• @[email protected]
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    41 year ago

    I used Coolplayer and had a totally awesome Phantom Menace podracing viewer tablet skin I made myself. There was transparency, and the red light I included for shuffle had shading like a real LED, and you could put the buttons ANYWHERE!

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      Depends how far back you go maybe? I remember being able to suss out pretty reliable rips on usenet in the 97-98 timeframe really easily through the alt.binaries groups, and eventually on tpb without too much trouble. On top of that, FLAC just a smidge later.

      • @[email protected]
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        21 year ago

        Look I used a lot of Usenet, it had a lot of benefits, but take a real close look at yourself in the mirror when you ask yourself this.

        Did you just suggest that Usenet is simpler than Spotify? Usenet is great for a lot of reasons, but simplicity is not one of them.

        • @[email protected]
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          1 year ago

          I see your point, but piracy has at all times provided me the music I wanted with the portability I wanted with the quality of files I have wanted.

          I guess it’s a matter of perspective.

          Is there a simple way for Spotify to give me high quality files that I can play offline or host myself with no DRM? (Maybe the answer is yes, but I haven’t had that impression.)

          That’s been my criteria for listening to music pretty much since mp3s came into existence.

          I can’t argue with you very hard though - if the goal is just “something that lets me play music” then I suppose spotify is simpler.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 year ago

      At least now it is pretty simple. Not sure about Spotify, but you can download exact audio files Deezer has. That’s my favorite method unless Deezer has a bad remasters of older albums, then I fall back to Soulseek to do some hunting of better version.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        None of that is more simple than clicking a link and having everything on all of your devices.

        I’m not saying Spotify is the end all. They have a lot of terrible shit. But none of the torrent/usenet based shit or open source crap is easier to use. Nobody is going to secondary sources on Spotify for bad remasters. You are handwaving away the pain in the ass part.

        • @[email protected]
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          21 year ago

          Obviously it’s not more simple and never will be, but at this point pirating music is as simple as it was using ITunes

          • @[email protected]
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            11 year ago

            How many people you know using iTunes for music? The apple folks I know are streaming from Apple music.

            • @[email protected]
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              11 year ago

              Nobody, everyone is streaming since it is more convenient. All I was saying is that getting local music is also more convenient now.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        Not the point now what I suggested but

        Nobody but niche users care. It’s good enough for 98% of users and their speaker quality.

        In fact they are out there in droves buying shitty quality records for the warmth introduced by the format.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        They aren’t cut off in the middle, the wrong song, labeled with the wrong artist, a “rip” from somebody with a microphone and FM radio, corporate honeypots, or literal viruses.

        Kids these days… 🤣

  • @[email protected]
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    281 year ago

    winamp can play online stuff too

    AND offline stuff

    and it has skins

    and its free

    and it has no ads

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      Aside from eminem and robbie whoever, i definitely have a playlist on winamp on my computer right now with those exact songs in it

      Edit: replied to completely wrong comment, soz

        • @[email protected]
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          11 year ago

          This I can’t speak to, so I’ll have to give it a shot. But VLC for a desktop media manager overall is on par with MPC-HC. Like, sure you can force it to do that. But it’s never going to be as competent as a dedicated app.

          Hell even the Winamp revival project WACUP would dare better I wager.

    • @[email protected]
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      261 year ago

      I miss when you could buy CDs and rip them to your computer so if your shitty mp3 died, you could just move everything on there.

      Degrees of freedom revoked

        • @[email protected]
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          1 year ago

          Seriously. Everyone complains about how it was so much better back then, when you owned your music on physical media.

          Meanwhile, the choice of music available to buy on CD’s (and even LP’s) has never been greater than today.
          Plus, you can easily download whatever you want from any streaming service and burn your own CD’s (but please don’t do that, it violates the TOS and copyright!)

          • @[email protected]
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            91 year ago

            Or you can buy DRM-free music files at higher quality than was ever available on physical media outside of niche formats that were never widely adopted. Costs are not outrageous and you can listen to them however you like on whatever device you like, and the artists actually get paid and there’s no question of legality.

            • @[email protected]
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              61 year ago

              Yeah you can literally buy flac instead of relying on CDs to get lossless quality. Also recording these days is so much better, you could easily get a lot of good remastered version of your favorite songs now.

        • @[email protected]
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          21 year ago

          DRM protection on music discs, and general distrust of “cracking” software due to my ignorance in The Scene as it stands today.

      • jadero
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        41 year ago

        You still can. I do it all the time.

        It’s entirely possible that I’ve missed more recent legislation, so take this with a grain of salt. Canada has a “blank media tax” courtesy of the record lobby back in the recording tape days. There was much pushback from consumers when that fee was applied to things like video tapes, recordable CDs, hard drives, etc, but still exists as far as I know.

        The recording industry was pushing for laws more in line with other jurisdictions, primarily the US. The government was open to it, but would then abolish the fees on blank media. Industry backed down because they get more from that fee distribution than they would ever get by having more restrictions. Of course, that doesn’t stop them from trying to shame us or blow smoke up our asses.

        That means we are already paying a licence fee allowing us to copy recorded or broadcast material for personal use. “Personal use” is defined by what it’s not: rebroadcast, playing for the general public, and reselling. Thus, making a strictly personal copy is fine, as is making a copy for a friend, copying from an original you’ve borrowed (from a friend or from the library), recording legal broadcasts (like from radio, etc), and recording concerts unless the terms of admission expressly forbid it, etc.

