably like a little redundancy... As a treat.
Got any pointers?
I'm using a Synology, and I love it. I have most of my self hosted servers running on it in docker containers, and I can use the Surveillance Station to locally store and view my camera setup.
I'll probably buy actual server hardware at some point, but I need to do my network build out first.
Truenas or unraid
What do you think of the Asustor flashtor NAS drives which have 6-12 m2 slots...I think you can run any OS on it if their own software doesn't check all the boxes for you
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/how-i-installed-truenas-on-my-new-asustor-nas
Listen up, all you young whippersnappers and your FLAC collections, we downloaded our lossy but 'high enough quality' 128kbps mp3s from those IRC DCC Fserves back in the 90s using our dialup internet and we didnt complain!
Unless of course someone picked up the house phone and caused our internet to disconnect.
I'm still shuffling some of those.
Don't forget Limewire and Kazaa
It's all about the 64kbps .wma's. I could fit so many songs on my 128mb mp3 player back in the day
Still fits in a 1 TB sd card... Barely!
A 1TB SD card costs the same as a single vinyl LP right now.
It's not even a concern.
However, I have a box of CDs that I ripped to 96kbps Vorbis in the early 2000s, and I think this time I'll go straight to FLAC. Plex will transcode to the flavour-of-the-month codec on the fly when listening with limited bandwidth.
I have my flacs on a 2tb nvme drive in a little usb-c enclosure, kinda like a big USB stick. It's about half full... Also have a couple hundred records so I'm pretty agnostic on format I guess. Still use foobar2000 too to manage and play lol
Imagine stroring WAVs
I actually tried doing that when I first decided to start archiving my own CDs. I ripped with abcde to flac but kept both copies. The idea was to keep .wav as a sort of "master" original and then copy the flacs to my phone and laptop for listening. That way if something happened I could always go back to my "masters" without having to rip the CD again.
Honestly the wav files aren't that much bigger than flac and I feel like storage wouldn't be much of an issue today, but I started this project several years ago when an 8TB hard drive was still $600+ and I quickly ran out of space.
Why would you need "masters" when you use lossless codec anyway?
I guess the idea was that if something happened to flac like new devices stopped supporting it for whatever reason, or if a better lossless format came along, it would be much easier to go back to the wavs and convert them to a different format.
It is easy to convert them back to wav, so...
Converting back and forth, even from lossless to lossless, is a good way to lose or corrupt data. I abandoned the idea years ago anyway, but thanks.
Imagine storing stems and plugins
Jeez why did you have to call me out by name? =(
You mean there's more of me out there?!
✅ No buffering, music starts instantly
✅ No connection issues
✅ No monthly money drain
✅ No arbitrary access or availability revocation
❌ No immediate access to any song I want to hear, but
✅ I'm patient
I need to get a NAS and a sailing hat
Watch out, it's a slippery slope... You start with a raspberry pi and a USB drive, you end up with a virtualization server and a zfs pool
And the orgasmic pleasure of sticking it to the man.
At least you get to learn along the way
But can you swim in it?
Same for me. I already have SBC with 64gb USB stick, but I could use more. Oh, and I want sailing hat too.
if you have an android phone, check out InnerTune on F-Droid. Youtube music client, native UI, no fees, lets you download music.
So you don't have no immediate access? That's not how yes/No checkboxes work.
You know, I considered "fixing" that before hitting reply, but I figured the overall sentiment of my comment would make its way through.
I used a check and an x, to represent positive and negative. I could have gone with ➕ / ➖, so that's on me.
It's only a friendly comment, why you have to be mad?
I salute your commitment to the audio jack. I no longer have that luxury, but it is what it is, and I love my phone despite that glaring flaw. Wish it had an FM receiver too, but oh well.
