I’m going back to CDs and ripping them because I’m fed up of shit disappearing from streaming services. Plus having to pay for access. Plus the crappy offline experience. Plus the crappy apps you have to use. Plus the devices that play them have a million other distractions I want to avoid. Oh and all the shite that is promoted constantly.
Physical media (especially in the film space) remains sometimes the only option if you don't want to compromise on quality. Sadly you have to compromise in other ways: unskippable trailers/copyright warnings for example.
I do worry that Bluray is just becoming more niche and the studios/distributors will do away with it in favour of their own streaming platforms.
I apologise for the self-promotion, but I started https://www.dvd.club for this very reason, hoping to find a like-minded community of physical media enthusiasts, willing to share their collections with each other.
That gives me an idea: a "CD player" that accepts the entire jewel case and has a camera inside that reads the barcode, retrieves the album, and plays it.
I’ve been going through my own personal revival of physical media - mostly audio. I don’t miss streaming at all.
Every CD I buy gets ripped to a NAS that hosts the music behind Navidrone where I can stream to my vehicle using Play:Sub (thanks to Tailscale for enabling all of this to work for me!).
I am just so enamored with being able to get the best of both worlds - my own music, anywhere.
I do wish I could figure out some sort of recommendation system to find new magic, though. Obviously not to steam new/unowned songs, just to point me in a direction next time I go to the store.
I got myself an iPod Nano recently and love curating my songs to fit the 8GB [0]
But I have the same problem of trying to find recommendations. Whenever I talk about music with my brother and friends, that's when I discover the best music, but that happens rarely nowadays.
So with the help of Claude, I've revived my 10 year old project on finding music based on Spotify tracks and liked songs: https://noiseblend.com
Completely free, haven't shared it much because it's more of a personal thing than something I want public. But maybe it comes in handy for some people here.
Took a quick look at Noiseblend, seems nice! Will play around a bit more with it when I’m actually at a computer, but I find that I end up getting into a downward spiral of recommendations (not from yours - just in general) that reinforces what I listen to, versus expanding based on what I listen to.
I listen to a good amount of underground hip hop/backpack rap kind of stuff and I find that so many recommendation systems just recommend what I already listen to.
Oddly enough, I randomly asked Claude one day and got three novel album recommendations that no other service really gave me :shrug:
Oh tell me about it, it's so hard to expand into other genres using online services.. Noiseblend is no better at it since it relies on the same data.
I mean, in its 30-50 recommended albums, one might be just the one I might be looking for, but how am I going to find it? Am I supposed to sit through 29 albums I don't really like, just to find that?
That's why friends are the best here, they act like impromptu curators :)
But on some occasions, I find Noiseblend useful when I hear a song at a cafe or restaurant or some friends' place, "shazam" it, then put it through Noiseblend and get dropped into a musical area I might have never looked into otherwise.
Really wasn’t a knock on NB - don’t worry hehe. I’m at least glad it gave me what I expected. I listen to a good amount of stuff like Aesop Rock and you tend to just get a bunch of his own stuff back, generally.
> But I have the same problem of trying to find recommendations.
If you're buying music semi-regularly then the people at the record store are probably starting to recognize you and what you like and will probably be happy to recommendation stuff.
Thanks! sure, if you click to open in the Spotify app or webapp, it will open a created playlist with those songs. You will need to connect your Spotify account for that though.
I use spotify for convenience and social sake, my friends use it and its been the best mobile/android auto/desktop sync app but it's well known for not having literally the best albums/songs/eps/whatever that they can't monetize or license for whatever reason so you might want to expand your app to look at spotify for recs but factor in that even someone huge like mac miller has a ton of music not on spotify that a real fan would side-eye you for not knowing on a recommendation list.
There is so much early career music for artists you can't find on spotify that it gives people who only learned the artist from spotify a curated history of the artist.
Spotify is the disney land walled garden music app and right now Ella Langley is Minnie Mouse.
