Please wait...
Arrived Friday. Eh, its ok. not great, not bad. Packaged in a nice black envelope, and a signed copy. Oh, and a poster and little thank you card.
Nice to support independent artists, and not the mainstream industry.
Wed Jul 10 2024 21:12:48 EDT from Nurb432ooo Collide is coming out with a new album, after quite a long time.
MusicBrainz Picard. Not yet ready to turn it loose on my collection, but am trying it on a copy. While most of it I DO have CDs of.. i tend not to bother to rip if i can download, saves me the trouble. BUT .. file names are all over the board ( i fix many, but miss some too ) and tags, are often missing or bad. Back in my day we had standards.. kids these days.
Downloading direct from the artist when i buy CD, when those come across with no tags is the strangest.
Today someone asked me " dont you have any nice and happy songs ". I just blinked at them for a moment. "why" then left.
It's too bad they didnt stick with 'any nice songs' i could have pulled out a Zappa reference of some sort.
Decided re-catalog and re-alpha all my physical CDs yesterday. Learned a few things:
- Far too many don't have bar-codes to scan.. grumble. ( id say about 25% )
- Due to the above its not a one evening job.. lots of typing to to.
- Missing a few i know i had.
- Have a few i thought were gone
- Have a few "what the F- was i thinking at the time, was my taste really that poor then?"
- Quite a few i thought i had ripped, which i have not. ( or lost the files to over the years )
- Had far more than i realized. ( over 400 and counting )
- Lots of old memories in those shelves... ( more with the vinyl collection, but those are gone now )
and most important: i really need to dust more often down there in that bookcase. *sneeze*
Using Discogs for the scanning.. And while they don't have labels and fell into the 'have to type this nonsense" im impressed. All my zeppelin bootlegs from Berlin and Australia were listed.. Ah the good old days of getting Goldmine magazine from the local record store, getting out the magnifying glass and looking for "questionable' stuff to buy..
Kids today will never know.
Kids today will never know.
I have about 720 CDs. A few years back, I re-ripped all of them with X Lossless Decoder to FLAC, stored the results on a pair of hard drives, and use those as my master set. I'll downsample from there to deal with devices that can only handle lossy compression. Still buying CDs with non-recent music on them, nobody wants them. Local record store was selling them for $1 each this past weekend, they had thousands out and I'm told several thousand more still in the basement.
Somewhere over 800 on vinyl now, too. Vacation project was to put the 150-ish newer ones into the alphabetical order of the others. And of course the next day I go out buying and come home with 2 more that go in 'C', oh well.
I think we all do it now -- just go online to play music we have on the shelf somewhere. Most of us even have playlists of music we could listen to by going out to the cabinet and pulling out the discs and tapes. But who wants to do that?
Recently I was reading about how Roger Waters and David Gilmour now hate each other more than ever. And it's because they took different (but both wrong) sides of some stupid sociopolitical issue that doesn't matter at all to the music or the fans. Just one more reason to pirate everything.
I dont. I want it all local. Sure, its been ripped and i dont dig out physical media, but i want the stuff in my grubby hands, under my control. And i never buy 'digital albums' unless there is no choice, and then only from the artist ( or indirectly like via bandcamp, but not the 'industry' ) and i can download all the files. And after that, any DRM ripped from them.
( well unless you consider playing off of a nextcloud server is online.. its still *mine* and in my house )
I think we all do it now -- just go online to play music we have on the shelf somewhere.
I think we all do it now -- just go online to play music we have on
the shelf somewhere. Most of us even have playlists of music we could
listen to by going out to the cabinet and pulling out the discs and
tapes. But who wants to do that?
Well, I have a nice CD collection, and even tapes. What I have done with those is dump them all to server storage at home.
I don't go online for the stuff I have at home. I just play it from storage.
i ditched all my analog ( reel, cassette, 8-track, vinyl ) as i had for the most part repurchased it all on CD over the decades.
Yes, i know, digital will never be as good as analog, but reality is its good enough. And my CDs wont continue to degrade just by existing ( like tape does ) and besides most of the time its listening in the jeep, which is noisy, at my desk with a tiny speaker, or a set of ear buds if im at the office. And im old, so im sure my hearing is not like it used to be either. So its all more than 'good enough' at this point. No more audiophile stuff for me. And that i can fit all the ripped versions in a package about 1/4 the size of a cigarette pack... ( a little music player i have. smaller than an old disk-ipod, but bigger than a ipod nano has bluetooth AND still has an actual audio jack, unlike some phones these days. and will last days on a charge, also unlike most phones )
Well, I have a nice CD collection, and even tapes. What I have done with those is dump them all to server storage at home.
I don't go online for the stuff I have at home. I just play it from storage.