Amen to that. I've got my weird guilty pleasures that I go to occasionally and there's no reason anyone else needs to know why I listen to a couple of specific dubstep songs as often as I do. If that theoretical information ever got leaked, would it even matter? Probably not, but I'm able to enjoy the music more if I can listen in my own world with no strings attached.
This is one of the biggest things I've enjoyed since I ditched spotify and started building up my own library again. It feels way more personal somehow.
Had a first Gen ipod permanently in my car from 2011 to just last year. Only took it out because head unit died and I put the factory one back in. iPod still works
The head unit in my car is so old it still has a dedicated 30 pin iPod cable that you're meant to run out to your glovebox. I don't do that, though. It has an SD card slot (full size) and also a USB port. And it still has a physical volume knob, too. I just chunk a flash drive into it.
I have. Arrrr.
I mean... That's not immediate, but it's close depending on the music and it's availability
WDYM? If you want to listen before full download, there are some FUSE download managers on linux.
I'm very new to Linux so I'll have to look up what that's all about. Got Mint on dual-boot, but I keep slipping back into Win10 because it's easier sticking with what you know, you know?
It takes me no longer to gain immediate access then it does for a stream user to search and play the stream, even with rare or weird songs.
I used to be hot shit back in the day when I could run a BitTorrent client anywhere on my Nokia N900. Nowadays anyone can do it.
No algorithmic suggestions and therefore, no curated daily taste playlists, no sorting your library by genre (at least not as granular and specific as Spotify unless you put in as much work as they do at tagging your music), finding new music manually takes at least 10x more effort and you're limited to the taste you already know you have. If you switch phones you're SOL unless you want to deal with the insanely slow transfer speeds of androids MTP or whatever apples slow ass transfer protocol is. Not to mention your library is limited by how much space you have. My 10,000+ song playlists on Spotify aren't gonna easily fit on anyone's device, and definitely not at the highest quality that Spotify can stream at. Your only hope of getting even a comparable experience is to be tech savvy and patient enough to set up a home streaming server, manually tag all your music, and find an audio app with an interface/features that you like that also supports streaming. Oh and then your home computer needs to be on all the time, and your Internet has to be great, and you must not care about your energy bill that much, and ... I'm just gonna stop. Locally stored music is just not anywhere near as good. It's lame and tedious and nearly pointless. At most, I'd say keep a couple albums you like with high quality FLACs but that's it. You're waisting your time not getting Spotify premium or Apple Plus or whatever the heck
Oh and this is coming from 20+ years of pirating media. Limewire used to be the best, but now it's firmly Spotify etc.
It's a bit spam-like, but I'm going to write something about this separately despite having replied about a different item previously.
I'm technical so it has to be taken with a grain of salt but umm:
Home streaming software is not really that difficult to setup and run.
Search beats tagging for me, which is embedded as part of point #1.
There are an abundance of options for streaming music, it's (almost of course) easier and with more available choice than running your own Plex server which millions of people do. Hell, if you like plex you can just use its music app.
Of course you have to have a computer on in order to stream to yourself. I have a NUC (to counterpoint your "large energy bill" point) I use for the purpose of Plex and music streaming. But at least the music you like will stay there even as artists fight with various streaming services or try to start their own to get market share via exclusivity. It's all still there, because in a very real way you actually have the music.
Your Internet does not have to be great to stream music. Some of us older fucks remember RealAudio. We literally streamed audio via dial-up modem. Aside from that, many streaming software packages including the one I use have an ability to locally cache what you're listening to. I can listen to anything I've recently listened to on an airplane without preparing because it has an offline mode.
To each their own, but Spotify isn't for me for a large number of reasons.
I haven't used Spotify much, but I found Google Music and Pandora to be very shallow with regards to discovery. There's not really much to them other than "people who liked X tend to like Y" or "here's something that sounds similar to an artist you like". It's discovery sure, but it's discovery on autopilot. It'll keep you treading water in the same shallow area of the ocean forever unless you make a concerted effort outside of its algorithms to listen to something new.