When you go camping or kayaking you can tell all the people using spotify, their playlists all blend into the same algo topping songs at some point. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if they factor in how much music is cached near the cell tower at the lake I'm parked on right now to maximize profits and limit their bandwidth costs. Let's keep that Zac Brown Band pumping near the boat ramp and feed it to everyone who probably likes it anyway.
Yep, I'm aware of that, I listen to a lot of live small room concerts of Jason Mraz for example, which aren't even on Youtube, I mostly get them from fan uploads on archive.org.
I mostly use Noiseblend to find such artists, or albums, and then I expand my search manually through Youtube, fan forums, archives. It would be a pain to try to integrate that into a web app.
I'm far less ambitious, but I ripped my entire 100+-disc collection to FLAC years ago. I've set up a mutant shell script/Makefile hybrid that can transcode the entire FLAC tree to whatever format du jour makes sense (Opus these days), while doing it all in parallel and using all cores (really all but one to keep the system responsive). Album art in the FLACs gets carried over along with tags.
On the LAN, the FLACs just sit in an NFS share, while on the phone, Foobar2000 works nicely with the Opus files.
And how many CDs can you buy per month for the price of a Spotify subscription? I am not going to be spending hundreds of Euros per month on physical media, and I also value my time too much to bother with ripping and converting these, just so I can end up with a worse experience for more money, while also producing a bunch of unnecessary plastic rubbish.
I don't understand myself, what you actually gain from constantly buying new music. Either the music is good, or it's not. If it's not it's not a loss to not buy it, and if it is it's not going to stop invoking the emotions you like it for, or intellectually demand you. You can hear the same music for hundred of times and still discover some new aspect, instrument, melody or sound, you haven't noticed yet. (if it is good)
If I would try to chase, constantly, new music, I wouldn't be able to actually listen to anything, and thus wouldn't enjoy anything at all.
(The only thing that makes sense to me, if people want to be like their peers and up to trends, so simply "listen" to new music to be able to talk like they now what's en vogue right now. But then it's hardly about the music itself and more like collecting an evergrowing checklist.)
At least for a family plan ($22/mo), around 2-20 or so depending on the CD. That accumulates pretty quickly, and of course you don't have to worry about limitations like living at the same address.
This may be the main difference between consuming content and listening to music. For some people, more is not always better and the process of building a collection and putting time and energy into it is a big part of the experience.
After ten years of Spotify subscriptions, you own nothing. Put that $12.99 or more per month into discs instead, and you'd have quite a nice music collection that's still yours ten years later.
I’d love to. I’m working off memory right now, but it’s nothing fancy.
I’ve got abcde[0] set up to handle the digitizing, navidrome[1] is set up to serve the content from a home lab server/NAS over Subsonic[2].
Play:Sub[3] is an iOS application that works with Subsonic. Just an audio receiver at this point, the app lets me “just play something” which is quite nice. Can “play a random album” for example.
https://listenbrainz.org/ is an open source alternative to Last.fm that I can confirm works with Navidrome. You can also self host it if you would prefer to keep your listen history private.
Not only are CDs the backup, but in some genres like classical music, the liner notes have some exclusive information that never made it to the web. I rarely take a CD down from the shelves where they now serve as mere room decor, but when I do, I often learn something new.
Even though I've ripped my 1000+ CDs, I tend to not let company dig through them, as I consider them my pristine backups!
I also buy a lot of digital music on bandcamp.com, and like OP, host using navidrome.
But you are right, when company comes over letting people DJ is fun. Instead of using my actual CDs, I set up a system with RFID cards. You can buy hundreds of RFID cards for super cheap. I print out the cover art of each of them, and the RFID ID corresponds to an album. A simple RFID reader hooked up to a pi, which reads the ID and plays the corresponding album with mpd on my stereo, makes for a cheap, fun way to allow people to physically explore your collection.
