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.
Yes! For me, I like that foobar2000 (1) plays Ogg Vorbis files, and (2) will spin itself up as an FTP server on my LAN so I can easily upload music to it.
I am so mad / ashamed that I tossed my big CD book not long ago. Now would be a perfect time to rip those CDs - especially as I am getting into DJ work on the side!
It’s funny, I proposed essentially this idea on HN awhile back and the pigpile of commenters who said it was a stupid idea made me reconsider whether I really wanted to share ideas here. It’s great to see that you actually did it. I’d love to read a blog post if you ever get around to it!
I was in shop the other day with my daughter and the walls were covered in cassette tapes as decoration.
I has to take SO MANY steps back to explain what they were.
I realised she thought all music was just magically created when you ask Alexa for it - so we had to start there to explain someone has to make the music first, and go back though streaming services, digital downloads, to having to literally go to a shop to buy a single song for £4 - which is probably about £20 now adjusted for inflation.
We are genuinely at the point now where you can just mostly summon this into existence with a coding agent.
I thought through the UI and tech stack and reasearched what would actually work first and then wrote a very detailed brief for Codex. And about 2 hours of back and forth and re-thinking later, it works.
One challenge was that the phone has to have the NFC UI on while looking for cards, but i wanted it to turn off while playing so I could have a hole in the box to a blank screen she can swipe to skip back and forward.
This stumped Codex - but I then had the idea to use the depth cam to detect cards placed on the phone, then only show the scan UI again when the card is removed.
So now it works really seamlessly.
1) Place card on, music instantly starts, even remembers where in the song and playlist you are.
2) Remove card, phone detects it can see at least a few cm, instant stop.
3) Place a new, or the same card on and that instantly plays from the last position.
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.
I suspect that the iPod nano is somewhat un-hackable, but the iPod mini and earlier models actually had physical mini EIDE spinning disks in them. The interface was electrically identical (or close enough) to CompactFlash cards that a little service I ran on the side for beer money was upgrading people’s iPods to CF. Nowadays you can get absolutely gargantuan CF cards. I put a 256GB CF card in my iPod mini and the firmware, to my surprise, had no trouble recognizing the capacity. I also personally love that form factor, but obviously, different strokes for different folks.
I do appreciate that you said that you enjoy curating your 8GB but I got tired with that way back in 2003 when I bought my first iPod. I never want to go back to that.
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’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.
Definitely did it sequentially with a single CD drive. I'm sitting on maybe 100 albums, max. It takes ~15min per album to process, which pulls in song metadata, lyrics (synced, if possible), album art, etc.
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.
You dont own those either. If you lose your copy, it's gone forever with no remediation or claim of ownership except at the specific retailer you did your transaction at. The source where it came from is unaffected by your loss, and they can decide at any time to stop selling their discs with or without your involvement. The nostalgic rose tinted pandering behind vinyls and old media conveniently forgets the introduction of digital storage to actually ensure reliable redundancy, and so "buying" physical media is just a smoke and mirrors way of saying the disc is for vain aesthetics while the actual mental relief comes from the secondary process being able to digitize it locally.
Following the same mindset of circumventing the traditional process, I could spend one single month ripping every single song I possibly can from Spotify and have the same claim of ownership over their files that you do with a much larger variety and without all the wasted physical space on assets that are immediately digitized. The only benefit to your method is that you feel like it justifies hoarding.
Presumably people also have some sense of fair exchange when buying the disc to rip vs. ripping from Spotify. If you want to be strictly rational you can of course skip the Spotify part too and just pirate it.
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.
Really like the idea of RFID cards - I was brainstorming something like that years ago for the kid, but never chased it down.
(Un??)fortunately, I am usually the one slinging CDs for people to listen to, people just like being able to offload that and listen to curated music, vs. "throw on spotify whatever" and having it just _play_.
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.
When they are serving someone else, and manipulating your attention to push promoted content instead of stuff you might actually like, or serve you ads, or track your behavior so that information can be sold, then not so much.