I usually don't want something "similar to...X" when finding new music. I usually want things that are completely different. I subscribed to Google Music for around a year and found maybe two new artists I liked to listen to. I switched back to a manual discovery process around five years ago and this year alone I've found probably a dozen.
I think this is a really important point. Music streaming services are incentivised to concentrate attention and create filter bubbles in much the same way as other tech. I've been discovering some new music through internet radio stations and it's reinvigorated my sense of adventure in music. There is so much good stuff out there which is ignored by streaming service algorithms. Nothing beats discovering a new song/artist/album out in the wild and falling in love with it.
All valid points, and I'm glad Spotify works for you. For me though, the tedium isn't nearly as bad as it seems to be for you. I'm fine with my methods since they've never truly failed me Even with my relatively disorganized collection, I can find what I'm looking for pretty quickly even without metadata (Lots of my oldest stuff is also from Limewire, and even Kazaa. Let's just not mention the bitrate of some of it lol).
I'm fine with gradually expanding my tastes too, so I don't need Spotify for finding new things. To be fair though, I have found some truly great stuff through the site that I feel I would have never heard, so it's not without its merits. Though if you're ever bored and you want to do some manual discovery, Every Noise at Once is a bizarrely cool place and might lead to some interesting finds. But YMMV. And if I don't feel like picking anything I'll just throw on whatever internet radio station suits my fancy.
I get you on the storage space as well. Luckily for me, a lot of what I listen to (don't make fun please) is chiptunes, and I found a kickass app for my phone that reads the same files that the real consoles read so I can enjoy them in truly perfect quality, plus I have actual weeks of music in this format for less than 300 megs.
I admit my tastes are highly eclectic - to say the least - but I'm perfectly content with that. It's great that you, along with the majority of other people, have an option that best suits your needs. May we both be able to access our music solutions as long as possible.
Every noise at once looks awesome - thanks for the suggestion!
Am I too FLAC to get these joke?
The guy on the left has mp3, the guy on the right has aif and the guy in the middle has flac
What features have been removed from Spotify?
Nothing if you're a premium user. Being able to pick songs on Free I think.
Christ
Plenty of things have been removed from Spotify or just bastardized over the years.
The app is so much less useful overall, so many controls are just gone. It's exhibit A for the dumbing down of modern apps. It went from being mature software designed to give users tools to control their experiences to a ranch designed solely to corral users into singular usage patterns.
and scrub through the song and rewind
I believe they've just placed a bunch of stuff behind their premium subscription, like shuffle/repeat, lyrics, etc.
And being able to look at what’s on a playlist.
What, really?!
Nm I was wrong. I wanted to talk shit and now here I am.
I respect the integrity.
Interesting. Not a Spotify user, but that’s pretty gross. Looks like the way things are going and I’m becoming more okay with that. There are more and more commodities I’m becoming more and more comfortable not paying for.
I really thought it would go in the other direction for me: Making more money leading to being ok spending more. But it turns out I just dislike being nickel and dimed.
Why would free users expect more stuff for free lol. If that's Spotify's biggest complaint then you know they're doing pretty good.
They took free features away, so yeah, it's reasonable to assume they'd be upset.
Let's also remember it's ad supported. The idea was you got the app as it was with or without ads, but now the app itself is pay walled.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Spotify
bro really had to Google criticisms of Spotify because he couldn't think of any other then wanting more free shit lol
I was wondering the same. I haven't noticed anything.
FLAC master race check in.
To all the friends I never met:
I am running a homeserver with all my music, videos, books, articles, source, etc. here is how you do it↓
Thank me later (also if you use ALL linux devices you can skip the smb part and just use netdriv
Whips the llamas ass
Not the new worthless app, the original.
Milkdrop.
Duh. Ver 11? 17? Can't remember
Version 1.0
It whipped a lama like it was nobody's ass
Playing NiN on that while trying for Gourangas in GTA.