People say this and when I look it up it's supposedly true, but I grew up in the heyday of cds and cdrws and have probably burnt thousands of them including specifically expensive plextors or whatever brand wasn't bulk trash back in the day and constantly had issues with scratches, sunlight, whatever damaging them to uselessness. I was the kid selling mp3 discs and pc games when nobody could afford a cdrw burner.
There is a reason people can tell you how exactly how many times they've bought greenday dookie, offspring smash, 2pac all eyez on me and other 90s gold. I think this is some collective brainrot or everyone is talking about hiding their discs in the canticle of leibowitz and not their corolla.
edit: 35 year old cds is 1995, that your dad comment made it sound even older. I guess you're not the prime cd burner in the house, your dad was, ask him how many times he's bought those working discs albums. Or he was the guy with the giant bookcase envelope of CDs he treated like gold. I could always burn a new one.
Similar to the OP, I buy discs, rip them, then store the physical copy for recovery purposes. I keep them in a box in the basement, the vast majority are still in working order. (Including discs purchased or burned 35 years ago.)
Like any other media, frequent use and handling will degrade discs, and sunlight is the natural enemy of anything plastic. The interior of a car will also get ridiculously hot on a sunny day, I have seen vinyl literally melt. (And crayons!) Actually I've lost more discs to theft than anything else, by a large margin.
> I do wish I could figure out some sort of recommendation system to find new magic, though. Obviously not to steam new/unowned songs, just to point me in a direction next time I go to the store.
Or set up "soulsync" and just use the library scanning, scrobbling, and recommendations / artist watching features if you don't want to pirate the music as well.
You can escape algorithms by choosing what you consume, regardless of what platform you're using. I had digitized my CD collection 15 years ago. but I never listened to those. I purchase misic directly from artists (Bandcamp), I don't buy physical media. And if their stuff is also on Apple Music, that's where I listen.
I am a "media fan" and algorithms (going back to last.fm) have make me discover so much music that it's not even funny. The idea of "escaping algorithms" is a net negative for me.
I guess the point (at least for me) is a bit to get rid of weird intransparent algorithms that seemingly got worse over the past couple of years. Using a platform like last.fm where it’s clearer that recommendations are based on genres and similar listeners is still ok and encouraged, and probably as close to getting recommendations from real humans as possible.
My experience also. I discover new music at a higher rate than even my teens when I listened to the radio every night, and went to gigs and bought CDs weekly. I still have some music I have to use my own MP3s for but I feel incredibly well served by streaming.
personally have been ripping 60/90 minute youtube sets to cassettes using a really nice automatic cassette recorder/player i got for cheap because no one uses cassettes anymore i guess
I enjoyed the social aspect of listening to music: talking to my friends about the latest release. But when everyone's has their little music bubble that's lost. I guess the music companies found that less profitable than having you plugged into their recommendations.
I'm an avid tape collector, and I especially love the small 'mixtape' labels. Every month, I get two or three mixtapes from a handful of little labels. They can have anything on them. It's always exciting to get one in the post and sit down to listen to it.
I think streaming and physical media complement each other nicely. If you have the family plan streaming can end up costing less than $4 / month (Spotify) so it's pretty cheap.
Easy, the social contract around streaming has become enshittified. The agreement used to be, “pay us every month and we give you access to a vast catalogue that you could never hope to accumulate yourself.” Sounds great, sign me up. Now people have a dozen streaming subscriptions and a search engine to locate content among them. The joke is, that one specific movie is often not on any of them. Or if it is, it’s on the one you have to watch a bunch of ads for.
I used to like to buy TDK tapes second hand and listen to the mixes. Almost every one had something obscure on it I loved but they have dried up over the last 12 months.
For me, the easy one is books. I love books, both for their content and as physical objects.
I love my pdf folder with a million papers, documents, etc. Sorted and easy available. But mentally it does not compare with my library.
In a trip I will bring my tablet to read books. It is practical and if a book does not click I have many more. At home I prefer the physical thing.
None of them comes, at least directly, from algorithms. I add books to my list of purchases when they get mention on YouTube, another books, news, or even here.