Share the 1996 rant again.
i also seemed to have missed it.
I do hope its about the industry in general, as there was still good independent music that came in the 2000s and ( tho lesser ) in 2010s.. Lesser even now, but still some.
Share the 1996 rant again.
Share the 1996 rant again.
Haven't heard it? Ok, one more time.
1996 was the year of a big change in telecom regulation. It had sweeping effects all over. It was, in fact, the year when a single telephone company could once again sell both local and long distance service. They were also required, however, to offer "unbundled elements" such as last-mile wiring and even ADSL connectivity to private networks other than the telco's own Internet service. This is what led to a lot of ISP's being able to offer DSL service everywhere. (A decade later, telcos like Verizon then declared "fiber doesn't count as an unbundled element" and no sufficient challenge was mounted, leading to the demise of most of the small ISP's, but that's a discussion for another day.)
But another change that was made as part of the 1996 act was the end of a limit on how many radio stations could be owned by a single company. This might have been considered small at the time, but predictably, a few big companies bought up all of the radio stations.
Clear Channel, Cumulus Media, and Citadel Broadcasting (no relation hehe) bought up all the big stations in all the big markets.
So how did this kill music? At the time, most people learned about new artists by hearing them on the radio. This is why record companies had A&R departments, to scout out new acts, to find new material to put on the radio. This is how most new artists found their careers, by being "discovered" by talent scouts and signed to the labels. But with all the major markets sewn up by three big companies, this wasn't needed anymore. Now it's a pretty tight loop, the record companies and the radio companies decide what they want, they manufacture bland corporate music and force it on anyone still listening to radio.
And it truly is manufactured. Most of the Top 200 songs at any given time are written by just a couple of people. Max Martin and Lukasz Gottwald wrote the vast majority of what you hear on the radio nowadays. They'll give talentles hacks like Taylor Swift a songwriting credit, but really they might have just tossed in a couple of notes or words towards the end of the process; the artists seldom write their own material anymore.
So if you think you're just old and cranky because you can't tolerate any popular music written in the 21st Century ... well maybe you are, but there's more to it than that. The above is the true and scientific reason why music died in 1996.
I guess its why it never effected me much. I never really bought into 'pop' I was always underground/alternative.
.
So if you think you're just old and cranky because you can't tolerate any popular music written in the 21st Century ... well maybe you are, but there's more to it than that. The above is the true and scientific reason why music died in 1996.
So if you think you're just old and cranky because you can't tolerate
any popular music written in the 21st Century ... well maybe you are,
When I heard basically the same argument from Gene Simmons a couple of weeks back, it struck me as odd and I wasn't sure I agreed.
Then I started poking around, looking at what I've bought in the last couple of years, how I heard about it, etc.
The last band I was really turned onto by commercial radio was Breaking Benjamin, in the late 90s. Maybe a little later than 1996, but not off by much.
For some time after that, I was still finding new music through the local noncommercial AAA station, but even that has been a cesspool for the last 10 years or so.
There's still good music being made out there, but it's a real hunt to find it. Small indie labels. Bandcamp. Friends-of-friends. That's mostly what I've been buying lately.
There are a few spotify linked 'bands like x' thing ( i have looked at chosic a bit ) as well as "music-map" that seem decently accurate. However i have run into the problem every recommendation ( either via stuff like that or band member research or 'friends" ), i already know about. I'm about to the point of no new bands, but at least some still put stuff out every so often. Once in a blue moon i hear about a new band that i somehow missed but its getting pretty rare..
I fully admit my music taste is not 'wide range', and in fact has shrunk a bit as i have got older, ( noticing this a lot as i was going thru my CDs last couple of weeks ) so im in a limited space to begin with, but if i was just first reaching out to find stuff, they would have been a lot of help still.
Oh, and my AI models, not much help either, they are about the same as mind-map. Accurate, but late to the game.
, but it's a real hunt to find it. Small indie labels. Bandcamp. Friends-of-friends. That's mostly what I've been buying lately.
The last band I was really turned onto by commercial radio was
And that's kind of the point, commercial radio can no longer be used as a way to discover new music unless you're into the vacuous stuff. In the past you could at least tune in to an AOR station and hear some deep cuts. Nowadays, not so much.
There's still decent music out there, it's just a bit harder to find. What really needs to happen is for record companies and radio stations to decline more, so people explore more.
There's still decent music out there, it's just a bit harder to find.
What really needs to happen is for record companies and radio stations
to decline more, so people explore more.
You overstimate people. If radio content declines more then people will eat the new crap. We have seen it happen already, we will see it happen again.
What epeople my generation listens to around here is of the same general quality as the low level party music they played at karaokes full of drugged people who didn't pay attention to the music and only wanted to get laid.