The Spotify algorithm is pretty bad for me. It pushes a lot of stuff I have no interest in (especially podcasts and audiobooks). The Apple Music algorithm is a bit better, but it's almost too conservative.
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.
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.
Personally, while I understand the importance of discovery both for artists and for many listeners, it’s not at all how I listen to music. I know what work I want to hear, by what artist or ensemble and I want that exact thing. It’s not that I’m not open to other interpretations; it’s just in the moment that I want to listen, it’s a particular thing. That my ripped CD collection is such an infinitesimal representation of all that’s out there is a feature for me, not a bug. And the problem of ephemerality on some of these platforms is yet another problem.
I personally never stopped. I had my collection I've been building since before I owned a Zune, and never wanted to give that up. Local media is infinitely higher quality than streaming anyway.
If you self-host, you owe it to yourself to set up Navidrome.
I used to own a couple of hundred DVDs, but then I moved country and they didn't come with me.
When I relocated I started with netflix, etc, but over the past five years or so I've definitely switched back to buying DVDs, used. Most of the local charity shops sell films for €1/piece, and maybe €3-5 for a season of a TV show.
Sure I don't get the latest movies, and eveyr single charity shop has like 20+ copies of the same few films, but it's still cheap and easy to build up a collection of films I know and love. And choosing a film is much less hassle when I can just pull the box from the shelf, without worrying about whether it's available on one of the streaming services.
The only downside is that it's hard to get complete TV shows - for example right now I have Peep Show on DVD, series 1-5, but later series haven't turned up yet. I'm not quite desperate enough to order them online, but the result is that I tend to ignore TV series unless "everything" is available to purchase all at once, I've passed on series 1-3 of a show, knowing that finding the final series 4 would be a matter of luck and patience.
As a classical listener, I never really prefer streaming services. Each classical piece is usually dense and requires multiple passes to memorize and process. While one of the fun parts is comparing different interpretations by different musicians, we usually eventually settle on one or a few versions, like some folks, me included, prefer Furtwängler for anything Germanic, despite his recordings are more than 74 years old (albeit remastered multiple times). The only new recording I listened this year is Chris Thile's well anticipated Bach Sonatas & Partitas Vol. 2.
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 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 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.
If you start streaming at 20 and plan to live to 80, that's a total cost of $2,880 assuming the price never increases. The price will increase and you don't even get ownership.
I have a pretty large music collection that I am happy with and I haven't paid that much for it.
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.
Yeah, it’s a strange window into someone else’s life.
A few years ago I stopped at an estate sale in a small town I was passing through, far away from home. Picked up an 8-track player and a few dozen cartridges, the majority of which were mixes.
It was just fascinating to listen to. I’m pretty sure it was mostly obscure 1970s and 1980s country with the odd Blondie song thrown in here or there.
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.
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.
No, usually authors publish 1 chapter every <schedule>. Some publish 1 chapter per week day, some 1 chapter per week.
Once there are enough chapters for a full book, authors usually publish them on Amazon, and remove them from Patreon because of the exclusivity clause.
There is usually a 2/3 book lead on Patreon vs Amazon.
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.
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.
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 guess it'll come across as obnoxious if I say I never actually used streaming services. I just never liked having to be connected to the internet at all times, and I liked having all my music collection on my private device. When I feel like I want to stream music, I use online radio. I have a few gems in my library that are hard to come across online (because nobody else cares but I do). I've always been a digital hoarder.
I'm not a fan of movies and shows, so I can't share my opinion here.
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.
It’s a race to the bottom and I’m done with that.
That is the way! VLC player works great on iOS and allows to upload of flac/mp3 via wlan.
I'm actually using foobar2000 on iOS. Much better for music. Had some reliability issues with VLC for music.
Yes! For me, I like that foobar2000 (1) plays Ogg Vorbis files, and (2) will spin itself up as an FTP server on my LAN so I can easily upload music to it.
PlexAmp is a good experience too, but not free.