      • @[email protected]
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        81 year ago

        I bought a CD of Green Day’s “American Idiot” and tried to rip it. The version still sold these days has some kind of copy protection on it that gives rippers fits (which isn’t very punk rock of them). Tried a few different things, and then gave up and downloaded somebody else’s flac rip.

    • themeatbridge
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      421 year ago

      DAE had that one copy of a song that everyone shared with a glitch during the second verse, and now you find it jarring to hear the song without that artifact.

      • @[email protected]
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        171 year ago

        I have an old copy of “American Pie” from Napster just like that. Couple little glitches at the start that gave me a twitch for years if I didn’t hear it.

        It’s also what I tell people who like the sound of vinyl. The pops and hisses of vinyl are objectively wrong, but you can get subjectively used to hearing things a certain way. It’s not better, it’s just what you have always done.

        Even that all said, I do like listening to vinyl because the whole process of listening to it is very deliberate. Like I’m preparing for an event and this is what I’ll be doing for the evening.

      • @[email protected]
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        71 year ago

        100%! There’s a whole second breakdown in Jamiroquia’s Virtual Insanity that I never knew about.

  • @[email protected]
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    31 year ago

    I forgot about Winamp! I’m going to have to give it a try again. The last time I used it was in 2013, because there was a plugin for extracting the music from Turbografx roms to .wav files. The soundtrack of my childhood.

  • Noble Shift
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    111 year ago

    Still use it to this day on the Win laptops. Zero issues in 20 years. (v5665), and using XMMS2 on the Nix boxen.

    • @[email protected]
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      41 year ago

      Back in my day, I had an old computer I stuffed under my desk that I installed Linux on. It’s only job was to connect to a cifs share where I kept my (totally legally obtained) music, and play it using xmms2.

      I did that so I could reduce the fairly minor load that winamp would put on my system while gaming. I had my PC and this music box both connected to a small mixer where I plugged in my headphones. So I could listen to whatever I wanted and had a dedicated screen and keyboard to control xmms2, so I didn’t have to alt-tab my gaming computer when I wanted to change tracks. Between the convenience of the control and the small benefit I got while using my computer, it was a nice setup that lasted me a long time I eventually stopped using it when I moved one time, I just didn’t bother to set it back up, and I eventually found that all the sliders in my mixer were messed up. From lack of use.

      I’m sad to hear that xmms2 also had a similar problem of being more or less ignored and falling into disrepair. It was a good alternative to winamp on my desktop. Everything was very very similar, so it was very easy to swap between them.

      I also similarly stopped using winamp, because reasons. I suppose the go to music player is now foobar2000.

  • Hyphlosion
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    21 year ago

    The (full) Shrek OST isn’t on Spotify. So messed up.

    I wanna stay hooome todaaaaay.

  • @[email protected]
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    441 year ago

    I recently began de-corpoing my life, and spotify is my most recent cancellation after I was a premium subscriber since soon after its launch.

    Took a bit of effort to convert my library, but I found a useful app to automate the process. And now I have my library back, offline and on my devices forever and for free.

    It’s actually kind of empowering, reclaiming your life from subscription hell and corporate voyeurism.

    • @[email protected]
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      31 year ago

      “subscription hell and corporate voyeurism”

      For me, this is just a place I knew to never go. The writing was on the wall when Warcraft 2/3 became World of Warcraft, one of the first subscription based game.

      I’d already been pirating software, music, and games by then and just, stayed on that path. Never so much as used Netflix or Spotify.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        I did a bit of web searching and found spotDL on github, you can give it Spotify playlists to convert and it will search them on YouTube/YouTube music, and output them as local files.

        Includes metadata and can output in different formats too. It works great about 99% of the time, though you sometimes need to search manually for individual songs it couldn’t match somehow. But that were about a dozen tracks out of over 4k for me.

        If you are interested in the other things I did/found aside from music feel free to ask

        • dditty
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          31 year ago

          Is the quality of the YouTube rips good?

          • Vaquedoso
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            61 year ago

            I imagine it’s not the best, but Spotify’s isn’t great either

          • @[email protected]
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            21 year ago

            I’m not an audiophile or anything, but on my in ears it sounds fine to me. Though I only made mp3s so far, but iirc it can do flac too. I’d imagine those have better quality

    • The Picard ManeuverOP
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      121 year ago

      This is one of those things that I dream of doing one of these days. I’d love to have a massive media library stored locally, so that I’m not chained to streaming services.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        I was prepared for that to go the other way.

        “…Spotify fucks over artists”

        *“This is one of those things that I dream of doing one of these days”

        • someone from the internet"*
      • NaibofTabr
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        1 year ago

        The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The next best time is today.

        Also, Amazon Music sells DRM-free MP3 files, if you don’t feel like sailing.

        • @[email protected]
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          121 year ago

          Or just buy on Bandcamp if the artist is on there. Support artists really directly (they get 85-90% of what you pay for an item) and you usually get a royalty free lossless download as well as subscription-less streaming.

          Hope recent dealings doesn’t fuck up this absolute gem of a site.

    • @[email protected]
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      51 year ago

      Just today I was listening to a Tidal Playlist amongst friends and the whole thing seized up and just stopped playing music all together when it ran into a song on the Playlist that apparently Tidal lost the rights to. Really frustrating when your music library is in flux at the whim of corporate dealings.

    • DUMBASS
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      21 year ago

      Every so often I download Winamp just to hear that intro, takes me back to being a kid everytime.

      I know it’s probably on YouTube, but it’s not the same when it’s not playing through Winamp.