Seconded. My music search these days is

    Find interesting band
               +
               |
               v               not sure I can
        Is on bandcamp? +-no-> be arsed to even
               +               check torrents
               |
              yes
               |
               v
           buy entire 
         discography on
            bandcamp

Really I prefer buying CDs at shows. Artists usually get to buy CDs from their own labels for $1 each, where if you buy it on Amazon/iTunes, they have to pay their label back for the recording costs, so they get like $0 until they hit some number (usually a few thousand). So if I buy a CD for $12, they're probably getting at least $10 of that.

Particularly on Bandcamp there are countless small, honest labels that act as a curator and really help to develop their artists while taking a fair cut. Being featured on one of them is a huge opportunity for most artists.

I also buy almost everything I find on Bandcamp. Excepting those über-hipster techno artists with 100-copies vinyl-only releases (but those you can usually still find rips on Soulseek.)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink's_Pink_Palace

Begin excerpt from said interview:

What do you think about OiNK being shut down?

Trent: I'll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world's greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted.

If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn't the equivalent of that in the retail space right now. iTunes kind of feels like Sam Goody to me. I don't feel cool when I go there. I'm tired of seeing John Mayer's face pop up. I feel like I'm being hustled when I visit there, and I don't think their product is that great. DRM, low bit rate, etc.

Amazon has potential, but none of them get around the issue of pre-release leaks. And that's what's such a difficult puzzle at the moment. If your favorite band in the world has a leaked record out, do you listen to it or do you not listen to it?

People on those boards, they're grateful for the person that uploaded it — they're the hero. They're not stealing it because they're going to make money off of it; they're stealing it because they love the band. I'm not saying that I think OiNK is morally correct, but I do know that it existed because it filled a void of what people want.

Cease excerpt from said interview.

Flash forward 11 years and there still isn't a legal alternative to OiNK' Pink Palace (OPP) that can hold a candle to it. I love music, but the music that I love I can not find on any streaming service.

The bands I like are old enough that they are no longer touring or producing music and since I can not find any of their "old" songs on any (legal) streaming or downloading sites I am left with zero options to support the bands I personally like.

[1]: https://www.vulture.com/2007/10/trent_reznor_and_saul_willia...

Redacted has almost anything that's not the most obscure of the underground.

Although for the more obscure things, youtube-dl is #1 where soulseek fails

How come? I know What.CD closed down, but I remember that RuTracker had quite a large selection of high-fidelity music records.

I've used Google Play when I couldn't find something on Bandcamp because it lets me purchase and download the album in a browser. But even then you have to have an account.

They want to make sure everyone uses their software that runs on their overpriced hardware, and DRM is yet another way to enforce that.

but yeah I never liked it/like it on windows.

iTunes successfully turned me off pirating music, why would I do it when I can pay 99p for a song and have all the metadata correct, including album art, perfectly synced to all my devices in perpetuity? And no DRM means I can play them on my non-apple/iTunes devices and media players.. great!

Well, unfortunately I want to own my music, so I don't like to use streaming services and there was an issue[0] with some music going missing. So for as long as apple are pushing their subscription model so hard I'm going to go back to ripping from youtube or downloading FLAC torrents and converting them myself.

(sorry, I'm a little bitter that the entire UX around apple's media player changed to push this bullshit so hard)

[0] https://blog.dijit.sh/importance-of-self-hosted-backups

https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

I even… buy music on iTunes… and overwrite all of their metadata with MusicBrainz's.

I haven't tried bandcamp but iTunes is annoying for me today. Features like the "complete my album" and recommendations no longer exist except inside Apple Music.

It is so damn hard to find media in other languages, and there is no reason for it. The US and Germany are both very technologically advanced countries producing a great amount of media in their own majority languages, but as a German speaker in the US, Harry Potter is about the only German language novel I can reliably find. I like Harry Potter, sure, but I like other books too. I shouldn't have to fly to Germany to find them.

