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I grew up listening to my dad’s vinyl records and remember buying my first CDs in the early 2000s. I also remember borrowing backpacks full of CDs of jazz and c

I grew up listening to my dad’s vinyl records and remember buying my first CDs in the early 2000s. I also remember borrowing backpacks full of CDs of jazz and classical music from my local library when I was in high school and ripping them to MP3 so I could keep them with all the music I was getting from Napster. I’m one of these people who likes to listen to full albums. At one point I had a few thousand ripped as quality MP3. In college there were campus peer-to-peer ways of sharing music and my collection grew a lot. In grad school, the streaming services came out. The streaming services like Spotify have some major downsides. Sometimes things go unplayable. Stuff is missing. Stuff is changed/censored without warning. The UI is optimized for whatever Spotify wants to show you, not what you want to listen to. I assume it makes sense for Spotify to optimize their costs by suggesting stuff they pay less for. For someone who likes albums, the little annoyances add up. I recently pulled my dad’s record collection out of his attic. It’s about a thousand LPs from the sixties and seventies. Stuff I like since I grew up listening to it. I’ve spent a few months browsing Discogs and buying bargin-bin vinyl and CDs (lots of scrolling, filters are useless). I’ve bought about five hundred CDs and maybe a hundred vinyl records over several months. The majority of the CDs are $1–2, and the records are mostly under $5. It all comes via Media Mail, shipped for a few bucks. One of the packages came from Brooklyn and had been inspected by USPS to make sure it contained only CDs. One package came from Jamaica and the vinyl sleeves had a bit of fine sand. It’s a cheap, fun hobby. Now I’ve got a hard copy of just about any album I want to listen to. I like the physicality of taking the CD out of the case and nudging the sliding tray in. My CD player is a 1988 Realistic I found at a music store and it sometimes skips if the disc has deep scratches. I like the unspoken social job of turning the record over. I like that the current CEO of Spotify, and the next CEO, and whatever government wants to, can’t see what I am playing on repeat today. Since returning to mainly listening to physical media, my experience of listening to music has improved and I enjoy it more than ever. I got home the other day and the internet was out, and I didn’t even notice for an hour since the first thing I do now when I get home is put a record on

JKCalhoun 4y ago
More and more I believe that offline is bestline. Some of us remember when the only password we needed was a 4-digit pin for the ATM. I swear if there was an offline version of Stack Overflow (like you can pull down a minimal Wikipedia) I could go days without internet.
- wolfskaempf 4y ago
  Dash makes offline copies of StackOverflow easily browsable. Maybe this could suit you! https://kapeli.com/dash https://kapeli.com/dash
- bmitc 4y ago
  It would be a dream if people just wrote documentation.
  - Ygg2 4y ago
    Writing documentation is easy. Writing documents is hard. Who are you writing for, what competency, which part of the documentation quadrant, what style...
- the_third_wave 4y ago
  That's throwing out the baby with the bathwater, going totally offline. You are in control of how much time you spend online, both mobile as well as at your desk. Just switch off automatic synchronisation on mobile devices and you're free from needless attention-grabbing noises from the things. Tell people to call you if they really need to get hold of you, now, at this moment. As long as you are the one who controls your devices instead of those devices controlling you the possibility of going online is a book. Use it when needed, no more, no less. Try to disable as many attention-grabbing features of connected devices, e.g rigourously block all forms of advertising on multiple levels - router, device and application. This is what I've been doing since... well, since 24h internet access became a thing really. It was clear from the outset that too much of a good thing can hurt.
- derwiki 4y ago
  Kiwix has an offline Stack Overflow: https://www.kiwix.org/en/look-at-us-we-took-stack-overflow-offline/ https://www.kiwix.org/en/look-at-us-we-took-stack-overflow-o... I haven’t used it, but I’ve used their offline Wikipedia
sneak 4y ago
> I assume it makes sense for Spotify to optimize their costs by suggesting stuff they pay less for. Pay less for? Payola is legal again; these are paid ads. Ever wonder why random bad hip hop is injected into playlists it has no place in? It's the label paying to promote the artist.
- shaunsingh 4y ago
  Unrelated but every time I clean my spotify cache I get better recommendations, I figure they're saving a fair bit of money not having to stream new songs
- themoonisachees 4y ago
  Spotify also has comissioned songs to play you from unknown artists at 0 cost (beyond 1 time comission) or even negative cost (if they decide to also pay themselves $0.00002 per stream). My friends an I stumbled upon "DJ Techno", an artist that is only on spotify and does not seem to exist on any other website (inlc social media), and it's the most generic techno music imaginable. When we checked it had millions of monthly listeners, probably from the same place as us, electro-adjacent radios.
NikolaNovak 4y ago
Understanding that there's pleasure In physicality of things, I never had an issue listening to full album, in order, on spotify. (unless you're talking about free version, in which case, com'on, it's free and cannot be compared to paid experience of buying albums plus players. At worst, it's like radio, except with fewer ads and way way more control:)
rcme 4y ago
My issue with hard copies of albums is that I’m too lazy to change them. I would often find myself listening to whatever was in the player, and, then that was done, I would stop listening to music in order to avoid changing records. I do miss the concept of an album, though.
- derwiki 4y ago
  I’ve been enjoying audio cassettes because they tend to have more audio per side than vinyl
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
The ONLY downside to collecting physical albums, besides the cost of newer or more desireable albums, is the space it requires. I'd like an album collection, but realistically I don't have the space (yet). Besides, it would go alongside the book collection, we've got like 2 Billy bookcases worth of books around the house and would like a lot more yet. I mean we don't have (take) the time to read and play video games instead, but that's besides the point; owning physical media is great.