One word. Geiss
Came here to say this!
I'm surprised more folks on here don't like FLAC.. it fits better 😉
It really whips the llama's ass
Yall may hate on em, but Spotify has not only made my life easier in that I don't have to first pirate then sort all my music, but has also got me through some difficult times by recommending music that I would have never found otherwise. I've found groups that I love that have maybe 2000 monthly listens. Went to concerts in places I've never been for bands I never would have found. It's more than just listening to your own music. The Monday and Friday discover playlists have been more beneficial to me than most anything else on this planet.
The Enshittification has forced us to revisit the old way
.flac or bust
I recently started ripping all my Spotify playlists using spotdl to put them on my Plex. Spotdl doesn't actually download from Spotify but uses it as a source for the metadata to tag the files but it gets the audio by matching to YouTube music and downloading from there. From there I import to lidarr for renaming / organization.
It's been more than 25 years of accumulating mp3, editing and cleaning my libraries, upgrading to flac, etc. Now going strong at around 600gb of music.
How do you remote access it?
Plex along with Plexamp
I have an mp3 library, but have never heard of Plex. What is that?
Plex.tv It's a free multimedia server that you can install on your computer and start streaming your own video & music to yourself or your family and friends when you share your server. I paid for the Lifetime license because it's worth it. I own a 36tb server at home and I shared my server to about 20 people.
Envy and jellyfish are other open-source solution that are also great to use.
What’s the advantage of using it vs. using a service like Spotify? I personally have around 16 gigs of music, which are all downloaded onto my phone.
I’ve gotten into a habit of maintaining a “physical” digital library since the iPod days and never broke away from that.
Not the person you asked but it's similar for me. I've used different solutions along the way, but now I'm running Jellyfin, which is great!
I don't deserve respect, it was the style at the time and i just kinda never stopped doing it.
Closing in on 200Gb of mp3 where i listen to the same 5 on repeat
Ive done the library management before. For the moment I'm still content with paying for spotify premium. I bet they will raise their prices in the future to make me rethink that, but for now i enjoy not having to manage a huge collection and my spotify recommendations arent terrible yet.
As soon as someone makes a FOSS song reccomender spotify is fucked
It was called The Genome Project before it got bought and turned into Pandora.
The Genome Project.
The music genome project
Are you sure it was not KDE Project?
Explains why Pandora turned out so great. At least when I used it ten years ago, then they restricted internationals. I could VPN and such, but at this point I'm just not vested.
I was the kid ripping CD's not to MP3 but to ogg Vorbis
Because - open source baby! 🥹😅
If I really like something, I get my own copy. Because I don't like corporations deciding what I'm allowed to enjoy.
Y'know most of us audiophiles are managing actual libraries.... but they're not mp3. Mines mostly flac.
"managing" isn't exactly the right word for whatever the fuck I'm doing
My journey to mp3s was weird. Phones were already becoming common in high school but I wanted a music player after using the in-game ipod in Metal Gear Solid 4. But iPod classics were expensive and weren't drag and drop. Being on flights and in areas with spotty reception really made me see the value of portable offline music. No ads, no buffering, and no drain on my phone battery.
Yup I still use a standalone player. I got a Sony Walkman NWZ-385 first which was 8GB. It has the best ui I've seen on a player and I still have it. But now I moved on to a Sandisc with a 256GB micro sd card. Before I had to pick and choose but now I can have hours long files just dropped in no prob. And I have it a copy of everything on my pc hard drive.
I still buy music CDs and rip them to mp3s. Then I sync my Music collection to the various devices. I even sync it to a USB stick that plugs into the car. I don't have Spotify; I have Strawberry.
Advice: FLAC is better than mp3
Opus is the best. Anyone still using mp3s in 2023 is living in the past. Some users can still hear a difference between 256kbit/s mp3 audio and uncompressed audio while Opus reaches transparency at about 120kbit/s.
