Music recommendations feels like somebody constantly prodding you with "oh don't like this? try this!"
Perhaps it was the combative nature that made them so much fun.
Reddit has, for good or bad, always attracted a "help all newbies" mentality too.
I'm not complaining most of the time, but sometimes I want to be able to spend a day working mindlessly on my computer to try new things and fool around.
One other factor not commonly mentioned is that many people ossify and have difficulty expending the mental energy to seek out new music. I personally don't do that anymore but I certainly did for a while when I was much more stressed out with work. Additionally, some genres themselves seem to get into a rut and tap out (let's not forget the "punk's not dead" attempts at denying reality, for instancee)
Nah, back then I just used LimeWire to download fake Weird Al Yankovic songs.
Though, I did discover the Avalanches because a guildmate I met while playing an MMO sent me the MP3 in MSN Messenger.
edit - it's not as fun as I remember it used to be
IIRC there was also something vaporwave-related (predictably).
(Dammit, this all was really long ago.)
/mu/ collaboratively produces albums all the time. I was present for and might have contributed to this one: https://millennialdreamcorp.bandcamp.com/album/drake-josh-jo...
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20080514213709/http://c8.com/
But as we have so much storage space and bandwidth the interest of newer, better audio codec wind down. 20 years later we still dont have anything that gives CD / 128kbps MP3 quality at half the bitrate. Instead we all went with 256Kbps AAC, and may be soon lossless. I wish MPC ( Musepack ) has taken off though, I still think it sounds better than AAC.
The same may happen to video too. The rate of Mobile 5G bandwidth improvement is much faster than video codec adoption. We used to care about sub- 1Mbps bitrate, now it is largely gone in developed counties.
Still, I am surprised Foobar2K getting updates in 2022.
Why shouldn't it? It's still perfectly fine with a lot of extensibility. It's one of the rare desktop apps that I'll not easily give up for a web-based alternative. Having an offline music collection is just different. I don't know how to explain it. I know it's stupid but it feels like, when I actually purchase albums, they sound better than streaming. It's the value my subconscious assigns for the things I pay for directly perhaps. Still silly but, perhaps.
No? Opus 1.3 96k is slightly worse than mp3 192k CBR. Previous listening tests just always compared 96k opus+AAC to mp3 128k because mp3 is just that bad (and mp3 would still lose).
The last group listening test was in 2014. Which was touched on in this thread [1]. And in general I believe and agree with IgorC. Opus has gotten better, but the last test results still remains largely the same.
On the subject of looking this up my HA account is over 20 years old. Oh My.
I remember ripping a few things in Musepack a very long time ago.
Now I use ALAC for lossless (it supports 24-bit 192khz now!) and AAC for lossy, because they are standardised, use the MP4 container, and seem to be the most widely supported.
Some of What's Vanity house stars are now real stars with tours around the world, like "The Flashbulb"
edit: ok I did confuse them, see reply
It might be a little late now, but in the early days, they seemed more than happy to have former What.CD users (provided they were in good standing) on board. There was an interview, but it wasn't a big deal.
It put things into perspective for many.
red, ops, slsk
The powers that be truly did destroy something great, if there's a tracker that's anything like it I'd happily rent a seedbox again.
Even now most music streaming services will only give you a single crummy option of the album version to listen to, usually some stupid remaster, AM sometimes gives lets you listen to the original but it's far from perfect.
It seems that the "stream any song instantly" usecase is winning out, but I really pine for some metadata / playlist overlay that I could use to regain this sort of control of my music streaming.
I was a Winamp guy on Windows, now I'm using Swinsian on Mac and both GoneMad and PlayerPro on Android.
I replaced my usage of spotify with these two and its been great. I also enjoy having fine grained control over my listening, and streaming services were sorely lacking.
Possibly ironically, both of those examples work on current versions of the Music app on macOS, and will work with both local and cloud files in your library. There are many valid reasons to dump on The Application Formerly Known As iTunes, but it remains more capable at library management than I think it's usually given credit for.
(N.B.: the same cannot be said for its iOS counterpart, which can sync smart playlists but not create them, and seems to have dropped support for star ratings completely.)
They can pry my music from my cold dead hands.
Basically type throw your music on a cloud or a combination of ones, Astiga scans these clouds and presents all the music it finds as one library which you can browse and play from the browser.
https://swinsian.com/ is another choice. Not a free or oss one though.
But what you describe takes work and Spotify radio and similar features from their competitors don't.
As someone who also built up a big library during the golden ages of music piracy, the primary benefit of the Spotify-like services is not their libraries. It is that they remove the need to do the work in both music selection and discovery. They provide a middle ground between just random music selection and entirely intentional selection. Sometimes I just want a specific musical vibe without having to design a playlist or choose a specific singular artist. In addition these services are smart enough to understand that vibe and mix new music in that fits that vibe which I therefore might also enjoy.
Is there anything that can adequately replicate this type of radio style listening while using one's own library that doesn't require them to spend hours and hours both proactively seeking out new music and meticulously updating their library's metadata using something like Musicbrainz (or whatever the modern equivalent now is)?
And this right here is the problem. It makes you lazy, it makes music discovery a passive process. It kills your soul. By requiring active effort to engage with a scene and music itself, you regain a certain beauty and excitement to music because it becomes an interactive process and something you are part of. Once you have "earned" a new album and or band by discovering it on your own whims, you are more motivated to share it and discuss it with people as opposed to just appreciating it as an individual.
Sure, there's a time and a place where you do just want to kick on a vibe and do something else (especially at work) and for that AM Stations or Spotify Radio is adequate, however, it is a gilded cage.
You have to understand that this reads like gatekeeping nonsense to a lot of people.
So much more exciting and engaging than fucking Spotify radio.
Shame the macOS one is basically nothing like the Windows one. I'd recommend Cog for something similar for macOS.
https://cog.losno.co/