JKCalhoun 4y ago

More and more I believe that offline is bestline. Some of us remember when the only password we needed was a 4-digit pin for the ATM. I swear if there was an offline version of Stack Overflow (like you can pull down a minimal Wikipedia) I could go days without internet.

wolfskaempf 4y ago
Dash makes offline copies of StackOverflow easily browsable. Maybe this could suit you! https://kapeli.com/dash https://kapeli.com/dash
bmitc 4y ago
It would be a dream if people just wrote documentation.
- Ygg2 4y ago
  Writing documentation is easy. Writing documents is hard. Who are you writing for, what competency, which part of the documentation quadrant, what style...
the_third_wave 4y ago
That's throwing out the baby with the bathwater, going totally offline. You are in control of how much time you spend online, both mobile as well as at your desk. Just switch off automatic synchronisation on mobile devices and you're free from needless attention-grabbing noises from the things. Tell people to call you if they really need to get hold of you, now, at this moment. As long as you are the one who controls your devices instead of those devices controlling you the possibility of going online is a book. Use it when needed, no more, no less. Try to disable as many attention-grabbing features of connected devices, e.g rigourously block all forms of advertising on multiple levels - router, device and application. This is what I've been doing since... well, since 24h internet access became a thing really. It was clear from the outset that too much of a good thing can hurt.
derwiki 4y ago
Kiwix has an offline Stack Overflow: https://www.kiwix.org/en/look-at-us-we-took-stack-overflow-offline/ https://www.kiwix.org/en/look-at-us-we-took-stack-overflow-o... I haven’t used it, but I’ve used their offline Wikipedia

sneak 4y ago

> I assume it makes sense for Spotify to optimize their costs by suggesting stuff they pay less for. Pay less for? Payola is legal again; these are paid ads. Ever wonder why random bad hip hop is injected into playlists it has no place in? It's the label paying to promote the artist.

shaunsingh 4y ago
Unrelated but every time I clean my spotify cache I get better recommendations, I figure they're saving a fair bit of money not having to stream new songs
themoonisachees 4y ago
Spotify also has comissioned songs to play you from unknown artists at 0 cost (beyond 1 time comission) or even negative cost (if they decide to also pay themselves $0.00002 per stream). My friends an I stumbled upon "DJ Techno", an artist that is only on spotify and does not seem to exist on any other website (inlc social media), and it's the most generic techno music imaginable. When we checked it had millions of monthly listeners, probably from the same place as us, electro-adjacent radios.

NikolaNovak 4y ago

Understanding that there's pleasure In physicality of things, I never had an issue listening to full album, in order, on spotify. (unless you're talking about free version, in which case, com'on, it's free and cannot be compared to paid experience of buying albums plus players. At worst, it's like radio, except with fewer ads and way way more control:)

rcme 4y ago

My issue with hard copies of albums is that I’m too lazy to change them. I would often find myself listening to whatever was in the player, and, then that was done, I would stop listening to music in order to avoid changing records. I do miss the concept of an album, though.

derwiki 4y ago
I’ve been enjoying audio cassettes because they tend to have more audio per side than vinyl

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

The ONLY downside to collecting physical albums, besides the cost of newer or more desireable albums, is the space it requires. I'd like an album collection, but realistically I don't have the space (yet). Besides, it would go alongside the book collection, we've got like 2 Billy bookcases worth of books around the house and would like a lot more yet. I mean we don't have (take) the time to read and play video games instead, but that's besides the point; owning physical media is great.