In the realm of compression transparency is when the compressed medium is indistinguishable from the source audio by a human
I just bought two CDs today.
over 50k flac's perfectly sorted with MusicBrainz Picard. So used to it I don't see any inconvenience
Is there any piece of software that can help a degenerate like me fix my MP3 collection to not be such a fucking messy nightmare? Paid or free doesn't matter to me.
My brother once shared an rdio playlist with me. I used the firefox dev tools to download all of the songs to my library. A few months later, rdio shut down. To this day, a piece of rdio lives on on my hard drive.
What features did Spotify nix?
I don't add anything to it (not even sure I could) but I still use my Zune every now and then.
My personal mp3 collection is quite comprehensive. I use musicolet to play songs at random in the car.
I find that much more rewarding than anything Spotify has to offer.
Spotify always finds a way to play top 40 to me. Oh you like post industrial banging on a trashcan to sawing noises? Check out Taylor's new album.
The hell are you doing on Spotify for it to do that?
Hell, I use my personal account to play songs for my job, which involves a lot of top 40 and Spotify still doesn't recommend that to me
I collect flac wherever i can on my Computer and sync it to my phone with transcode to lossy. I agree tho, a good lossy encode cannot be distinguished from their lossless version. Even less when you dont have the immediate comparison.
Three reasons:
I have the same mp3 I ripped from a cd decades ago that has a bug in one of the tracks, and I love it.
Do yourself a favor and get a record player and some records, vinyl if you can. Then sit down and really listen. Don't do anything else while listening. It pays off, I promise.
“Pathetic.”
I've been using the same off-brand MP3 player for like 15 years now. That thing is indestructible and has better battery life than my phone
https://www.navidrome.org/
Laughs in 8TB NAS
8tb of music or capacity
Subscribed to Google Music when it was still a thing for about a year. Found it largely horrible for music discovery, which was surprising to me because prior to it I had discovered music mostly manually (browsing websites, etc.).
I wound up going back to running my own streaming software from my own MP3 catalog and haven't really looked back since.
That's almost identical to my story. After that, I found Navidrome, which started my adventure in self-hosting. I've never looked back
The radio is on all the time at my house.
Locally we have 24/7 classical, 24/7 Jazz/Blues, 24/7 bizarre college, 24/7 FUCKYEAHROCK, 24/7 FUCKYEAHOLDERROCK, 24/7 Talk radio, 24/7 HipHop/R&B both old and new school, shortwave, and whats your 20.
And I don't need internet for any of that. that said I do use mp3 (hallelujah and Amen break for that) and youtube for finding this and that.
But all of those stations have shows that I tune in for specific content.
Bach's lunch
commercial free fridays
Breakfast with the Beatles
A weekly show about movie soundtracks
A weekly show about young jazz and classical musicians
A bollywood show
and all i have to do is mute or change station to escape commercials or pledge drives.
cost to my bandwidth: zero
radio is where it is at still to this day.
Lucky you. Radio sucks where I live
I believe that. It is a lucky situation.
That said, streaming radio sucks everywhere.
Radio was meh at best here. Classical/NPR, 1 old country station, 3 new country, 3 classic rock, 1 rock alt, 2 Christian, 1 oldies and 1 interesting one that has been a game changer.
That one is The Summit in Akron Ohio. Locally owned and plays mostly indie rock but also damn near everything. Polka, bluegrass, blues, you name it. I've discovered enough music from them that I bookmarked their playlist page on my phone for quick access. Also no ads (they are funded by the public via memberships and donations) and no morning talk shows!
You can find them on Radio Garden if you want to check it out
I switched to Qobuz from Spotify. Never going back. Better sound quality, good UX, and they pay artists more than 10x what Spotify pays per stream.
Spotify has been promising better audio quality for years and I just don't think they will deliver.
Meanwhile I'm still enjoying my Bandcamp. They give me vinyl records and everything.
