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Posted by mcgin 18 hours ago

The lost joy of music piracy(www.pigeonsandplanes.com)
759 points | 512 commentspage 3
IndySun 2 hours ago|
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L23UJfvptd8&ra=m
stronglikedan 3 hours ago||
I miss collecting all kinds of MP3s, burning them to CDs, labelling them, sometimes even printing out the CD artwork for them, organizing them in binders, and then never listening to them. I wish I had that kind of free time as an adult! I should check the garage...
whatcd 1 hour ago||
Oink.me.uk, What.CD, and waffles.fm were amazing

RIP

rdwrrr 15 hours ago||
Call me old fashioned but I still collect FLAC files on my server. Using plex on my mobile devices is great, even in my car things just work. The pain of manually editing metadata is long gone, the horror shudders
juvvel 12 hours ago|
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duxup 7 hours ago||
Great read.

Those days of the internet were fun, but also a product of their times. Whatever niche worlds we make now won’t be like the past, they have to be new.

In my time pirating I used to take tracks from The Sound Of Music and rename the files / metadata something like <popular metal band> - <popular song by different popular metal band>.

I got a lot of downloads.

gitowiec 4 hours ago||
I searched today for UK garage music blog and stupid LLMs gave me links to services with links to Bandcamp, YouTube and SoundCloud. It didn't understand the phrase "music blog" so I added mp3 and mixtape words. Still couldn't find good place like it was 2000.
ColdStream 17 hours ago||
Huh... I'm still waiting for Bandcamp and Soundcloud to close their streaming download hole. It has been a few years now.
nmfisher 16 hours ago||
If you're on Bandcamp or Soundcloud it's usually because you want to support artists directly, I doubt many people are purely interested in getting free music rips.
ColdStream 16 hours ago||
Pretty much. There would be some folks who are scraping large amounts of stuff but I don't think it is a giant issue.
9dev 17 hours ago|||
Posting that here is one of the more promising ways of achieving that
noduerme 16 hours ago|||
That's such small potatoes. Anyone putting out an album on Bandcamp is probably thrilled that someone would want to pirate it.
tmountain 16 hours ago||
As a musician, I can agree with this 100%.
noduerme 16 hours ago||
Ditto!
ColdStream 16 hours ago|||
Yeah probably. But it also depends on how much it is exploited.

If 0.1% of people do it, then it probably isn't worth while. If it 10% of the audience, that needs to be focused on.

markasoftware 16 hours ago|||
does it matter as long as yt-dlp is maintained?
BoingBoomTschak 16 hours ago||
Some people want more than "mystery meat" levels of audio quality.
ColdStream 16 hours ago|||
I once did a blind test on myself. A FLAC audio file and a 128Kbit Ogg vorbis file of the same track that I could switch between as I pleased but without knowing which was playing. Yeah, I cannot tell the difference.

I am absolutely sure others can, but not me. I also think credit goes to far better encoders today than what we had 25 years ago.

bluescrn 16 hours ago|||
Hearing also degrades over time. In my 20s I was a lot more fussy about audio formats and hi-fi gear.

Approaching 50, with less sensitive ears and a bit of tinnitus, I’m happy with the convenience of Bluetooth headphones and whatever format Spotify uses.

MSFT_Edging 11 hours ago||||
I did this with a japanese punk band and when I finally got on a private tracker, I redownloaded them and the quality difference was night and day. I have a huge backlog of mid-grade MP3s from TPB back in the day and I'll occasionally download a second flac version of the albums just to get the dynamic range.
Semaphor 6 hours ago||
A lot of old stuff was also encoded way worse than one might think from the alleged bitrate. A while ago I went through a ton of old files, and everything that sounded shitty (or, far more commonly, stuff I downloaded but didn’t care about) got yeeted.
seba_dos1 16 hours ago||||
Opus - perhaps, but claiming that 128kbps Vorbis is transparent would be rather stretching it (unless it's a mono stream); though how easily it will be detectable depends on the kind of music used to test it. However, if you added, say, Bluetooth A2DP to the mix and made it go through a lossy encoder again the difference should be pretty obvious to anyone with good ears.
t-3 15 hours ago||||
I can't tell the difference with most headphones, but with monitors or a good system in a good listening environment there are some details that get lost in compression, but there's essentially 0 difference from losslezd if I rip a CD to opus or mp3 rather than from a stream.
BoingBoomTschak 7 hours ago||||
Properly encoded Vorbis, Opus or AAC (even Musepack) certainly reach transparency very quick, but who knows what horrible sources were used on non-official YT music? And what dismal remasters?
gfody 15 hours ago||||
crappy speakers?
d3rockk 7 hours ago||
I was about to say the same thing..

I use a dual A7X setup with a Sub10 Mk2 in a proper studio listening environment, and I can easily hear the difference between a low‑quality MP3 and a fully lossless WAV/FLAC. I do have trained ears, but even an untrained listener could probably notice that level of difference.

BoingBoomTschak 7 hours ago||
Define low-quality. Encoded at V[0-2] with a recent LAME, I doubt the difference is more than ABX nitpick material; and that despite MP3's inherent limitations (like https://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=LAME_Y_switch...).

I use a pair of calibrated Genelec 8341 btw.

archagon 15 hours ago|||
Yeah, but people aren’t uploading high quality music to begin with. It’s probably like two or three levels of compressed by the time you yt-dlp it.
Semaphor 16 hours ago|||
But bandcamp is only 128 kbit MP3 for free streaming, now that’s not a mystery, but probably also not worse than whatever YT offers.
einsteinx2 11 hours ago||
If it is 128kbps MP3 then it’s slightly worse than YouTube which generally has 128kbps AAC and OPUS versions of everything.
flipped 17 hours ago||
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andruby 13 hours ago||
I got into Techno by cheer coincidence. I was 13 in 1999 and browsing Napster. I had followed the 1998 World Cup the year before with France - Brasil in the final and (the older) Ronaldo stealing the show.

So here I see music from what I think is DJ Ronaldo. And this is when download 1 mp3 could easily take half an hour on our dial-up connections. So we only downloading 1 or 2 songs max.

Turns out it’s not the footballer but DJ Rolando with Nights of the Jaguar. Brilliant techno song. First time I heard anything like it. Hooked for life. Bought it on vinyl a few years later. Became a techno DJ and event organiser for a while.

inigyou 12 hours ago|
Is Nights of the Jaguar considered techno now? I associate the genre of techno with, like, very repetitive rhythms.
have_faith 12 hours ago|||
It's a bit "bright" for a lot of techno, but it is very repetitive. Techno is a very broad genre with lot's of fuzzy edges. I'm suddenly reminded of Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music: https://music.ishkur.com/
andruby 11 hours ago|||
Genres are fuzzy. It opened the door for me towards Derrick May, Adam Beyer, Carl Cox, etc.

If you had to put a label on it, what genre would you file it under?

sondr3 16 hours ago|
I still have my invitation email to What.CD and cherish the stuff I found and downloaded on it. After it went away I didn't do the reasonable thing and migrate to RED/OPS immediately, though I've joined OPS in recent years. It does not feel the same, but that's probably more me being older and less optimistic than during the What.CD days. I have fond memories of reading the forum threads about jazz when I was getting into it, or looking at all the weird collections people made (I vividly remember laughing at the "albums with feet on the cover"-collection) or finding really obscure, local artists you couldn't find anywhere else or going to the public library to rent CD's to rip and upload for credits. Fun times.
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