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Why media fans want to escape algorithms with CDs, DVDs and vinyl

70 points · 109 comments · beardyw

  1. pkthunder · · focus · HN ↗
    I’ve been going through my own personal revival of physical media - mostly audio. I don’t miss streaming at all.

    Every CD I buy gets ripped to a NAS that hosts the music behind Navidrone where I can stream to my vehicle using Play:Sub (thanks to Tailscale for enabling all of this to work for me!).

    I am just so enamored with being able to get the best of both worlds - my own music, anywhere.

    I do wish I could figure out some sort of recommendation system to find new magic, though. Obviously not to steam new/unowned songs, just to point me in a direction next time I go to the store.

    1. this_user · · focus · HN ↗
      And how many CDs can you buy per month for the price of a Spotify subscription? I am not going to be spending hundreds of Euros per month on physical media, and I also value my time too much to bother with ripping and converting these, just so I can end up with a worse experience for more money, while also producing a bunch of unnecessary plastic rubbish.
      1. flyinghamster · · focus · HN ↗
        After ten years of Spotify subscriptions, you own nothing. Put that $12.99 or more per month into discs instead, and you'd have quite a nice music collection that's still yours ten years later.
        1. zen928 · · focus · HN ↗
          You dont own those either. If you lose your copy, it's gone forever with no remediation or claim of ownership except at the specific retailer you did your transaction at. The source where it came from is unaffected by your loss, and they can decide at any time to stop selling their discs with or without your involvement. The nostalgic rose tinted pandering behind vinyls and old media conveniently forgets the introduction of digital storage to actually ensure reliable redundancy, and so "buying" physical media is just a smoke and mirrors way of saying the disc is for vain aesthetics while the actual mental relief comes from the secondary process being able to digitize it locally.

          Following the same mindset of circumventing the traditional process, I could spend one single month ripping every single song I possibly can from Spotify and have the same claim of ownership over their files that you do with a much larger variety and without all the wasted physical space on assets that are immediately digitized. The only benefit to your method is that you feel like it justifies hoarding.

          1. ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
            Presumably people also have some sense of fair exchange when buying the disc to rip vs. ripping from Spotify. If you want to be strictly rational you can of course skip the Spotify part too and just pirate it.
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