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Over the last year I've come to trust effectively nothing on the internet. I've had so many Spotify playlists I was following disappear, whole artists, websites
by dorian-graph 8y ago
Over the last year I've come to trust effectively nothing on the internet. I've had so many Spotify playlists I was following disappear, whole artists, websites, articles, etc.
I'm slowly moving to offline-first versions of all the information I care about. Edit: This change too also lends to the 'slow web' (or just slow $whatever) movement, which I'm a fan of.
- amelius 8y agoThe problem is, it's getting harder every day to find DRM-free content. For audio, CDs are getting out of fashion, and piracy channels lack the seeders because everybody is on Spotify.
- dorian-graph 8y agoYup, it's becoming a sad state to be able to own things and not be dependent upon the whims of others. I went from buying all my music (physical and digital copies), and sometimes had to remove DRM from the digital copies, to stopping that and just using Spotify. I'm slowly planning to stop paying for Spotify, but it would be very expensive to buy all the music I listen to. I think this will lead to at least 2 things (that used to be true, for me). 1) I'll listen to more local/new music that I can buy from BandCamp, etc. and 2) I'll have higher value to the music I do listen to, because I'm not as worried about glutting myself on a million new bands through Spotify. I'm okay with these 2 things.
- amelius 8y agoI used to save tracks by recording them through the "analog hole", using the following commandline in Linux: parec | sox -t raw -r 44100 -Lb 16 -c 2 -e signed-integer - -t wav raw.wav It still requires a lot of manual work, such as cutting the tracks, and making sure there are no "skips" (which somehow can happen). Skips could theoretically be removed using a consensus algorithm (using multiple recordings). I just wish someone would develop a fully automated workflow for converting playlists to audio files.
- hiram112 8y agoI'm not familiar with the 'parec' command. Are you able to filter out other audio streams (e.g. Slack alerts or accidentally opening a page with an auto-play video)? I was under the impression that one of the big advantages of Pulse Audio was its ability to separate multiple streams. Interestingly enough, I had similar scripts about 15 years ago pre-Napster. The earliest mp3 sharing sites tended to push full-albums instead of breaking things up by track. I had a lot of fun using some of the earlier mp3 tools to break up and tag tracks. I still have a lot those mp3s on various HDs, and I know it because my splits weren't perfect for certain tracks that don't have 2 second gaps.
- amelius 8y agoIn theory PulseAudio should be able to separate the streams, or at least turn off audio for selected applications. However, this was never really a problem anyway because I usually ran the command at night :) Yes, audio processing in the early days was fun, though it's easier now because of better tools and especially bigger harddrives and faster CPUs :)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- twostoned 8y agoYes. The debate is gone. Young people have a much different view of 'ownership' (I struggled for a better word) than older people. For example, I remember the copyright, file sharing, music piracy arguments and debates from the 90s (Metallica, Napster! Hah) and 00s. But when I talk about this stuff now with people in their early 20s there seems to be less awareness. DRM & 'Stream everything' are the way it is, as if its some kind of inevitability. The concept of actually owning, or possessing, something (even if its a byte stream on a physical hard drive in your house) seems to be disappearing. It's interesting to watch. I think the most interesting part is the lack of discussion.
- Arzh 8y agoThat's because 99% of the time the streaming service for music is better than trying to build your own library. It also seems to have a lot less attribution than video stream right now so people don't have to pay attention to where they can stream a specific song, they can use just about any app and get what they are looking for.
- amelius 8y ago> That's because 99% of the time the streaming service for music is better than trying to build your own library. What good is "better" if songs disappear every now and then?
- Arzh 8y agoThat's the 1% of the time that it's not better. Using a streaming service doesn't stop you from buying albums or song that you really want to keep around for a long time.
- Retric 8y agoDepends on your tastes. If you only really care about say 100 ish or fewer CD's worth of music then you can easily hit that and save money vs a streaming service. So for someone like me they are a complete waste of money. Remember, 70 years * 10$ / month ~= 8,400$ for music over a lifetime. By comparison you can easily buy say every piece of music by Bob Marley and your done no need to ever do so again. Sure, if you really care about music then a service is great.
