Ask HN: How do you 'Music' (discovery, acquisition, consumption, ...)?

13 points by simba-hiiipower 12 years ago | 14 comments

How do you go about finding new (or new to you) music, acquiring it, managing a digital (or otherwise) collection, and (most importantly) enjoying it?

Interested to hear what sources, services, devices, ... people around here utilize towards interacting with music as a digital good.

lcasela 12 years ago |

discovery:

https://last.fm

https://rateyourmusic.com/customchart

http://kexp.org/

http://www.youtube.com/user/kexpradio

http://www.4chan.org/mu/

http://mthrfnkr.fm

http://bandcamp.com

http://reddit.com/r/listentothis

various blogs

acquisition:

mp3 blogs, bandcamp, amazon

consumption:

mp3 player, media player, spotify, grooveshark

simba-hiiipower 12 years ago |

i'd say i'm a fairly high-volume consumer and tend to spend a lot of time searching for, acquiring, managing, and enjoying my music.

i'm fairly old-school in that i like to download everything and have built and maintain a large collection of digital files. i view it very-much-so as one would a record collection and spend a lot of time ensuring quality (audio fidelity, proper tagging, rich cover art, ...).

discovery: genre-specific blogs (mainly for hip-hop), soundcloud, digitally imported, 8tracks, live shows/concerts, word of mouth

acquisition: direct downloads (you'd be surprised by how much great free, legal, content is put-out on a daily basis, especially in the hip-hop world), beatport, bandcamp, xbox music, amazon mp3, torrents

management: pretty much focused around proper tagging and maintaining a consistent file structure. mp3tag [1] is great little windows utility for batch tagging

consumption: mobile phone via bluetooth audio (in-car, headphones, portable speakers), laptop connected to sound system, xbox connected to home theater system

i've toyed around with various streaming services and never been satisfied with the selection or the overall experience. i've also tried using a number of cloud music solutions but have yet to find anything that can effectively manage my library in an efficient and convenient manner. would love to hear any others' thoughts on these.

[1] http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

FedRegister 12 years ago | |

I fall into a similar category as you. The only difference is that I prefer that my music come on CD unless it is an online only album.

For tagging I use EasyTag[1]. It looks to be very similar to mp3tag except that it runs on pretty much every operating system. (Does mp3tag run under Wine?)

[1] https://projects.gnome.org/easytag/screenshots.html

simba-hiiipower 12 years ago | | |

i used to also like having a physical copy as well, and don't mind paying a bit extra for it, but for me it just got too time-consuming ripping cds that i rarely used for purposes other than display afterwards.. i have sort of started building a small vinyl collection though as i like having that physical tie-in and find it looks a lot cooler as a collection.

easytag looks quite similar to mp3tag, though unfortunately it seems the windows version is really out of date. i'm not sure about mp3tag on wine as i've used it exclusively on windows 7/8.

siddboots 12 years ago | |

This sounds much the same as me, but with beets [1] instead of mp3tag. Not just does your audio-fingerprinting/musicbrainz/tagging, but also maintains a database for you, and has a command line query tool that you can just pipe into another player.

http://beets.radbox.org/

simba-hiiipower 12 years ago | | |

wow, that looks really cool; i'll definitely look into it. though it look a bit intimidating to me, seems like it would be a big time saver once you get things setup how you like.

dannytatom 12 years ago |

I use SoundCloud & Spotify to listen to music, and usually discover through last.fm, hypem (searching for stuff I like), or subreddits (most music subreddits have relevant subreddits in the sidebar, e.g. http://www.reddit.com/r/crustpunk).

Depending on the grene, finding blogs through hypem is probably the best way I've found for discovering new stuff.

LarryMade2 12 years ago |

Discovery, usually streaming radio sometimes VH1 - icecast.

Acquisition - Amazon usually, sometimes CD.

Managing - Rhythmbox

enjoyment- rhythmbox or the trusty old 1xAAA powered Sansa mp3 player.

Yeah, all Linux.

whichdan 12 years ago |

Discovery:

* http://turntable.fm/ambient_chillout_trip_hop2

* http://reviews.headphonecommute.com/

* Last.fm

* several subreddits

Aquiring:

* iTunes

* Amazon

* (rarely) Physical CDs

Managing:

* iTunes, with a playlist for newly acquired music, and the actual files separated by folder based on where I acquired them from (free downloads, bandcamp, Amazon, iTunes, etc)

Backup:

* Dropbox

palimpsests 12 years ago |

I tend to pay attention to labels and follow the ones I like through various sources (label website, Soundcloud). Labels curate content of similar themes / genres. Some examples: Ninja Tune, Warp, Brainfeeder, Matador.

bgar 12 years ago | |

I do this also, following a few labels I really like (Never Say Die, Dim Mak, OWSLA, Monstercat, RAM Records, etc). I follow quite a few artists on social media as well.

adrianwaj 12 years ago |

Soundcloud.. in fact YT should learn from its stream interface for its subscriptions.. cease downloading vid when users presses pause. Maybe could be done with mashup.

johneth 12 years ago |

Discovery:

* various BBC Radio stations (specficially, their specialist shows)

* Last.fm

* iTunes Genius Recommendations

Acquiring:

* iTunes

* Amazon

* Physical CDs

Managing:

* iTunes (purely because it keeps my files organised, and it's a better interface than Spotify / others in my opinion)

muxxa 12 years ago |

discovery: pitchfork.com and recursively following artists on soundcloud