Flac rule
Squeezebox. Slimserver. Redacted.
The holy trinity.
OOTL - What features are being removed?
YES MY PEOPLE
been doing it since 2011 never ever stopped. why would i stop? i never even got the point of spotify, oh cool only the official releases if the contract is currently valid, fun, i love paying so i need internet access anytime i want to listen as well.
in the last few months i've been buying vinyl actually which is even more antiquated and quaint and even more fun, really detailed immersive listening, feeling like you own a piece of the band
I love buying vinyl too! I have a small collection spanning a few genres, but it's mostly videogame soundtracks, hah. I currently have a crappy Sony turntable that's apparently infamous for scratching records, so I'm holding out on spinning til I get a good one. I'm thinking one of the Audio Technical models that people recommend often.
mp3 and opus is the way
I still do it because the weeb part of my library isnt all on spotify.
If you're already paying for Spotify swap for YouTube music, you can upload 50,000 of your own tracks and get ad free YouTube as a bonus
I recently moved the old archive to a new drive and started adding to it again. The enshittification of all the things is real, seems like if it's something I'd like to re-watch or listen to the only sane way I'll be able to do so is by making sure I have a copy some company can't yoyo around.
I noticed Jellyfin can do music as well, but not really used it much. Need to get myself a mini PC as a server at some point. Seems a bit wasteful leaving a full desktop running just for that.
Works well! I use an Android app called Symfonium to access my FLACs (hosted on a Pi)
buy cheap 16G thumbs, load them with mp3s and gift them. ~$5/ea
xmanager been good so far
(dont make them popular btw)
I used to flex on the gigabytes my collection required. Now it seems like bragging about the length of your buggy whip. Kinda wish I'd stuck to it though... Now I'm just the curator of a big pre-millennium library.
I still have a collection of mp3s from the Limewire era.
I'm still kicking the llamas ass after all these years. It just fucking works!
https://www.f-droid.org/packages/com.zionhuang.music/
Just gonna throw that in here completely unrelated 👀
Even though I got files of many differing audio types, the feeling is still mutual. No dealing with ads or paywalled/removed features on Auxio on my phone or Strawberry Music Player on my desktop.
The amount of song has only been going up since I got my first smartphone in highschool and it feels good having them stored on my phone/desktop for local playback.
Used to be heavy in the business, still have ~32,000 songs left of my collection it used to be a few thousand more.
Got into it back when I had no regular internet access, where you'd have to grow your music on your own and seasons make all the difference in going outside to find a wifi hotspot and then download a list of albums that you prepared for beforehand by doing hours of research in your free time at 1 MB/s, during good hours, sitting in the freezing cold watching LibreTorrent or Freezer 24/7 on your old phone because it didn't have enough RAM to actually store an app and let it work in the background. And at the same time hoping the years-old battery would hold enough power left to last the 2 hours it took you to go home. For multiple years in succession, downloading at least 20 albums at each opportunity.
Yeah, I did some work for my collection. It's why I also can't delete it, had I deleted it within a month it would be different, but after multiple years it would feel too much of a waste. It's a monument of the same time frame in which an incredulously important person to me partook in. The first few months of this year were my second deepest spot ever, and thus I got incredibly bored of everything and, because of that, couldn't get into an artist at a time anymore, if at all. I came to the conclusion that ignoring the problem is the only thing I could realistically do, so my mood never improved or decreased, it was just a plateau that's depressing to look back at. Beginning of September I found the band Waterparks for myself and recently started expressing myself more how I want it (:3). The switch-up really fueled me to question if I could actually had a chance at being passively moderately happy, after almost two decades of having felt pretty much nothing. Music represents me, I couldn't.
