I cancelled my Spotify account some time ago due to a band I liked at the time (Thank You Scientist) having their catalogue dropped making me realize that I do, in fact, own nothing -- but I was not happy about it.
During a trip back to my parents a couple of years ago I found an old CD binder of mine that was packed full of old music that I thought I had lost, so I took that home with me and started the slow process of ripping music to my hard drive. Foregoing MP3 I decided to rip them as WAVs since I have a big disk and a pair of Sony M4s and it was like a new sonic universe had been opened to me.
I have about 200 CDs in my collection now, a lot of them old ones that I did end up losing but repurchasing. There's apparently a niche enough market for them that some arbitrage can happen. For instance, using Amazon as a spot market I found a CD for $5 used at a local book store that sells for $40 minimum at Bezosland (Dance Gavin Dance - Mothership for those curious). My mom has also come in clutch, finding Drive Like Jehu - Yank Crime at some flea market local to her and throwing it into my Christmas stocking last year.
I can't stress the quality of the music with a good set of headphones and a lossless rip. And best of all I own this music forever.
Don't use WAV files unless there's some very specific reason why you can't use FLACs. FLAC is lossless compression so you get a significantly smaller file size at zero quality cost.
Eh just the ease with which you can decode a wav. You can basically blit a wav out the shift register of an audio device, and it will sound like music. One might also argue the amount of space is trivial these days.
For archival, rip to bin/cue files and you'll be able to recreate the physical CD with your burner any time in the future.
I've always ripped to FLAC+CUE, that should be able to do the same thing.
I used to have like 2500 CDs. Then when I got an iPod I downloaded them onto the iPod and then the iPod got old so I have Apple Music. I buy CDs at yard sales now. When I get a house with space I want a record player
Somebody had an actual Columbia House
That’s actually a good deal if you bought a lot of CDs like I did
I used to have a collection about that big too. I used the shit out of Columbia House and BMG. I ripped them all and went digital because too many of them were getting scuffed up from sliding them in and out of travel cases.
I miss my iPod. Had the iPod be with the most GB and I could just download my CDs onto it as well as songs off YouTube. The iPod broke down and the Apple store said it was too old for them to repair. Streaming services lose music due to agreements. At least once i downloaded it off the cd I knew I had it. But going digital is good. Just nice to have CDs as a backup
I miss dedicated mp3 players too. Apple sucks though.
I have been meaning to look for a good mp3 player app for my phone. Google music used to be awesome until they forced it to merge with youtube music. Now they want you to use a paid account to disable ads on your own music. Fuck that.
The hassle with it has just made it so I don't even listen to music that often any more.
I just use VLC on my phone. No ads, can switch between local music or network music, plays FLAC.
Thanks. I will try it out.
As a fellow physical media lover, I wish I'd had the foresight (and the drive space) to rip all my old CDs as FLAC back in the day. I ripped everything I had into 128kbps MP3s at the time. Then I went and used the CDs in the car, portable CD player, etc. until most of them weren't that great condition, got tossed, etc. and I have almost none of them.
So unfortunately, at the time music is one of the only things I still pay to stream, albeit not Spotify. I just enjoy the expansive library available that I haven't had the time to build up. I do have a handful on my NAS and a few physical CDs I picked up at an estate sale. There's actually tons at the flea markets around here I should look through them more. For me, I go more for blu-rays. I have no streaming services, when I want to watch something, I acquire it and either watch the disc or rip it if it's a TV series or I want to take it with me. Since I care about maybe 1% of modern content, it's pretty easy to find what I'm looking for.
Soulseek is still going, lads. I rediscovered it recently on recommendation from a fren. Everything I need in FLAC whenever browser searches fail me, which is nearly 100% of the time these days. Frequently now I order physical albums (to patronise the bands) then head straight to soulseek to nab it in lossless digital before it arrives in the post.
tagging u/dagthegnome and u/KeeperOfTheGate in case you guys also didn't know.
Wow, I used to use Soulseek and it had dropped from my mind entirely. I had memories of an IRC-like downloader but figured it had been axed by this point. My man.
Been cranking out the downloads all day -- thanks again.
No worries, man, it was a bit of a revelation for me too. The fact that all the same chatrooms, full of all the same kind of annoying spergs, were still there from 20 years ago, almost brought a tear to my eye. Just goes to show sometimes the best solutions are the old ones.
Thanks for the tip, wasn't familiar with Soulseek. I've got a few CDs that won't rip properly for various reasons.
On a related note, the single best resource for downloading free music, Free-MP3-Download.net, just got shut down. They were around for almost 2 decades and had a pretty much limitless catalogue of songs and albums that you could get in MP3 and FLAC format. I still have thousands of files that I got from that site, but it looks like the music industry finally managed to put a stop to it.
Remember, if you don't really own it, then piracy isn't really stealing.
I didn't know such a thing was still around, sucks they finally got to it. Gives me memories of the Napster days when we'd exploit the school's T1 all day to download music then I'd bring my parallel port Zip drive to hook up to the school's computer to take the files home to burn to CDs to give to friends. That was the only way, USB wasn't common yet. There was zero network and PC security at school back then and us high school kids knew how to problem solve. As far as I'm concerned those were the glory days of the internet.
