I was still using Milkdrop 2 visualizations on Foobar until I stopped using Windows a couple of years ago. If anyone knows how to use Milkdrop with MPD on Linux, you’d make me very happy.
Maybe some part of github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm would work for that? I had milkdrop visualizations working on an osmc [Kodi] install on a Raspberry Pi so I’d assume there must be a way.
Back in my day, I had an old computer I stuffed under my desk that I installed Linux on. It’s only job was to connect to a cifs share where I kept my (totally legally obtained) music, and play it using xmms2.
I did that so I could reduce the fairly minor load that winamp would put on my system while gaming. I had my PC and this music box both connected to a small mixer where I plugged in my headphones. So I could listen to whatever I wanted and had a dedicated screen and keyboard to control xmms2, so I didn’t have to alt-tab my gaming computer when I wanted to change tracks. Between the convenience of the control and the small benefit I got while using my computer, it was a nice setup that lasted me a long time I eventually stopped using it when I moved one time, I just didn’t bother to set it back up, and I eventually found that all the sliders in my mixer were messed up. From lack of use.
I’m sad to hear that xmms2 also had a similar problem of being more or less ignored and falling into disrepair. It was a good alternative to winamp on my desktop. Everything was very very similar, so it was very easy to swap between them.
I also similarly stopped using winamp, because reasons. I suppose the go to music player is now foobar2000.
Not that I was (much obliged to lets just forget present tense exists and is a thing) popular enough to go to pool parties let alone get drunk at one,
But aside from eminem and robbie whoever, i definitely have a playlist on winamp on my computer at this moment with those exact songs in it. It was probably created when i was a teenager lol
They aren’t cut off in the middle, the wrong song, labeled with the wrong artist, a “rip” from somebody with a microphone and FM radio, corporate honeypots, or literal viruses.
At least now it is pretty simple. Not sure about Spotify, but you can download exact audio files Deezer has. That’s my favorite method unless Deezer has a bad remasters of older albums, then I fall back to Soulseek to do some hunting of better version.
None of that is more simple than clicking a link and having everything on all of your devices.
I’m not saying Spotify is the end all. They have a lot of terrible shit. But none of the torrent/usenet based shit or open source crap is easier to use. Nobody is going to secondary sources on Spotify for bad remasters. You are handwaving away the pain in the ass part.
Depends how far back you go maybe? I remember being able to suss out pretty reliable rips on usenet in the 97-98 timeframe really easily through the alt.binaries groups, and eventually on tpb without too much trouble. On top of that, FLAC just a smidge later.
I see your point, but piracy has at all times provided me the music I wanted with the portability I wanted with the quality of files I have wanted.
I guess it’s a matter of perspective.
Is there a simple way for Spotify to give me high quality files that I can play offline or host myself with no DRM? (Maybe the answer is yes, but I haven’t had that impression.)
That’s been my criteria for listening to music pretty much since mp3s came into existence.
I can’t argue with you very hard though - if the goal is just “something that lets me play music” then I suppose spotify is simpler.
I recently began de-corpoing my life, and spotify is my most recent cancellation after I was a premium subscriber since soon after its launch.
Took a bit of effort to convert my library, but I found a useful app to automate the process. And now I have my library back, offline and on my devices forever and for free.
It’s actually kind of empowering, reclaiming your life from subscription hell and corporate voyeurism.
This is one of those things that I dream of doing one of these days. I’d love to have a massive media library stored locally, so that I’m not chained to streaming services.
Or just buy on Bandcamp if the artist is on there. Support artists really directly (they get 85-90% of what you pay for an item) and you usually get a royalty free lossless download as well as subscription-less streaming.
Hope recent dealings doesn’t fuck up this absolute gem of a site.
For me, this is just a place I knew to never go. The writing was on the wall when Warcraft 2/3 became World of Warcraft, one of the first subscription based game.
I’d already been pirating software, music, and games by then and just, stayed on that path. Never so much as used Netflix or Spotify.
Just today I was listening to a Tidal Playlist amongst friends and the whole thing seized up and just stopped playing music all together when it ran into a song on the Playlist that apparently Tidal lost the rights to. Really frustrating when your music library is in flux at the whim of corporate dealings.
I did a bit of web searching and found spotDL on github, you can give it Spotify playlists to convert and it will search them on YouTube/YouTube music, and output them as local files.
Includes metadata and can output in different formats too. It works great about 99% of the time, though you sometimes need to search manually for individual songs it couldn’t match somehow. But that were about a dozen tracks out of over 4k for me.
If you are interested in the other things I did/found aside from music feel free to ask
I’m not an audiophile or anything, but on my in ears it sounds fine to me. Though I only made mp3s so far, but iirc it can do flac too. I’d imagine those have better quality
Definitely did. Dad was a stoner, I was too young to get stoned, we both sat and watched it for ages while dad shared his favorite tunes with me. Ah, good times.
Seriously. Everyone complains about how it was so much better back then, when you owned your music on physical media.
Meanwhile, the choice of music available to buy on CD’s (and even LP’s) has never been greater than today.
Plus, you can easily download whatever you want from any streaming service and burn your own CD’s (but please don’t do that, it violates the TOS and copyright!)
Or you can buy DRM-free music files at higher quality than was ever available on physical media outside of niche formats that were never widely adopted. Costs are not outrageous and you can listen to them however you like on whatever device you like, and the artists actually get paid and there’s no question of legality.
Yeah you can literally buy flac instead of relying on CDs to get lossless quality. Also recording these days is so much better, you could easily get a lot of good remastered version of your favorite songs now.
I bought a CD of Green Day’s “American Idiot” and tried to rip it. The version still sold these days has some kind of copy protection on it that gives rippers fits (which isn’t very punk rock of them). Tried a few different things, and then gave up and downloaded somebody else’s flac rip.
It’s entirely possible that I’ve missed more recent legislation, so take this with a grain of salt. Canada has a “blank media tax” courtesy of the record lobby back in the recording tape days. There was much pushback from consumers when that fee was applied to things like video tapes, recordable CDs, hard drives, etc, but still exists as far as I know.
The recording industry was pushing for laws more in line with other jurisdictions, primarily the US. The government was open to it, but would then abolish the fees on blank media. Industry backed down because they get more from that fee distribution than they would ever get by having more restrictions. Of course, that doesn’t stop them from trying to shame us or blow smoke up our asses.
That means we are already paying a licence fee allowing us to copy recorded or broadcast material for personal use. “Personal use” is defined by what it’s not: rebroadcast, playing for the general public, and reselling. Thus, making a strictly personal copy is fine, as is making a copy for a friend, copying from an original you’ve borrowed (from a friend or from the library), recording legal broadcasts (like from radio, etc), and recording concerts unless the terms of admission expressly forbid it, etc.
DAE had that one copy of a song that everyone shared with a glitch during the second verse, and now you find it jarring to hear the song without that artifact.
I have an old copy of “American Pie” from Napster just like that. Couple little glitches at the start that gave me a twitch for years if I didn’t hear it.
It’s also what I tell people who like the sound of vinyl. The pops and hisses of vinyl are objectively wrong, but you can get subjectively used to hearing things a certain way. It’s not better, it’s just what you have always done.
Even that all said, I do like listening to vinyl because the whole process of listening to it is very deliberate. Like I’m preparing for an event and this is what I’ll be doing for the evening.
Add comment