Wow, I'm rambling high again, sorry not sorry >:3
Qobuz masterrace unite
got a music folder with newpipe downloads and Poweramp on my phone :) all I need
Yes, I recognize some of these words
❤️ Poweramp
It's super easy for me to maintain a library of offline music because I just listen to the same synthwave tunes and 90s dad rock over and over. Saves me $120+ a year. If I want a new song or album, I use a YT downloader extension.
I still play physical CDs every day. Still buying them, although that is getting to be more difficult, sadly.
I have a nice Rotel CD player at home and a CD player in my vehicle. I got a great CD/DVD duplicator for $50 used so all those CDs in my truck are easily disposable copies of my originals that stay at home.
I should rip them all but that is a lot of work. I did rip many of them to 192 khz mp3s a while ago so that has been enough so far.
Streaming is nice but the fuckery will continue and they can miss me with that shit.
This made me remember that my five CD disk cartridge in my Volvo no longer works ... it's great to have access to physical content but mechanical things break down too.
Yes things do break down. They still sell CD players. Scamazon has many portable ones including Sony. I bought my main home CD player art worst buy ( magnolia).
I recently bought a portable CD player that outputs a FM signal. So I can play my CDs on the radio now. Which can replace a car CD player. Studebaker brand.
But IDK about new car audio with a CD player. A quick look at Crutchfield shows they do still sell CD players and DVD players.
I only use Spotify for a couple of exclusive podcasts I like and maybe some comedy. I certainly wouldn't pay for a subscription since I don't listen to much music and I hate the user interface especially through Android Auto.
The only time I really listen to music is late at night in front of the PC and I have a music collection for that. It's amazing how cheap you can pick up old CDs these days second hand in car boot sales and similar. It's just cheaper to buy CDs and rip them rather than fork out 11 euros every month.
me but opus instead of mp3 and ViMusic instead of Spotify
It's harder to find (legal) downloadable music anymore too. 7Digital has been pretty alright for me, but I just stopped bothering with Spotify and Pandora and such. Youtube used to be great for discovery until they started mega cracking down on adblock again.
How often people are just getting rug-pulled left and right by streaming services is ridiculous.
To this day I do my own personal MP3 mixes 😏
Is this some kind of sweet water joke, I'm too pirate to understand?
You can just pirate the mp3s ( for legal reasons I definitely havent done this for the entirety of my song library
I'm too cheap to get an unlimited data account and I don't want to use up my mobile data. I have a separate ipod touch for my music, so it frees up space on my actual phone, so if one gets broken/lost/stolen, I'm not completely out of everything. Plus, I like the idea of actually "owning" my stuff, as much as you can own digital files. After my Dad passed, I picked up all his mp3s he had saved and merged them into my library, so I also like the idea of potentially passing on this collected library to my kids (if they care enough or the world hasn't transitioned completely to streaming music when I die).
Meanwhile me still listen some songs locally (self host Jellyfin) because some songs that I listen are not available on Spotify :/
Thinking about to reencode my collection to opus but "too lazy" as my ripped collection are 320kbps mp3 to save space.
Does no one still use Winamp and midis?
1.5Tb and counting, where my data hoarders at?
I used to lurk on the reddit sub for data hoarders, even though I haven't started data hoarding myself. Do we have a lemmy community for that yet?
Not sure, but I hope so!
1.8Tb stored on an 8Tb NAS drive. Plenty of room for more music hoarding.
Preach! 🙏
how much of that did you at least listen to once
Most of it, admittedly almost all of it I've only played once, buuuuuut....I'm not just gonna throw away good data! It's like several years worth of music, and it's nice when someone's like: Eyyyyy, pop this track on YouTube on the TV!
And I'm all: Fuck that! Pop it on the big speakers, got that guy's whole discog in lossless!
geometry dash asset music ._.
I wonder if I still have my Creative Nomad Jukebox somewhere... came out in 2000. Was the size and shape of a portable CD player so it fit in the same kind of cases. Took normal AA batteries. Had a 6 GB capacity, which was insane in 2000. I had a huge number of MP3s on it. Many radio dramas. I wish I still had them elsewhere.