I'll give the music industry a bit of credit, they learned to make things reasonably available at not a stupid price. You don't have to get Sony Music+ for $14.99 and that gets you only Sony artists and some scraps they put together to say they have a billion songs. Then oh wait you wanted that artist, well they are a Virgin Premium exclusive, that will be another $14.99.
We must be roughly the same era. Loved napster at college. Kazaa? eMule?
I remember one year at college there was a job fair, and one company was giving out USB thumb drives. Probably like 8mb or 16mb or something. Awesome!
People were waiting in line like 20+ minutes just to get one.
Truly the glory days of the Internet.
I will also have a soft spot in my heard for 90s Something Awful and JeffK.
No love for Limewire?
I used Kazaa. Never like Napster. I have about 650 CD's - I ripped them to 320k upon purchase and then just burn them as required to blank discs so the originals can stay unused in storage.
I must truly be the old fart here. I remember when the only way to get your music on the high seas was to download multi-part compressed archive files on NNTP servers, aka news groups, or on IRC channels.
Now pardon me while I make my way back to my rocking chair. Lol
Best to just use yt-dlp and download music from youtube.
It's not actually hard to scrape from spotify or apple music or anything using a web interface and linux. I would post code to do it, but it's probably more trouble than it's worth. Pretty much every song is on youtube anyway, it's just a bit harder to save a whole album.
Even using a 320 kbps format to download mp3s from YouTube, the quality is just shit. That's why I prefer FLAC files, but even 320 mp3s from albums are better quality. YouTube compresses too much of the original audio during upload.
Seems youtube maxes out at like 130k opus, but on the plus side in ten years you'll hardly be able to tell the difference between that and a live performance.
I've been compiling a library of blurays, music cds, and dvds from local thrift stores. The ones near me sell any media for $2. New sealed, or an entire TV series, doesnt matter.
Got the entire Clone Wars series for $2 because it has the same blanket media price as all the individual cds. It's crazy what people give away just because it's out of style. Someday, as the streaming services get worse selection and more expensive, they'll regret this and wish they had their original library back. For now it's to our benefit.
I've been scanning the thrift stores for 2-3 years, gradually accumulating stuff as it comes in. I think I have over 500 movies and complete series at this point, plus an uncounted amount of music cds, most of the media library I've ever consumed.
Started ripping them last weekend, and backing up the files multiple places-- on my pc, on spare sata ssds, etc.
But my favorite media player is a cheap chinese emulator handheld. Loaded up a pair of sd cards, one with game isos, one with mkv movies.
Now I can play all my ps1, dreamcast, snes, gba, etc (anything older than ps2) roms and all my movies on one handheld device. I can even output them to my home theater setup drm free, with hdmi-out. Its hardware is about as strong as a potato, but that's more than enough. Technology has long since outstripped the demands of hd video and emulated ps1 games.
Meanwhile when I try to stream movies from amazon, they tell me my gaming pc doesnt support HD video and to get a verified device. Ok. Bye Amazon.
If you have an option between an original CD release and a later re-issue, go with the original. Properly mastered CDs sound fantastic: reissues kept raising the volume and crushing the dynamics which basically ruins everything.
I ended up messing up a lot of my CDs by constantly taking them in and out of cases and CD players. I still have my old Sony Walkman from back in 2003 as a reminder of the good ol days. I'll never part with that.
Now all of my music is ripped onto my media server as FLAC files and I take advantage of PlexAmp. I never have to worry about a particular artist being removed.
I am a huge archivist for these reasons.
Ditto, I love my Plex server. All of my media, thousands of CDs, DVDs and BRs available from anywhere. I even let family and friends use it, so I can share without having to give them physical media.
EAC with LAME to 320 kbs variable MP3 is what I did with all my CDs. I inherited 400 audio CDs from my dad when he passed, and spent a month ripping them all. I'm indifferent to FLAC vs MP3, but I generally try to find the highest bit rate MP3 I can, as 128 kbs sounds like AM radio sometimes. The few albums I have purchased recently have all been via Amazon in MP3 format. I never got into music streaming, really, but I do have a Pandora account I rarely use.
I bet alot of people are doing something similar. I've been buying physical movies for the last few months now and mostly not even watching them, but just to have the collection for when they all inevitably get censured or removed from streaming. I wanna start doing the same for music and games but I'm already wasting too much time and money on movies for now.
On the PC I use SpotX for spotify. It basically removes all the ads in the free version. You can use similar things on phones, but I don't bother with that.
Of course you still don't own anything, but it's free to use. I can live with that, especially since I'm not super into various artists / music.
I'm into progressive house, so for music on the way I just rip a youtube set of my favourite artists to mp3 and play those. Using youtube-dl for that. They release stuff like that often enough to keep me satisfied.
Oh and I am a patreon subscriber for one artist and get some songs there. Usually unreleased / earlier versions of songs.
If you're into collecting physical media, try Discogs. I use it for vinyl collecting, but there's CDs on there, as well!