streaming sucks

[Saddam Hussain Obama]

have you ever thought about how new streaming is to our lives? its pretty crazy to think about how it got so big so quickly some background

napster in the 90s allowed people to get free music metallica got pissed napster got sued and went out of business
steve jobs made itunes and everyone went to that
spotify and pandora came out
spotify somehow became huge
now we have spotify ruling as the kings of music streaming with apple launching apple music

so now everyone uses streaming and it has its advantages but it also has alot of disadvantages i want to talk about including

1: lack of songs
for example garth brooks is only on amazon music and youtube reuploads
2: spyware
spotify and others spy on your every choice for some this is good for convenience for others its a problem
3: poor audio quality
tidal and apple music have lossless but most are not as high quality as CDs not a big dealbreaker for me but worth mentioning
4: songs getting pulled
this is an issue for example taylor swift pulled her music for a short period and neil young pulled his music from streaming also for the longest time AC/DC tool bob seger and led zepplin were not on streaming services with the before mentioned garth brooks only putting his music on amazon music
5: poor artist pay
artists have to split most money with spotify meaning they do not make much money as compared to CDs where they made much more money

so whats the solution my solution is

1: rip mp3s from youtube
for archiving and for MP3 players
2: buying CDs
CDs are great and should make a comeback you can then rip these CDs for MP3s
3: return to MP3s
MP3 players were based and kino and should make a comeback

theres been many videos talking about this if you wanna watch them i may link them later but discuss it here

TLDR buy CDs pardon my grammer im lazy

 

[Cat tit bingo]

I'm that hipster asshole who still uses an ipod for 2 main reasons.
1. Piracy is still extremely fucking easy. You can download hundreds of flac quality albums in minutes.
2. You can't call an ipod. How often does your music get interrupted by calls, text, updates, notifications, and worst of all streaming ads.
It also pretty piss easy to mod an ipod for anywhere from 256GB to 2 TB depending on the model and large battery's that can last full days. You can still go the legal route if you want by buying a bunch of cds, most have download codes and for the rest I hope you still have an optical drive for those high quality rips™

 

[generic sauce]

I pirate my music and have my own funkwhale "pod" for streaming music to my phone.

 

[Bubble Ba'ath]

Same, I still have an Ipod and a vast DVD/Blue Ray library and get physical copies of any movie I know I will want to re-watch multiple times. The fact is, things cycle through streaming services too fast, and only the lameist coporate consoomer dreck is ever perpetually retained. Buying digital copies is also really just a more long term rent as you have no power over it and they can revoke hosting the material without compensating you. Plus now there are so many more streaming services that you would go broke using enough of them to legitimately stream most things.

At this point I actually think physical rental stores for movies make more sense than using multiple (non-pirate) services. It would certainly be cheaper anyway. One day, if things keep going this way, such places might even come back-albeit in a limited sense.

 

[Saddam Hussain Obama]

I'm that hipster asshole who still uses an ipod for 2 main reasons.
1. Piracy is still extremely fucking easy. You can download hundreds of flac quality albums in minutes.
2. You can't call an ipod. How often does your music get interrupted by calls, text, updates, notifications, and worst of all streaming ads.
It also pretty piss easy to mod an ipod for anywhere from 256GB to 2 TB depending on the model and large battery's that can last full days. You can still go the legal route if you want by buying a bunch of cds, most have download codes and for the rest I hope you still have an optical drive for those high quality rips™

I pirate my music and have my own funkwhale "pod" for streaming music to my phone.

where do you guys pirate legally obtain MP3s or other downloadable music?

 

[generic sauce]

where do you guys pirate legally obtain MP3s or other downloadable music?

Private tracker

 

[Dysnomia]

At this point I actually think physical rental stores for movies make more sense than using multiple (non-pirate) services. It would certainly be cheaper anyway. One day, if things keep going this way, such places might even come back-albeit in a limited sense.

