this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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[–] TwinTitans@lemmy.world 40 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Never stopped. Get your own mp3s kids.

[–] sad_detective_man@leminal.space 11 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I know so many people who are so ride-or-die for never having to manage the file space for their own music library and they don't seem particularly less stressed.

I think they just cannot live without an algorithm to recommend new music to them

[–] utopiah@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago

they just cannot live without an algorithm to recommend new music to them

They might want to try LMS and its https://github.com/epoupon/lms?tab=readme-ov-file#music-discovery

[–] Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I think they just cannot live without an algorithm to recommend new music to them

Oh, piss off. I just want to financially support artists for making something beautiful I enjoy. Streaming is the easiest because of space constraints. I still buy the CDs of my most favourite albums, but I cannot stress enough how great it is to NOT have to rip the MP3s every time, make sure the tags are good, etc.

It's convenient.

If you don't like Spotify's new ID check, kill your Spotify account and use an alternative - Tidal and Qobuz are both excellent.

[–] sad_detective_man@leminal.space 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

woah woah woah, chill bro goddamn. let's sit and think about this. Record labels take pretty much all of the cut for streaming. Here is the chart showing what each service pays artists per song played. I used to think Napster was the best and subscribed to them for years, which is ironic considering their history

collapsed inline media

obviously the payout is going to vary widely but it's common knowledge that for even the most played artists, the pay from this avenue sucks. they simply use these services to get their music to potential concert goers since that's the income that record labels actually let artists keep. vinyls, merch, and usually tickets unless they REALLY get fucked over like child musician groups tend to.

If You have an interest in discovering just how shady that industry is, you should watch this essay about payola and how it's literally more profitable for a musician to die than it is to release a certain number of future albums. I'm going to stick to pirating albums and using my cash to actually see the artists I love

[–] Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

It's still giving them SOMETHING, isn't it?

Of course I'd prefer to buy directly from the artist (hence: Bandcamp), but that's not the world we live in. Flat out piracy is just the worst of all the available options.

woah woah woah, chill bro goddamn

Then stop saying stupid shit like "they just cannot live without an algorithm" when talking about people who use streaming services.

[–] sad_detective_man@leminal.space 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

it really isn't though. I don't really know where you live or how your local economy is organized but where I'm at people in my tax bracket are extracted for every ounce of raw money we can generate, both now but even speculatively in the future. it really doesn't make sense to consider theft as a taboo against corporations since we are literally a resource that's being exploited in real time for far much more than whatever artists would lose if we all stole.

.sopuli is a Finnish board right? my understanding is that you guys have way stronger social ethics and consumer protection, so yeah. in your world I probably would sign up for that Napster subscription again. or even better, a service actually from Finland. Bandcamp is good too.

here, though in the present we have far worse things to worry about than theft. being tricked into defending the feelings of billionaires is a big one. letting corporations curate our education and media is another. but I hope you continue to have the life where you can engage with your economy in such a good intentioned way. I miss back when I felt I could do that too.

[–] Alaknar@sopuli.xyz -1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

people in my tax bracket are extracted for every ounce of raw money we can generate, both now but even speculatively in the future. it really doesn’t make sense to consider theft as a taboo against corporations

This is such an "I'm 12 and a rebel" position to take...

Sure, corporate greed is a cancer, there's zero doubt about that.

But these corporation also create jobs, make it possible for many people to survive. In terms of media streaming corpos SO MANY people/bands were allowed to have a career thanks to people just stumbling upon them.

Should they be getting paid more? Absolutely. Should the corpos handling the hardware, infrastructure, AND software be also paid? If you don't believe that, you're just naive or ignorant. Or both.

sopuli is a Finnish board right? my understanding is that you guys have way stronger social ethics and consumer protection, so yeah. in your world I probably would sign up for that Napster subscription again. or even better, a service actually from Finland. Bandcamp is good too

Or the French Qobuz.

here, though in the present we have far worse things to worry about than theft. being tricked into defending the feelings of billionaires is a big one. letting corporations curate our education and media is another

Be the change you want to see. Instead of going stomping feet and stealing candy, go to the store that you feel you can morally support. Hard to do IRL, but online - sky is the limit. Use European services, those that pay artists (Qobuz pays around 5 times more than Spotify to rights holders), buy directly from artists on Bandcamp, etc., etc.

Piracy is literally the worst solution here because you're taking without giving. Any "fight the corpo!" banner here is just extreme naivete because the artist will starve MUCH quicker than the corp.

[–] sad_detective_man@leminal.space 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

yeeesh. I realize now that getting artists paid is obviously way less important to you than having somebody to verbally spar with. this is reductive and overall pretty naive to the actual experience of being in the workforce or trying to consume ethically.

instead of shouldering the responsibility of being your debate partner, I'm going to bow out and bid you a good life 👍 perhaps somebody else here would like to take turns quote tweeting and making character assessments with you.

[–] Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I realize now that getting artists paid is obviously way less important to you

That's a very interesting take considering I'm against piracy and pro direct purchases from bands. Please, do explain how you ended up at that conclusion.

nah we're done. I already said but you don't listen. have a good night ✌️

[–] Mika@sopuli.xyz 7 points 1 day ago

I think if you send like a dollar to everyone on your playlist, it would end up being like 100 times more than they get from the system.

[–] vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

An algorithm for them:

set rand [clock microseconds]
set len [mpc_pl_len]
set to [expr {$rand%$len}]
mpc_pl_jmp $to
[–] sad_detective_man@leminal.space 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

mpc, is that shuffling media player cassic with the system clock? isn't that what shuffle already does ?

[–] vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 day ago

mpc as in mpd CLI client, where mpc_pl_len and mpc_pl_jmp procedures are not listed, but just call it with some other Unix commands to get playlist length and jump to a playlist position.

[–] ftbd@feddit.org 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] yopyop@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Usually when someone still use mp3s it's for the ubiquity of the format. Every device that has a USB port handle mp3s. I personally use opus and it's not common at all.

[–] tiramichu@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

It's really interesting when you think about that.

In the video world, we've had an arms race all throughout the last 25 years for the lowest possible file size at the best possible quality, with new codecs and containers constantly coming in and out of favour. Hardware playback has always been spotty at best, with little guarantee you'll get a file to play on any device in particular.

Meanwhile I could rip a CD and put it on even my first-generation MP3 player from the year 1999, and it would work. A blessing we rather take for granted.

I guess there just hasn't been sufficient pressure to toss MP3 out completely. From an evolutionary perspective, just like the horseshoe crab, it is "good enough" and so it endures.

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 1 day ago

You just reminded me: A while back there was this slew of articles coming out of the tech press saying MP3 was now dead.

And why did they say that? Because the last Fraunhofer Patent on an MP3 related invention ran out.

Instead of reporting the format was now fully free, those idiots thought that meant it was now dead 😂

[–] vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 day ago

Opus is far better, but with MP3's there's been plenty of hardware players only working with that format. Also Opus is new, before it was Vorbis which was kinda as good as MP3 but far less popular.

And yes, MP3 is very "good enough", like JPEG.