- gumami 8y agoWhat do you mean? Google and Amazon both sell DRM free music. (Apple might too, I've just been out of that ecosystem for so long that I don't really remember)
- fiddlerwoaroof 8y agoiTunes is now drm-free except for streaming
- MrMember 8y agoI feel like music is one of the few pieces of media that's very easy to buy DRM free. Movies, TV shows, books, and most other things are heavily encumbered after you "buy" them.
- JackCh 8y agoIt's a pretty shitty state of affairs, but for ebooks what I've done is purchase an old model kindle and buy ebooks for it. I then crack that DRM using Calibre (easy to do with the old model kindles, you only need to enter the serial number). This has worked to archive all the books I've purchased so far but there may come a time when Amazon will only deliver ebooks to kindles with stronger DRM. I don't feel bad about doing this because I'm still paying for the books and I'm not distributing the backups I make. I'm not clear on whether personal backups are a legal exception or not, but I don't really care.
- MrMember 8y agoI do the same with audiobooks from Audible, though the cracking process is a bit more complicated. I have no moral qualms about ensuring I will always have a copy of something I bought even if I leave the platform I bought it on or that platform goes under.
- scruple 8y agoI buy almost all of my music through Bandcamp these days. The nice thing there is that I can buy digital, vinyls, and sometimes even CDs or cassette tapes.
- biggc 8y agoUnless something's changed, you can still buy DRM-free high bitrate tracks from iTunes.
- paulie_a 8y agoI just use Usenet. I tend to purchase media, or use a streaming service but I no longer pay attention to copyright. I have legal and non legal options. Whatever is easiest is all I care about. Drm/copyright has tilted so far I simply don't care anymore.
- ryanSrich 8y agoOne of the first things I do with any article that I've enjoyed is download an HTML copy and create a PDF. Too many times I've bookmarked something only to come back a year later and it's gone.
- ivankolev 8y agoI started using Firefox for Android partly because of its excellent Save page as PDF feature.
- ssarodia 8y agoJust fyi, on Chrome on Android you can Share -> Print -> Save as PDF.
- Semirhage 8y agoMe too, and I don’t rely on cloud or streaming services. If I really like a song or article or book, I buy it some form and then download (if necessary through alternative channels) a copy. I bought a bunch of audio books from Audible years ago, and taking the time to convert them to MP3 has made my life much easier. Streaming, clouds and DRM protection are fine for discovery, but if you love something, archive it. Storage is so cheap after all!
- pasbesoin 8y agoI used the Firefox extension Scrapbook, until the change to WebExtensions killed it. I feel changes like this are incrementally making the Web "theirs" and not "ours". Separately, someone replied on here to me, a few months ago, that archive.org's policy for respecting -- or not -- robots.txt was in the process of changing. I don't think that putting up a robots.txt policy should be able to retroactively remove from archive what was previously public. All the more so when the domain in question has changed hands. But I expect this nonsense to continue. So, I only trust local copies. Unfortunately, for me, killing the Scrapbook extension made them less convenient to collect.
- dorgo 8y ago
- Zathman 8y agoI don't typically visit Wikipedia, but when I do, I read something and then try to visit the source(s) for that something. More often than not, the source URLs are dead.
- jakeogh 8y agoMe too. Practically every video I have seen since ~2012 went through youtube-dl, along with 100x more that I didn't watch. The memory hole is real, I plan to post my kit sometime, there's a few pieces on github (until?) already. I suspect the majority of the material I deliberately archived will be gone on YT, it's somewhere around 20% and it's going to hit 50. A big chunk is historically significant. There is a serious push to criminalize memory. The GPDR is the latest attack. It's a huge problem for power centers that people can so effectively lookup the past themselves independent of what was deleted. Archive.org is a gold canary and they know it. They must partner with other people willing to accept copies, it's too easy and valuable to attack them otherwise. btw (unrelated to video): https://github.com/bup/bup https://github.com/bup/bup is awesome.
- dorian-graph 8y agoYoutube is another big one too! youtube-dl is a godsend. > There is a serious push to criminalize memory. I hadn't thought about it that way, but it seems so true. And thanks for sharing bup!