Another thing. I buy most movies I like on iTunes, but I have an issue with the films one of my favorite directors; Werner Herzog. The company that distributes his films on iTunes has decided to mostly make his films available with only a dubbed English soundtrack rather than the original German with subtitles. Even though I don't speak German, hearing the original actors voices gives me a better feel of what the director was doing. Herzog actually shot and edited two different versions of Nosferatu, but his ear for english, or his actors comfort with English make the english version clunky and stilted. In Aguirre, the Wrath of God, the voice actor doing the English for Klaus Kinski can't convey the delusional desperation in the closing speech to the monkeys on the drifting raft the way Kinski's voice can.

Interestingly, I recently bought Almodovar's Women on Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. It defaults to a dubbed version, so every time I watch it, I have to reconfigure my AppleTV to play the Spanish, but add english subtitles (a setting that I have to back out when done because it screws up all my other films). Its funny because several of the characters in the film are actors that do voice dubbing, and there are several scenes where they are dubbing an American film into Spanish. Translating that to a english language film it seems like she is dubbing an English language film into English. kind of absurd.

This is so true. I have a decently fast connection (75mbps) and Netflix's own speed test tells me the pipe really is that fat. YouTube can play 1080p60fps content without breaking a sweat. But Netflix is always blurry af. I tried firefox Chrome edge and even the native windows app. The quality is always lesser than what you can get on YouTube. It's the same on Android. I think it doesn't even show me 720p on my 1440p phone. Even when I pre-download something so the network strength is not an issue.

On the other hand, Amazon prime content is crispy clear 1080p most of the times.

Other browsers are at a lesser resolution, I believe it was 720p but that could be wrong.

Edit: yup, 720p on everything except IT.

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742

Quote:

    Google Chrome

        Up to 720p on Windows, Mac, and Linux

        Up to 1080p on Chrome OS

    Internet Explorer up to 1080p

    Microsoft Edge up to 4K*

    Mozilla Firefox up to 720p

    Opera up to 720p

    Safari up to 1080p on Mac OS X 10.10.3 or later

As I said, the weird part is that their is no improvement in quality even if you pre-download the content.

I understand that there are business and licensing reasons for that, but it is still a bummer to use a much inferior second rate version of the website.

I generally found that buying a season pass on iTunes typically gives you episodes as soon as they come out. They often offer shows in the original version and with German subtitles/audio. In original versions, the shows get released in parallel with the US. And if there's something missing, I use an US iTunes account (Apple TV 4 permits quick account switching).

Because apparently fuck japanese shows, both ways (right holder side and distributor side).

Netflix is getting better at this game, but worldwide same time release is still more of a miracle than a standard procedure. If it ever gets release outside of japan in the first place.

Got burned once when my flatmate downloaded family guy and we got "mail" by an attorney of 20th century fox...

But yes, I got Netflix and Amazon Prime too. They simply don't have everything in every language.

Why? You have to get through tons of ads, have to hope they are of decent quality, etc. With BT I download, and in about 5 minutes I have the whole thing in HD.

All streaming in HD in about 5 seconds.

> All streaming in HD in about 5 seconds.

Yeah, until it's not. I mean sure, 20 seconds of low quality is not the end of the world. But there is no reason it should be that crappy. And they are competing against easy and free, having only "moral high ground" as the competitive advantage. So at the very least, they shouldn't be worse.

I literally never have 20 seconds of low quality on Netflix et al. It is sharp HD from the moment that I start streaming (UnityMedia with 200 MBit/s downstream).

Example: I just watched "Dark" and it defaulted to English dub, but it just took a second to switch it to German with English subtitles.

(Being Dutch, I am used to having subtitles, so for some reason I prefer English subtitles over audio only. I guess that I have to concentrate less with subtitles.)

Plus the connection is not very good for streaming, so torretning is the route to go. We tried cable, but the number of adverts and the length was insane (I'm originally from the UK, I seem to recall being annoyed at the sheer quantity of ads when have visited the US as well)

Even worse is although most films at the cinema come out dubbed in our language or at the very least with subtitles, Netflix doesn’t have any content in our language or subtitles. It does have an option for Russian, but most people under 40 don’t speak it.

I wrote above about why this is, and you're right, it is artificial, but it has nothing to do with technology.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16360889