I am so mad / ashamed that I tossed my big CD book not long ago. Now would be a perfect time to rip those CDs - especially as I am getting into DJ work on the side!
I just finished making a ‘physical’ music system for my daughter.
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…
It’s funny, I proposed essentially this idea on HN awhile back and the pigpile of commenters who said it was a stupid idea made me reconsider whether I really wanted to share ideas here. It’s great to see that you actually did it. I’d love to read a blog post if you ever get around to it!
Just ignore everyone and make things you yourself want and love.
I saw a new Walkman yesterday in one e-shop. I hadn’t dump audio tapes… so kids will be all right :)
I was in shop the other day with my daughter and the walls were covered in cassette tapes as decoration.
I has to take SO MANY steps back to explain what they were.
I realised she thought all music was just magically created when you ask Alexa for it - so we had to start there to explain someone has to make the music first, and go back though streaming services, digital downloads, to having to literally go to a shop to buy a single song for £4 - which is probably about £20 now adjusted for inflation.
Phone booths, landline phones, Atari or Commodore computers with modems… 25 years is history now.
People born before WWI had to feel similarly when WWII started.
Funnily enough I have also set her and 3 friends up on a private landline network for them to call and chat old school.
One thing I love most about old tech is that it is single purpose = no distrations!
> she thought all music was just magically created when you ask Alexa for it
This is becoming more and more true.
Yeah she was just 18 months early on that one eh.
That is exactly what I had in mind for my daughter too, fantastic that you got that done
We are genuinely at the point now where you can just mostly summon this into existence with a coding agent.
I thought through the UI and tech stack and reasearched what would actually work first and then wrote a very detailed brief for Codex. And about 2 hours of back and forth and re-thinking later, it works.
One challenge was that the phone has to have the NFC UI on while looking for cards, but i wanted it to turn off while playing so I could have a hole in the box to a blank screen she can swipe to skip back and forward.
This stumped Codex - but I then had the idea to use the depth cam to detect cards placed on the phone, then only show the scan UI again when the card is removed.
So now it works really seamlessly.
1) Place card on, music instantly starts, even remembers where in the song and playlist you are.
2) Remove card, phone detects it can see at least a few cm, instant stop.
3) Place a new, or the same card on and that instantly plays from the last position.
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.
There's a free API for getting albums from QR codes
https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/release/?query=barcode:50997465...
This was the first CD I ever owned
I LOVE THAT IDEA SO MUCH.
It's so dumb and so functional at the same time.
My favourite ideas usually hug that Pareto frontier.
Hacking a Tonie box would be so awesome
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.
[0] https://files.alinpanaitiu.com/ipod-nano.mp4
I suspect that the iPod nano is somewhat un-hackable, but the iPod mini and earlier models actually had physical mini EIDE spinning disks in them. The interface was electrically identical (or close enough) to CompactFlash cards that a little service I ran on the side for beer money was upgrading people’s iPods to CF. Nowadays you can get absolutely gargantuan CF cards. I put a 256GB CF card in my iPod mini and the firmware, to my surprise, had no trouble recognizing the capacity. I also personally love that form factor, but obviously, different strokes for different folks.
I do appreciate that you said that you enjoy curating your 8GB but I got tired with that way back in 2003 when I bought my first iPod. I never want to go back to that.
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.
Nice website and functionality!
I would love a way to create a playlist from the related songs it found if that is possible!
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 have a huge collection (100-200) of CDs from a relative that I would like to store the same way. Can you explain your setup?
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.
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/
Thanks a lot! Did you do this sequentially with each CD, or did you have any concurrency with multiple drives?
Definitely did it sequentially with a single CD drive. I'm sitting on maybe 100 albums, max. It takes ~15min per album to process, which pulls in song metadata, lyrics (synced, if possible), album art, etc.
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.
Yep - I’ve noticed I’ve stopped “having music playing” and I’ve more started “listening to the music” if that makes sense.
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.