I think it was a mistake to forsake physical media for the convenience of digital. We're paying the price when you need several costly subscriptions to legally enjoy media. The prices keep going up and the content keeps getting worse. I don't really care about most original programming on Netflix, Amazon ect... I want to watch classic stuff. If you look at the horror section on Netflix it's mostly Syfy level garbage. Where are the good movies? Are they too costly to stream compared to Z grade trash and movies from India and wherever?

It's easier to pirate or buy used DVDs. We let these streaming services just run wild. It was supposed to be a cheap, higher quality alternative to cable. Why pay a lot for 500 channels when you only watch five of them? Now it's "pay $15 a month each for several streaming services just to watch five movies you really like". It's the same damn thing in a different package. Fuck that. I'm pirating.

 

[M3xus]

We vastly underestimated the money legacy media would throw to get their own streaming services running. Now it's the new cable, and the problem of "there's nothing good on TV" is even more acute than before.

Re: where are the good movies?

If they had the good movies on there nobody would watch their "oh so great" original programming.

 

[Snorky]

I agree, but there are still good solutions other than piracy and buying that are out there.

Bandcamp offers an interesting compromise between streaming and owning music. You still buy the albums like you do with CDs, but you can stream the music online if you choose. You also get the ability to download DRM-free FLACs of the music you bought. The downside is that not everyone puts their music on Bandcamp, so if you want DRM-free high quality music files you're essentially forced to pirate them if they aren't on there. I actually use this so that I can have something to listen to even when I don't have shit for internet.

As for movies, I wish a solution like Bandcamp existed, but nope. Physical media is still the way to go. If you want the ability to jump directly to movies instead of waiting through dozens of retarded advertisements, just get a Blu-ray drive for your computer and then use something to rip only the movie track itself and convert it to a format that doesn't have shit for DRM. Then you can watch the film wherever and however the fuck you want without getting screwed in the ass.

 

[Phalanges Mycologist]

I think it was a mistake to forsake physical media for the convenience of digital. We're paying the price when you need several costly subscriptions to legally enjoy media. The prices keep going up and the content keeps getting worse. I don't really care about most original programming on Netflix, Amazon ect... I want to watch classic stuff. If you look at the horror section on Netflix it's mostly Syfy level garbage. Where are the good movies? Are they too costly to stream compared to Z grade trash and movies from India and wherever?

It's easier to pirate or buy used DVDs. We let these streaming services just run wild. It was supposed to be a cheap, higher quality alternative to cable. Why pay a lot for 500 channels when you only watch five of them? Now it's "pay $15 a month each for several streaming services just to watch five movies you really like". It's the same damn thing in a different package. Fuck that. I'm pirating.

For some I can see the utility of streaming music - especially if your into some smaller genera's like I am Apple music is great for that for a lot of the bands / music I like they don't have enough fans to do a decent CD or vynal run. I'm talking about things like Bard Core (modern / semi modern songs performed like medieval bards) and Neo-Folk / Neo-Pagan but when they do offer a option to buy Physical media I do.

I've never been much of a fan of TV apart from a few sci-fi shows and maybe some Docu Drama short run series, or some of the older TV shows like This Old House, New Yankee Workshop, Rex Hunt, Screaming Reels, River Cottage & Cook On the Wild Side (I liked it before I knew what a cunt HFW was and the info is good) but they are nearly all on YT now and I've downloaded a copy of what I want to keep long ago very little new shows appeal to me, and the old guys an some new make there own content now and it's normally pretty high quality (I've been thinking of starting a Trade / Craft tube thread) - sadly most of these shows never got a physical media run, but normally did a book or two.

Films, I very rarely watch now I'll buy maybe one or two DVD's a year for a film I like an rip a copy and keep it on my external drives, I've been to the cinema twice in the last few years to see 1917 and Openhimer and I'd buy them on DVD rather than stream them, if anything I'd love both of them to get released with a really nice big fat book about the history and production.

