Yet another Hacker News

Why media fans want to escape algorithms with CDs, DVDs and vinyl

42 points beardyw 1 hour ago 40 comments

pkthunder 1 hour ago | parent

I’ve been going through my own personal revival of physical media - mostly audio. I don’t miss streaming at all.

Every CD I buy gets ripped to a NAS that hosts the music behind Navidrone where I can stream to my vehicle using Play:Sub (thanks to Tailscale for enabling all of this to work for me!).

I am just so enamored with being able to get the best of both worlds - my own music, anywhere.

I do wish I could figure out some sort of recommendation system to find new magic, though. Obviously not to steam new/unowned songs, just to point me in a direction next time I go to the store.

Hoodedcrow 58 minutes ago | parent

Seems like CDs are redundant here though, given that they get digitized anyway.

pkthunder 53 minutes ago | parent

I have a home audio setup to play them on, don’t worry :).

Also, buying directly from artists (when you can) is a good way to support them.

pmontra 15 minutes ago | parent

They are the backup. A music CD can last for a long time. Proof: my father CDs from about 35 years ago still work.

pkthunder 14 minutes ago | parent

Also just fun to be a plain-old jockey when you have company over, rather than just let “Appotifydal Top 3”

Dreami 58 minutes ago | parent

I have a huge collection (100-200) of CDs from a relative that I would like to store the same way. Can you explain your setup?

pkthunder 44 minutes ago | parent

I’d love to. I’m working off memory right now, but it’s nothing fancy.

I’ve got abcde[0] set up to handle the digitizing, navidrome[1] is set up to serve the content from a home lab server/NAS over Subsonic[2].

Play:Sub[3] is an iOS application that works with Subsonic. Just an audio receiver at this point, the app lets me “just play something” which is quite nice. Can “play a random album” for example.

Tailscale just enables this off-LAN.

Happy to give more info if you need!

[0] https://linux.die.net/man/1/abcde

[1] https://www.navidrome.org/

[2] https://www.subsonic.org/

[3] https://michaelsapps.dk/playsubapp/

frameset 50 minutes ago | parent

Last.fm is still around. Some Navidrome clients work with it, and it can point you to artists you might like.

pkthunder 44 minutes ago | parent

Love it, but honestly I’m trying to decouple from services like this.

Although, it’s not a critical-path item..

anticorporate 38 minutes ago | parent

https://listenbrainz.org/ is an open source alternative to Last.fm that I can confirm works with Navidrome. You can also self host it if you would prefer to keep your listen history private.

pkthunder 36 minutes ago | parent

Love love love to see this, thank you for making my day!

notpushkin 6 minutes ago | parent

> You can also self host it if you would prefer to keep your listen history private.

On the other hand, if you don’t mind making it public it would help train open source recommendation algorithms :-) https://listenbrainz.org/about/#:~:text=Roadmap

alin23 33 minutes ago | parent

I got myself an iPod Nano recently and love curating my songs to fit the 8GB [0]

But I have the same problem of trying to find recommendations. Whenever I talk about music with my brother and friends, that's when I discover the best music, but that happens rarely nowadays.

So with the help of Claude, I've revived my 10 year old project on finding music based on Spotify tracks and liked songs: https://noiseblend.com

Completely free, haven't shared it much because it's more of a personal thing than something I want public. But maybe it comes in handy for some people here.

[0] https://files.alinpanaitiu.com/ipod-nano.mp4

pkthunder 28 minutes ago | parent

Took a quick look at Noiseblend, seems nice! Will play around a bit more with it when I’m actually at a computer, but I find that I end up getting into a downward spiral of recommendations (not from yours - just in general) that reinforces what I listen to, versus expanding based on what I listen to.

I listen to a good amount of underground hip hop/backpack rap kind of stuff and I find that so many recommendation systems just recommend what I already listen to.

Oddly enough, I randomly asked Claude one day and got three novel album recommendations that no other service really gave me :shrug:

alin23 21 minutes ago | parent

Oh tell me about it, it's so hard to expand into other genres using online services.. Noiseblend is no better at it since it relies on the same data.

I mean, in its 30-50 recommended albums, one might be just the one I might be looking for, but how am I going to find it? Am I supposed to sit through 29 albums I don't really like, just to find that?

That's why friends are the best here, they act like impromptu curators :)

But on some occasions, I find Noiseblend useful when I hear a song at a cafe or restaurant or some friends' place, "shazam" it, then put it through Noiseblend and get dropped into a musical area I might have never looked into otherwise.

pkthunder 15 minutes ago | parent

Really wasn’t a knock on NB - don’t worry hehe. I’m at least glad it gave me what I expected. I listen to a good amount of stuff like Aesop Rock and you tend to just get a bunch of his own stuff back, generally.

showsover 27 minutes ago | parent

Nice website and functionality!

I would love a way to create a playlist from the related songs it found if that is possible!

alin23 26 minutes ago | parent

Thanks! sure, if you click to open in the Spotify app or webapp, it will open a created playlist with those songs. You will need to connect your Spotify account for that though.

swozey 10 minutes ago | parent

I use spotify for convenience and social sake, my friends use it and its been the best mobile/android auto/desktop sync app but it's well known for not having literally the best albums/songs/eps/whatever that they can't monetize or license for whatever reason so you might want to expand your app to look at spotify for recs but factor in that even someone huge like mac miller has a ton of music not on spotify that a real fan would side-eye you for not knowing on a recommendation list.

There is so much early career music for artists you can't find on spotify that it gives people who only learned the artist from spotify a curated history of the artist.

