Why media fans want to escape algorithms with CDs, DVDs and vinyl(theguardian.com) |
Why media fans want to escape algorithms with CDs, DVDs and vinyl(theguardian.com) |
It’s a race to the bottom and I’m done with that.
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.
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:
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.
On the LAN, the FLACs just sit in an NFS share, while on the phone, Foobar2000 works nicely with the Opus files.
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
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.)
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.
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.
If you self-host, you owe it to yourself to set up Navidrome.
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.
YMMV
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.
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.
That said smart shuffle on Spotify has found me a lot of good music.
Note that I do still stream and buy digital on Bandcamp though.
Do you want the car to drive you? Or do you want to drive the car?
There is no possible acceptable article with this title.
I'm not a fan of movies and shows, so I can't share my opinion here.
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.
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 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 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.
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!