Many years ago I used Amazon book store suggestions because they were extremely good. But that was the time before enshitification when they were trying to give you the book the you will like the most not the one that will give them more profit.
Books are also the one thing I much prefer to have physically! I can usually get fiction in my language (mostly in secondhand bookstores now), but I still have to get most things digitally. Most books I read are in English and my country isn't English-speaking, so getting them would cost a fortune. And sometimes out-of-print books even in my language are also hard to find due to scarcity. So pdfs and epubs it is.
I love books as well, but I find it hard to keep my physical library growth comparable to my physical books.
The majority of the books and authors I follow are now on Patreon, and there is just no easy way to get a hard copy, or even a digital copy for that matter. I read book 11 on Patreon while Amazon is publishing book 8...
Now that is good for authors I guess, they have a better, more stable revenue source. But I don't own books anymore, can't read them offline, which is very annoying.
It’s a race to the bottom and I’m done with that.
I do worry that Bluray is just becoming more niche and the studios/distributors will do away with it in favour of their own streaming platforms.
I apologise for the self-promotion, but I started https://www.dvd.club for this very reason, hoping to find a like-minded community of physical media enthusiasts, willing to share their collections with each other.
The inverted commas are because it’s actually all MP3s that are stored on a phone.
But the phone is in a box
Connected to a speaker
Running an app I made that plays playlists when she places an nfc card on the box
Basically it’s a bootleg Yoto / Tonie box but completely free, and our own music.
Also got a desktop app where I download stuff, make plays lists and it auto syncs to the phone.
She actually really likes it. Having a physical sense of what you own feels good!
I wish I could take all the credit but Codex helped, a bit…
Every CD I buy gets ripped to a NAS that hosts the music behind Navidrone where I can stream to my vehicle using Play:Sub (thanks to Tailscale for enabling all of this to work for me!).
I am just so enamored with being able to get the best of both worlds - my own music, anywhere.
I do wish I could figure out some sort of recommendation system to find new magic, though. Obviously not to steam new/unowned songs, just to point me in a direction next time I go to the store.
But I have the same problem of trying to find recommendations. Whenever I talk about music with my brother and friends, that's when I discover the best music, but that happens rarely nowadays.
So with the help of Claude, I've revived my 10 year old project on finding music based on Spotify tracks and liked songs: https://noiseblend.com
Completely free, haven't shared it much because it's more of a personal thing than something I want public. But maybe it comes in handy for some people here.
[0] https://files.alinpanaitiu.com/ipod-nano.mp4
I listen to a good amount of underground hip hop/backpack rap kind of stuff and I find that so many recommendation systems just recommend what I already listen to.
Oddly enough, I randomly asked Claude one day and got three novel album recommendations that no other service really gave me :shrug:
I mean, in its 30-50 recommended albums, one might be just the one I might be looking for, but how am I going to find it? Am I supposed to sit through 29 albums I don't really like, just to find that?
That's why friends are the best here, they act like impromptu curators :)
But on some occasions, I find Noiseblend useful when I hear a song at a cafe or restaurant or some friends' place, "shazam" it, then put it through Noiseblend and get dropped into a musical area I might have never looked into otherwise.
If you're buying music semi-regularly then the people at the record store are probably starting to recognize you and what you like and will probably be happy to recommendation stuff.
I would love a way to create a playlist from the related songs it found if that is possible!
There is so much early career music for artists you can't find on spotify that it gives people who only learned the artist from spotify a curated history of the artist.
Spotify is the disney land walled garden music app and right now Ella Langley is Minnie Mouse.
When you go camping or kayaking you can tell all the people using spotify, their playlists all blend into the same algo topping songs at some point. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if they factor in how much music is cached near the cell tower at the lake I'm parked on right now to maximize profits and limit their bandwidth costs. Let's keep that Zac Brown Band pumping near the boat ramp and feed it to everyone who probably likes it anyway.
