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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What features have been removed from Spotify?
I believe they’ve just placed a bunch of stuff behind their premium subscription, like shuffle/repeat, lyrics, etc.
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.
If that’s Spotify’s biggest complaint then you know they’re doing pretty good.
bro really had to Google criticisms of Spotify because he couldn’t think of any other then wanting more free shit lol
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.