I listen to a lot of Audiobooks like 5 or 6 a month, but I buy Audible Credits an keep a copy of the ones I've purchased, this is one area I think that Digital beats out physical copies because Audiobooks of longer books took up a lot of space and where difficult to find unabridged compared to now where 20 hours + long books are the norm.

The only two subscription services I have are Audible £18 a month and Apple Music on a Family plan and my Mrs batters that one to death at times an it's about the same off the top of my head so £35 a month isn't too much for me but if it goes above £40 in the next year or so I'll likely dust of the old Tri-Corn hat an peg leg.

 

[anustart76]

I use streaming services for discovery but pirate anything I care about anyway.

 

[WTBOnlineFather]

It's not crazy at all, you know it was always gonna happen as soon as phones became able to connect to the capital I Internet and stay perpetually online. Spotify capitalized on being the youtube of music, it has an algo to constantly keep feeding you new shit that you don't have to pay anything extra for beyond the standard monthly sub, no more rolling around a dollar in your hand pondering if you really wanna buy that one song on itunes. They make up the difference by colluding with record companies to rip off artists, to keep costs down.

That's the reason I use it as well, for me it's a vehicle to discover new music first and foremost, compile playlists, stuff like that. Whenever they delete anything I like I just pirate it. Eventually once I buy a larger hard drive I wanna pirate my entire spotify library.

As far as quality is concerned spotify really isn't that bad. It's certainly way better than youtube and with the music I listen to the deciding factor is usually the specific master/release, of which spotify typically offers several, rather than encoding.

 

[I'm Retarded?]

streaming mainly blows because, like all consumer tech services, it's built around catering to convenience at the expense of literally everything else. quality, reliability, ownership, cultivation of the global community of music creators, these are all dead last afterthoughts if they're considered at all. consumers are shamefully retarded nigger cattle in the general case, but music especially is a market absolutely dominated by some of the most retarded motherfuckers on Earth. the most common use case for any music service is some variety of faggot looking up some shitty song they heard on the radio, or binging Taylor Swift, or some gay ass K-pop, or a million other astroturfed pop singers like Drake, The Weeknd, Miley Cyrus, shit I couldn't imagine unironically listening to in my worst nightmares. these shallow idiots do not have the horsepower to contemplate literally anything other than what the culture industry vomits onto the surface of their brain and are thus easily frustrated by anything requiring even rudimentary problem solving abilities. this means that music streaming services are mainly in the business of providing access to the same three dozen most popular artists by way of an interface with soothing solid colors and lots of big buttons, as there is little consumer pressure for much else. here's a fun data point: the most popular music streaming platform is overwhelmingly fucking YouTube, a site designed from the ground up for video media, because the most popular way to listen to music is just typing the song name into Google, or blindly clicking on whatever YouTube's ad revenue driven recommendation algo serves up. I hate the antichrist.

Bandcamp offers an interesting compromise between streaming and owning music.

Bandcamp solved a number of problems with the process of buying music, namely with being able to download songs in any format you want as many times as you want, and giving consumers a way to ensure the vast majority of their purchase money goes to the actual artist rather than some jew in a licensing office. unfortunately Epic ruined fucking everything by buying it for no reason, then selling it off to some reptilian recording industry startup, who then fired half its staff, specifically targeting anybody who had been involved in the company's unionizing earlier in the year. this just happened back in October so I'm sure they're still working on their new management strategy, which I anticipate will include plenty of creeping, scummy monetization. it sucks ass because I have a ton of music on my Bandcamp account, my preferred approach has been to buy music directly from that site in addition to streaming it off Spotify when I don't have access to my library, since I mainly listen to destitute indie artists with no exposure. for fuck's sake I just want to give money to the people who actually make the god damn music rather than jews running a shitty middleman service that produces nothing other than a client consisting entirely of an embedded HTML5 web page and a basic recommendation algo that operates on a small subset of the incredible amount of data the client silently harvests. there's a site called Artcore that similarly focuses on helping creators as much as possible but basically nobody knows it exists, so until the new owner torpedoes Bandcamp's reputation by running it like shit and triggers a mass exodus, the future is looking grim for Bandcamp Enjoyers like me.