Spotify is the disney land walled garden music app and right now Ella Langley is Minnie Mouse.

When you go camping or kayaking you can tell all the people using spotify, their playlists all blend into the same algo topping songs at some point. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if they factor in how much music is cached near the cell tower at the lake I'm parked on right now to maximize profits and limit their bandwidth costs.

alin23 4 minutes ago | parent

Yep, I'm aware of that, I listen to a lot of live small room concerts of Jason Mraz for example, which aren't even on Youtube, I mostly get them from fan uploads on archive.org.

I mostly use Noiseblend to find such artists, or albums, and then I expand my search manually through Youtube, fan forums, archives. It would be a pain to try to integrate that into a web app.

criddell 7 minutes ago | parent

> But I have the same problem of trying to find recommendations.

If you're buying music semi-regularly then the people at the record store are probably starting to recognize you and what you like and will probably be happy to recommendation stuff.

komali2 8 minutes ago | parent

> I do wish I could figure out some sort of recommendation system to find new magic, though. Obviously not to steam new/unowned songs, just to point me in a direction next time I go to the store.

Navidrome can scrobble to https://listenbrainz.org/ which has a recommendations mechanism

Or set up "soulsync" and just use the library scanning, scrobbling, and recommendations / artist watching features if you don't want to pirate the music as well.

Frieren 1 hour ago | parent

For me, the easy one is books. I love books, both for their content and as physical objects.

I love my pdf folder with a million papers, documents, etc. Sorted and easy available. But mentally it does not compare with my library.

In a trip I will bring my tablet to read books. It is practical and if a book does not click I have many more. At home I prefer the physical thing.

None of them comes, at least directly, from algorithms. I add books to my list of purchases when they get mention on YouTube, another books, news, or even here.

Many years ago I used Amazon book store suggestions because they were extremely good. But that was the time before enshitification when they were trying to give you the book the you will like the most not the one that will give them more profit.

Galanwe 57 minutes ago | parent

I love books as well, but I find it hard to keep my physical library growth comparable to my physical books.

The majority of the books and authors I follow are now on Patreon, and there is just no easy way to get a hard copy, or even a digital copy for that matter. I read book 11 on Patreon while Amazon is publishing book 8...

Now that is good for authors I guess, they have a better, more stable revenue source. But I don't own books anymore, can't read them offline, which is very annoying.

Hoodedcrow 56 minutes ago | parent

Books are also the one thing I much prefer to have physically! I can usually get fiction in my language (mostly in secondhand bookstores now), but I still have to get most things digitally. Most books I read are in English and my country isn't English-speaking, so getting them would cost a fortune. And sometimes out-of-print books even in my language are also hard to find due to scarcity. So pdfs and epubs it is.

mnnuu 52 minutes ago | parent

I'm an avid tape collector, and I especially love the small 'mixtape' labels. Every month, I get two or three mixtapes from a handful of little labels. They can have anything on them. It's always exciting to get one in the post and sit down to listen to it.

pkthunder 38 minutes ago | parent

Would love to hear more about the mixtape labels.

Enfi 30 minutes ago | parent

That’s lovely! Please, can you tell more about your setup and where you buy fresh tapes?

mistyvales 52 minutes ago | parent

I never stopped buying. Let's just say my collection of various physical media is.. unruly at best. Moving is a pain but I don't look back.

Note that I do still stream and buy digital on Bandcamp though.

smackeyacky 50 minutes ago | parent

I used to like to buy TDK tapes second hand and listen to the mixes. Almost every one had something obscure on it I loved but they have dried up over the last 12 months.

intrasight 25 minutes ago | parent

You can escape algorithms by choosing what you consume, regardless of what platform you're using. I had digitized my CD collection 15 years ago. but I never listened to those. I purchase misic directly from artists (Bandcamp), I don't buy physical media. And if their stuff is also on Apple Music, that's where I listen.

bsoqk 20 minutes ago | parent

I am a "media fan" and algorithms (going back to last.fm) have make me discover so much music that it's not even funny. The idea of "escaping algorithms" is a net negative for me.

thom 11 minutes ago | parent

My experience also. I discover new music at a higher rate than even my teens when I listened to the radio every night, and went to gigs and bought CDs weekly. I still have some music I have to use my own MP3s for but I feel incredibly well served by streaming.

vorticalbox 9 minutes ago | parent

When I was a teen some 20 odd years ago the “algorithm” is people you spoke to.

That said smart shuffle on Spotify has found me a lot of good music.

jonplackett 17 minutes ago | parent

I just finished making a ‘physical’ music system for my daughter.

The inverted commas are because it’s actually all MP3s that are stored on a phone.

But the phone is in a box

Connected to a speaker

Running an app I made that plays playlists when she places an nfc card on the box

Basically it’s a bootleg Yoto / Tonie box but completely free, and our own music.

Also got a desktop app where I download stuff, make plays lists and it auto syncs to the phone.

She actually really likes it. Having a physical sense of what you own feels good!

I wish I could take all the credit but Codex helped, a bit…

gosub100 5 minutes ago | parent

That gives me an idea: a "CD player" that accepts the entire jewel case and has a camera inside that reads the barcode, retrieves the album, and plays it.

OroPla 16 minutes ago | parent

I never went to streaming in the first place. It never seemed like a good deal for anything.

pinheadmz 12 minutes ago | parent

If you live in Brooklyn check out Night Owl Video !

winwang 6 minutes ago | parent

99% of my music consumption is through offline playback of mp3's or youtube content. I don't use playlists nor shuffles, just repeat.