Local used CD store sells albums for 7USD - could even get two a month and put money away on months you don’t want to buy anything.
You dont own those either. If you lose your copy, it's gone forever with no remediation or claim of ownership except at the specific retailer you did your transaction at. The source where it came from is unaffected by your loss, and they can decide at any time to stop selling their discs with or without your involvement. The nostalgic rose tinted pandering behind vinyls and old media conveniently forgets the introduction of digital storage to actually ensure reliable redundancy, and so "buying" physical media is just a smoke and mirrors way of saying the disc is for vain aesthetics while the actual mental relief comes from the secondary process being able to digitize it locally.
Following the same mindset of circumventing the traditional process, I could spend one single month ripping every single song I possibly can from Spotify and have the same claim of ownership over their files that you do with a much larger variety and without all the wasted physical space on assets that are immediately digitized. The only benefit to your method is that you feel like it justifies hoarding.
Presumably people also have some sense of fair exchange when buying the disc to rip vs. ripping from Spotify. If you want to be strictly rational you can of course skip the Spotify part too and just pirate it.
Last.fm is still around. Some Navidrome clients work with it, and it can point you to artists you might like.
and btw they recently went independent!
Love it, but honestly I’m trying to decouple from services like this.
Although, it’s not a critical-path item..
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.
> You can also self host it if you would prefer to keep your listen history private.
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
Love love love to see this, thank you for making my day!
Seems like CDs are redundant here though, given that they get digitized anyway.
They are the backup. A music CD can last for a long time. Proof: my father CDs from about 35 years ago still work.
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.
Also just fun to be a plain-old jockey when you have company over, rather than just let “Appotifydal Top 3”
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.
Really like the idea of RFID cards - I was brainstorming something like that years ago for the kid, but never chased it down.
(Un??)fortunately, I am usually the one slinging CDs for people to listen to, people just like being able to offload that and listen to curated music, vs. "throw on spotify whatever" and having it just _play_.
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.
CDRW is a totally different technology that happens (by design) to be compatible with the same reader. CDs are moulded, much like the box that holds them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc_manufacturing
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.
> edit: 35 year old cds is 1995
35 years ago is 1991. Don't try to age me faster than I'm already going!
I think commercially sold disks are not burned, but stamped from a master copy or something.
I have a home audio setup to play them on, don’t worry :).
Also, buying directly from artists (when you can) is a good way to support them.
> 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.
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.
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've got a lot of very good stuff that isn't on Apple Music, Spotify or Bandcamp.
YMMV
100% this. The algo trap is from laziness, not from streaming.
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.
When I was a teen some 20 odd years ago the “algorithm” is people you spoke to.
That said smart shuffle on Spotify has found me a lot of good music.
Algorithms are fine when they serve you.
When they are serving someone else, and manipulating your attention to push promoted content instead of stuff you might actually like, or serve you ads, or track your behavior so that information can be sold, then not so much.
Things are good when they are good for you. Things are bad when they are bad for you.
By now the Spotify algorithm has been good for me. The day it starts being bad I’ll badmouth it. It’s not the time yet.
The Spotify algorithm is pretty bad for me. It pushes a lot of stuff I have no interest in (especially podcasts and audiobooks). The Apple Music algorithm is a bit better, but it's almost too conservative.
For me, Pandora gets it just about right.
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.
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.
Personally, while I understand the importance of discovery both for artists and for many listeners, it’s not at all how I listen to music. I know what work I want to hear, by what artist or ensemble and I want that exact thing. It’s not that I’m not open to other interpretations; it’s just in the moment that I want to listen, it’s a particular thing. That my ripped CD collection is such an infinitesimal representation of all that’s out there is a feature for me, not a bug. And the problem of ephemerality on some of these platforms is yet another problem.
I never stopped buying. Let's just say my collection of various physical media is.. unruly at best. Moving is a pain but I don't look back.
Note that I do still stream and buy digital on Bandcamp though.
[dead]
I personally never stopped. I had my collection I've been building since before I owned a Zune, and never wanted to give that up. Local media is infinitely higher quality than streaming anyway.
