lawrence
Jonas WisserI truly can't express right now how mad I am about music streaming generally and the absolute decay of Apple's iTunes ecosystem in favor of Apple Music specifically.
Do yourself a favor: own a copy of your music. Don't use a streaming service.
Several times tonight I've had to torrent albums I've paid for because Music.app simply won't let me download a non-DRMed version. Instead, it repeatedly serves me the DRMed Apple Music version.
The iTunes ecosystem had literally one job. Fucking embarrassing.
It's getting harder and harder to recommend Apple anything to family or friends. But the big problem is that nothing else is getting better at the same rate Apple software and ecosystems are getting worse, so I'm increasingly tempted to tell them "Just avoid using computers”.
I am *this close* to telling everyone I know that CDs and Discmans are the future.
I legitimately think I'm going to invest in a USB CD drive and buy all my future albums on CD. That way I can rip to lossless but also just have a physical music library.
Gssy
eila169
BoredomFestival
UK-Birmingham_UTV@jwisser @bigzaphod Analog. It’s where it’s at.
Nelson@jwisser Any physical media is the future, IMHO. Personally I've been buying vinyl and even cassette tapes lately, but that's in part because I'm cursed by a lack of working CD players (my Discman seems unrepairable, but my older Walkman works fine, go figure). Anyway I already have enough CDs in my collection to last a lifetime when I do get a CD player working again.
P.S. Avoid computers.
mbrdev@jwisser minidisc was my jam, if there was a phone that could double as a minidisc player I’d switch to it in a heartbeat.
Emily King@jwisser I'm glad I never got rid of my CD collection.
Baron Vonskinnback@jwisser when everyone was purging their CD collections I was buying up their now unwanted collections for absolutely no money, I did the same with DVD's & Blu-ray's, people would come round my house & mock my cabinet full to bursting with these apparently dead mediums, the fact that I had to take time to rip them all to a digital format & store them like an animal on a NAS drive & run them through media apps & create NAT rules on my internal network to access them when away from my home...
D.Hamlin.Music@jwisser Lenovo is apparently rolling out an Android PC in the near future, maybe that'll end up being good.
@jwisser if you think that's bad, you should see the nightmare that YouTube Music has become. Google Play Music was a solid product, but YTM is a goddam insult
Reinder Dijkhuis Does Art
Tom Lorenz@jwisser I have a 2009 Mac Mini with macOS 10.4 and iTunes 9 on it. I keep that thing around as the Source Of Truth for my local music collection. I’ll either rip CDs or digitize vinyl and put the tracks on it. Version 9 was the last one Apple released before they started making some awful (for me) changes in its functionality, so that’s what I cling to. I also keep a copy of that music library up on my server so I can access it via either Plex or Synology Audio.
Charlotte Ariel Finn@jwisser iTunes somehow gets worse every time I use it and I feel it's gotta be deliberate to push me towards streaming.
@Charlotte It's pushed me over to @edwellbrook's Doppler instead. https://brushedtype.co/doppler/
But sometimes I still have to deal with Music.app—for example, because someone asked me to export them a bunch of my old playlists—and I lose my goddamned mind.
eestileib (she/hers)iTunes has been shit for almost 2 decades. Bloat city.
Chip Unicorn@jwisser
It's better for the musicians, too. If I recall correctly, they get a bigger cut of the money than from streaming services.
It's better for the musicians, too. If I recall correctly, they get a bigger cut of the money than from streaming services.
Martin P.@jwisser I have gigs and gigs of music accumulated over decades on hard drives, and I just got a new Mac after years on a PC and Apple Music makes it, as far as I can tell, impossible to play that music on my hard drive, like I used to on the windows iTunes app? Wtaf
@PaperCities That's wild. You should be able to import all your files into Music.app, and it *should* be able to play them… but the reason I switched to Doppler is that Music.app sometimes just doesn't play local tracks for me, or clips them at a random duration, or… you get the gist.
@jwisser I mean, I haven’t owned a Mac in 15 years so there’s almost certainly something I’m missing, but iTunes.app on Windows makes it wicked easy and Music.app on the Mac makes it 100% unintuitive
@PaperCities The moment they changed the name of the app from “iTunes" to "Music" was a sign to start making new plans. :-/
@jwisser totally, the writings been on the wall for years, it seems the legacy windows stuff still allowed me to live in the 00’s for just a few more years
Polycraftsman@jwisser I will say that streaming services are nice for initial discovery of new music but I wish I was organized enough to have my ideal selfhosted setup of owned media. For those with the time, budget and inclination you can use JellyFin to host your own streaming server: https://jellyfin.org/
Error Crater@jwisser i've permanently damaged my voice and my ears screaming in fully triggered ADHD rage at apple music for their fantastically bug infested platform. i used to have my diligently archived mp3 files on external hard drives which i could easily download to a personal player when desired...and now if i'm driving in the mountains i have to listen to pop country, praise rock, or one of my few remaining CDs. i screamed "I JUST WANT TO LISTEN TO THE MUSIC THAT I PAID FOR, YOU GREEDY RENTIER CAPITALIST FUCKS" until my eyes bled.