I mostly use Noiseblend to find such artists, or albums, and then I expand my search manually through Youtube, fan forums, archives. It would be a pain to try to integrate that into a web app.
On the LAN, the FLACs just sit in an NFS share, while on the phone, Foobar2000 works nicely with the Opus files.
If I would try to chase, constantly, new music, I wouldn't be able to actually listen to anything, and thus wouldn't enjoy anything at all.
(The only thing that makes sense to me, if people want to be like their peers and up to trends, so simply "listen" to new music to be able to talk like they now what's en vogue right now. But then it's hardly about the music itself and more like collecting an evergrowing checklist.)
I’ve got abcde[0] set up to handle the digitizing, navidrome[1] is set up to serve the content from a home lab server/NAS over Subsonic[2].
Play:Sub[3] is an iOS application that works with Subsonic. Just an audio receiver at this point, the app lets me “just play something” which is quite nice. Can “play a random album” for example.
Tailscale just enables this off-LAN.
Happy to give more info if you need!
[0] https://linux.die.net/man/1/abcde
[1] https://www.navidrome.org/
[2] https://www.subsonic.org/
[3] https://michaelsapps.dk/playsubapp/
Although, it’s not a critical-path item..
On the other hand, if you don’t mind making it public it would help train open source recommendation algorithms :-) https://listenbrainz.org/about/#:~:text=Roadmap
I also buy a lot of digital music on bandcamp.com, and like OP, host using navidrome.
But you are right, when company comes over letting people DJ is fun. Instead of using my actual CDs, I set up a system with RFID cards. You can buy hundreds of RFID cards for super cheap. I print out the cover art of each of them, and the RFID ID corresponds to an album. A simple RFID reader hooked up to a pi, which reads the ID and plays the corresponding album with mpd on my stereo, makes for a cheap, fun way to allow people to physically explore your collection.
There is a reason people can tell you how exactly how many times they've bought greenday dookie, offspring smash, 2pac all eyez on me and other 90s gold. I think this is some collective brainrot or everyone is talking about hiding their discs in the canticle of leibowitz and not their corolla.
edit: 35 year old cds is 1995, that your dad comment made it sound even older. I guess you're not the prime cd burner in the house, your dad was, ask him how many times he's bought those working discs albums. Or he was the guy with the giant bookcase envelope of CDs he treated like gold. I could always burn a new one.
Like any other media, frequent use and handling will degrade discs, and sunlight is the natural enemy of anything plastic. The interior of a car will also get ridiculously hot on a sunny day, I have seen vinyl literally melt. (And crayons!) Actually I've lost more discs to theft than anything else, by a large margin.
35 years ago is 1991. Don't try to age me faster than I'm already going!
Also, buying directly from artists (when you can) is a good way to support them.
Navidrome can scrobble to https://listenbrainz.org/ which has a recommendations mechanism
Or set up "soulsync" and just use the library scanning, scrobbling, and recommendations / artist watching features if you don't want to pirate the music as well.
YMMV
That said smart shuffle on Spotify has found me a lot of good music.
Do you want the car to drive you? Or do you want to drive the car?
Note that I do still stream and buy digital on Bandcamp though.
There is no possible acceptable article with this title.
I love my pdf folder with a million papers, documents, etc. Sorted and easy available. But mentally it does not compare with my library.
In a trip I will bring my tablet to read books. It is practical and if a book does not click I have many more. At home I prefer the physical thing.
None of them comes, at least directly, from algorithms. I add books to my list of purchases when they get mention on YouTube, another books, news, or even here.
Many years ago I used Amazon book store suggestions because they were extremely good. But that was the time before enshitification when they were trying to give you the book the you will like the most not the one that will give them more profit.
The majority of the books and authors I follow are now on Patreon, and there is just no easy way to get a hard copy, or even a digital copy for that matter. I read book 11 on Patreon while Amazon is publishing book 8...
Now that is good for authors I guess, they have a better, more stable revenue source. But I don't own books anymore, can't read them offline, which is very annoying.