If you self-host, you owe it to yourself to set up Navidrome.
I used to own a couple of hundred DVDs, but then I moved country and they didn't come with me.
When I relocated I started with netflix, etc, but over the past five years or so I've definitely switched back to buying DVDs, used. Most of the local charity shops sell films for €1/piece, and maybe €3-5 for a season of a TV show.
Sure I don't get the latest movies, and eveyr single charity shop has like 20+ copies of the same few films, but it's still cheap and easy to build up a collection of films I know and love. And choosing a film is much less hassle when I can just pull the box from the shelf, without worrying about whether it's available on one of the streaming services.
The only downside is that it's hard to get complete TV shows - for example right now I have Peep Show on DVD, series 1-5, but later series haven't turned up yet. I'm not quite desperate enough to order them online, but the result is that I tend to ignore TV series unless "everything" is available to purchase all at once, I've passed on series 1-3 of a show, knowing that finding the final series 4 would be a matter of luck and patience.
> Local media is infinitely higher quality than streaming anyway.
I'm not so sure that's true anymore... It might be as good, but from an audio perspective, not better.
As a classical listener, I never really prefer streaming services. Each classical piece is usually dense and requires multiple passes to memorize and process. While one of the fun parts is comparing different interpretations by different musicians, we usually eventually settle on one or a few versions, like some folks, me included, prefer Furtwängler for anything Germanic, despite his recordings are more than 74 years old (albeit remastered multiple times). The only new recording I listened this year is Chris Thile's well anticipated Bach Sonatas & Partitas Vol. 2.
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.
That’s lovely! Please, can you tell more about your setup and where you buy fresh tapes?
Would love to hear more about the mixtape labels.
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 never willing left.
A lot of the artists I follow (bandcamp) stopped offering CDs (yes, vinyl is often an option, but I'm not a hipster).
Side note, Sony introduced the CD player on 10/1/82, 44 years ago yesterday.
I never went to streaming in the first place. It never seemed like a good deal for anything.
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.
If you start streaming at 20 and plan to live to 80, that's a total cost of $2,880 assuming the price never increases. The price will increase and you don't even get ownership.
I have a pretty large music collection that I am happy with and I haven't paid that much for it.
I wish CD player was an option in more cars. Last time I looked Subaru was the only company still offering CD player as a dealer installed option.
The dichotomy of streaming media versus owning physical media - it's like the difference between an automatic transmission and a manual transmission.
Do you want the car to drive you? Or do you want to drive the car?
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.
Yeah, it’s a strange window into someone else’s life.
A few years ago I stopped at an estate sale in a small town I was passing through, far away from home. Picked up an 8-track player and a few dozen cartridges, the majority of which were mixes.
It was just fascinating to listen to. I’m pretty sure it was mostly obscure 1970s and 1980s country with the odd Blondie song thrown in here or there.
Don't y'all fell like just reading its title is poisoning you, or at least ruining your mood?
There is no possible acceptable article with this title.
99% of my music consumption is through offline playback of mp3's or youtube content. I don't use playlists nor shuffles, just repeat.
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.
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.
What form does a book take on patreon if there's no file to download - is it just one huge text post?
No, usually authors publish 1 chapter every <schedule>. Some publish 1 chapter per week day, some 1 chapter per week.
Once there are enough chapters for a full book, authors usually publish them on Amazon, and remove them from Patreon because of the exclusivity clause.
There is usually a 2/3 book lead on Patreon vs Amazon.
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.
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.
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
If you live in Brooklyn check out Night Owl Video !
I guess it'll come across as obnoxious if I say I never actually used streaming services. I just never liked having to be connected to the internet at all times, and I liked having all my music collection on my private device. When I feel like I want to stream music, I use online radio. I have a few gems in my library that are hard to come across online (because nobody else cares but I do). I've always been a digital hoarder.
I'm not a fan of movies and shows, so I can't share my opinion here.