@ErrorCrater Yeah, I suspect my enraged yelling tonight may have permanently affected my new neighbors' opinion of me. 😬
SocietyofRockets@jwisser keep my mp3 library on external hard drive/backup on dropbox + ipod classic for listening
wellidntdiscute@jwisser easier said than done. Also, I'd recommend giving your local public radio's streaming service a go...
@wellidntdiscute No thanks. Radio doesn't suit me.
@jwisser you haven't found a good station. Again, not talking about the commercialized stuff, but the local public radio that shares new artists and opens up your world. For those that dont have collections of their own music (like me who couldn't keep up with the tape/cd/mp3 and wasted a lot of money trying) it offers a cheap way of staying current and discovering new stuff.
Give it a try!
Adlangx
MarkD@jwisser Apart from streamers one day just closing up shop and revoking your DRM keys, how do you stream without connectivity?
FWIW. I use streamers solely for discoverability but buy non-proprietary mp3 or flac from other sources to add to my forever music collection.
Trusting so-called disintermediaters who are actually intermediaters is always a mistake.
Lilith Grace@jwisser iTunes charges artists 85%. Really not great.
Velinion@jwisser
On the Android side the decay has been a constant. Google Play Music? Stupid name, but you could upload your own music collection and stream it from anywhere. Great interface. Google Play Music All Access - added streaming. Later phased out uploading music. Later cancelled the whole service in favor of YouTube Music, a wholly inferior service with a worse interface. I've got my collection on a home server with Plex at the moment.
On the Android side the decay has been a constant. Google Play Music? Stupid name, but you could upload your own music collection and stream it from anywhere. Great interface. Google Play Music All Access - added streaming. Later phased out uploading music. Later cancelled the whole service in favor of YouTube Music, a wholly inferior service with a worse interface. I've got my collection on a home server with Plex at the moment.
Chris@jwisser Yes, I prefer CD's over MP3\AAC
(Matthew)=> 🏳️🌈🇿🇦🎮💻📖@jwisser I ended up using Google Play Music for the longest time because while the app was garbage, the web client let me just get a good old fashioned .zip of an album. It's kinda sad that it folded and now only YouTube Music exists.
I have no nostalgia for iTunes, it was a piece of shit back in the day as well, and I'd use literally anything else, but streaming... It's not great either.
Emeritus Prof Christopher Mayhey, I'm a #vinyljunkie.... nothing will ever replace my LPs (all 5,000 of them!)... I wasn't happy even with CDs, let alone digitalisation & streaming!
Cristin PescosolidoI still have all of my physical media, and I only make digital purchases from places that allow me to download the digital files (flac preferred)
I don't trust streaming services, and most of them don't have the weird stuff that I've collected over the years anyway. and did I mention the quality of the audio streams? gah.
Now to finish digizing a few thousand vinyl LPs... <sigh, so time consuming to do it properly>
Majester IT@jwisser You're going to appreciate the future. Podcastindex.org was started to save podcasting from Apple's poor stewardship and update it's features. They're now tackling music so that musicians can be paid directly and control their own distribution through platforms like wavlake or simple RSS feeds and self-hosting.
aeshnid@jwisser
As a long time Apple/NeXT user, I agree 100% about the #Enshittification of the Music app. The problem of ‘unwanted substitution' is real and extremely annoying. To this I would add the problem of music which is not on the Apple system requiring multiple efforts to upload before it can work on the existing player. The oncoming enshittification of Bandcamp and the eventual fusion of macOS and iOS clearly indicates that things are only going to get worse for us music nerds.
As a long time Apple/NeXT user, I agree 100% about the #Enshittification of the Music app. The problem of ‘unwanted substitution' is real and extremely annoying. To this I would add the problem of music which is not on the Apple system requiring multiple efforts to upload before it can work on the existing player. The oncoming enshittification of Bandcamp and the eventual fusion of macOS and iOS clearly indicates that things are only going to get worse for us music nerds.
highway2009@highway2009 @aeshnid The whole point is to *not* stream music, but keep it locally on all my devices. Thanks tho
@aeshnid @jwisser Flacbox will also work to play music locally. Then to sync your music without a third party cloud provider you could use #syncthing, which is p2p.