@deezertogdrivebot Use this telegram bot to rip from Spotify
Anyone else use a terminal to rip flac from tidal?
I share mp3s via google Drive links. browsers know how to play them
I just got myself a record player/cd player/cassette player. Back to analog.
And digital. CDs are digital.
Digital and lossless. So futuristic!
Almost 300GB of MP3s, and I keep everything organised. All 320kbps, all tags correct, artwork done, etc... I started this years ago and simply kept on doing it. I have a separate hard drive for music, and another to back it all up. I even use a Fiio X1 MP3 player that I purchased around 2013. MP3 players were getting hard to buy as it was back then. If this breaks, not sure what I am doing? It's all quite retro and old school, I guess?
It's pretty easy to get high amounts of mp3s
Mainly a spotify user but I always keep an mp3 library
I mean, I use them my prime 4 dj system because i'm not always gonna be sure about internet availability at the next venue. I don't want to DJ for other humans while using my phone as a 5g accespoint.
i only have 2000 :(
Bandcamp, Supraph Online, Ototoy, Uta 573, Steam and GOG's OSTs and Apple's iTunes store have been my to-go options. No DRM, no worries. Just avoid Apple's music subscription, as it is DRM'd.
Spotify dubstep always somehow had worse variations than what was available on Youtube.
I found that Soundcloud is really good for dubstep, also for niché artists
SoundCloud and Mixcloud
After I got rid of Spotify Premium subscription, I tried this app called InnerTune. It's basically the same as Spotify, with synced lyrics, music searching and download (not mp3 though)
But things got messy when I was flying long haul using a LCC, where at first I can play a song from a downloaded playlist but cannot manually play next/previous/another songs from the same/different playlists and not long after the app crashed
I guess mp3 is still the best choice, I currently use older version of Spotify desktop (old UI and no ads) and spotdl. 128 kbps mp3s are good enough for me
MP3 isn't dead but smells funny. Today I manage a ton of OGM, AAC, FLAC and other formats.
In the summer I figured out how to install and setup airsonic. Life changing.
Unless you have just an absolutely massive library what is the advantage of this over just file sync? I prefer file sync as I'm often listening on portable devices and it's nice to not rely on a connection and working server as two points of failure.
It’s not massive but it’s about 300gb. Plus nowadays it’s only a backup tbh. Like a home jukebox.
I used to. But in the later years I found it very difficult to carry this much weight. In addition to that, I've realized the transient nature of my music tastes and my over-reliance on music. Also my priorities have changed a lot. Music is far from essential for survival, and when the times get rough (when you move a lot, and all you can take with you is your laptop), it's much easier to access an online library than your own physical one. I've decided to keep the mp3s (m4as, wavs, flacs, etc.) of the songs that aren't on Spotify and remove everything else.
Yeah them removing music I listen to cause of licensing bullshit was why I quit Spotify a couple of years ago and went back to buying and pirating music again just like before. Plus I get better audio quality, have like 1 tb of mostly 24-bit Flacs on my NAS with Plex. I do also not have to keep paying more and more for the same content cause they find out they cant keep infinite growth so they squeeze the existing subs for more money instead. Fuck I hate subscriptions in general. The only thing I miss are the mixes and radio cause it made me discover so much new music.
M4A (MP4) users 🗿
Can us vinyl heads get in on this?
That only seems fair
THATS ME!
I have several playlist. Largest is my "Pop" @ 4854. I add new music every week.
Never considered a streaming service.
Great username OP
Thank you much
MP3 user eh?
they're looking down on them while having no features other than play and pause lol
Honestly, what I need is a recommendation-engine like Pandora that I can basically just set the computer to download any/all new music, and then I can listen to "Radio" by selecting a song, and metadata used to suggest whatever song comes next.
MP3 has been obsolete since 2002 when Vorbis got it's first stable version.