 

[Jason Wynn]

They said I was crazy pirating terabyte after terabyte of movies and tv shows! But who’s crazy now?!

*does crazy 1800s prospector dance while cackling*

Seriously though this is why I pirate shit. Get to watch what I want to without paying bullshit prices and not have to worry about it getting yanked for being too offensive

 

[Fascist Kirk]

Buying CD's is not a bad idea and Since 2016 I have been building up USED DVD collection, all those edits of classic movies on streaming services rewriting history to be politically acceptable in the modern Rainbow safe space world.

CD's were a pain in the ass expensive, and since the advent of MP3's why would you ever go back to such a flawed outdated technology if for no other reason rip and convert to MP3's and save the cd's as masters. Even the price point for used CD's is more than used DVD's that I typically find for $5 dollars and under in Vynol shops, Garage Sales, and Goodwill.

 

[AgendaPoster]

so whats the solution my solution is

You zoomers are pretty retarded.
First you cry that audiophiles are stupid; then you moan that the 128kbps slopaudio you get served on streaming is too low quality; you probably have some shitty gamer headphones that muddy everything too.
If you want good quality music, you need a proper setup. With good headphones or speakers. Again, actual monitor speakers (studio gear basically) are more accurate and usually cheaper than the audiophile stuff. When you're on the road, gym, running etc. the 128kbps is just fine anyway, and some half-assed headphones will do.
For home and some comfier listening, you want to download your shit from a tracker, in lossless format. Unless you wanna pay, that is. You can find even 24/96 music, vinyl rips done with pro gear, FLACs, SACDs, DTS etc.
Of course, with the zoomer levels of sperginess, it would be a miracle if they learn what these do

 

[Lord Xenu]

There is a bunch of decent & fairly cheap audio players (Shanling, Fiio, etc) that support lossless audio with good sound. I've used Shanling M0 as my daily driver for the last 3-4 years. It only has one button and a tiny touchscreen as well as a non-user replaceable battery (BS) that is getting sketchy, so I've been starting to think about maybe getting a new one, even though this one still does the job. A few months ago I found out that the mid-range Sony Walkman DAP's (NW-A55) have custom firmware available to make them sound like the top dollar devices. Apparently the hardware is nearly identical, it's hobbled in the software (another BS anti-customer practice). A good budget solution is the LG V30 which has a wolfson quad DAC (a decent audio chipset, same as in many DAP's) and is available used for $100. LineageOS recently added official support for this device because of its popularity.

For the most part, I source media from torrent sites, but recently I found out about qobuz and qobuz-dl. I havent run into any rate limiting or anything like that and all the files are largely tagged correctly. They don't have everything in 24/96 but there is quite a bit. What isnt hi-res is at least cd quality flac. So I've been re-downloading a lot of stuff I already have that's questionable, or that I couldn't easily find on torrent site to upload. Generally, I avoid paying for any digital goods. But if theres something thats not widely available, and I personally would like to have, I dont mind paying for it to share with others. Over the last 2 months (you get a free month with qobuz) I downloaded 30gb of hi-res audio from torrents that were either dead, or unavalaible in flac, for the low, low, price of $10. I haven't got around to creating torrents yet, but I will eventually.

 

[William Afton]

i listen to music on youtube only , I don't understand why people use spotify. Just get an adblocker and it's easy.

 

[raspberry mocha]

I pirated even when CDs were the dominant medium. I wonder how many zoomers are just unaware they can make their own physical media and nobody will knock down their door for it.

 

[Never Scored]

It stupidly easy to just rip the songs you like from Youtube in MP3 format, and while it violates Youtube's TOS(lol) I don't even think it's illegal.